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JOHN M. KELLY LIBRARY

Donated by

The Redemptorists of
the Toronto Province

from the Library Collection of
Holy Redeemer College, Windsor

University of
St. Michael s College, Toronto

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CONFERENCES ON THE LIFE OF
GRACE

By the same Author.

Oxford Conferences, Summer Term, 1899.
Conferences on Grace. By Rev. Fr RAPHAEL M. Moss,
O.P., Lector in Sacred Theology. Crown 8vo, paper
covers, Is. 6d. net.

The following Works have been arranged for, but it has not
yet been possible, to fix the prices :

The Rosary Guide. By Rev. Fr J. PROCTER, O.P.

(In the Press. )

The Dominican Tertiaries Daily Manual. By Rev.
Fr J. PROCTER, O.P. (In the Press.)

The Dominican Evening Service : Hymns. By Rev.
Fr POPE. (In the Press. )

Short Lives of Dominican Saints. By Sister MARY
ANGELA NORTHCOTE. ( In the Press. )

The Life of flary Ward. By Rev. Mother SALOME.

(In preparation. )

The Religious Life. By Rev. Fr J. WILHELM.

( In preparation. )

Devotions, from Advent to Epiphany. By Rev. Fr
BURNHAM, of the London Oratory.

Devotions, from Epiphany to Lent. By Rev. Fr BURN-
HAM.

Devotions, from Lent to Pentecost. By Rev. Fr BURN-
HAM.

Devotions, from Pentecost to Advent. By Rev. Fr
BURNHAM. (In preparation. )

LONDON :
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.

CONFEEENCES ON THE LIFE

FR RAPHAEL M. MOSS, <>.!>.

LKCTOK IN SACKED THJEOLOUY

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.

PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD

1900

PRINTED BY-
TEE ART AND BOOK COMPANY
LEAMINGTON

(The rights of traitslutiun .i/i rtpratluction are reserved. J

KlHIL OBSTAf.

FR. VINCENT McNABB, S.T.L., O.P.
FR. HUGH POPE, S.T.L., O.P.

IMPRIMATUB.

FK. JOHN PROCTER, S.T.L.,

Provincial O.P.

IMPRIMATUR.

HERBERT CARD. VAUGHAN,

Archbishop of Westminster.

CONTENTS.

1. PAGK

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE ... ... ... 1

II.

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE ... ... ... 20

III.

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WORK OF GRACE ... 37

IV.
COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE ... 54

V.
HOLY MASS, THE FOUNTAIN OF GRACE ... ... 74

VI.
PURGATORY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE ... 89

VII.
HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE ... ... ... 106

VIII.
HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE ... ... 127

FAITH, THE GATE OF GKACE.

OF all the many beautiful sayings of our blessed Lord
recorded by the evangelists, it would be hard to choose
out one more beautiful and more significant than
that recorded by St John in the tenth chapter of his
Gospel, "I am come that they may have life, and
that they may have it more abundantly." 1 These words
contain the summary of all His teaching, they are the
revelation of the divine designs, the explanation of the
Incarnation. For our blessed Lord was not a mere
reformer or philosopher, like so many who had gone
before Him and were to follow Him, whose names are
written large in the history of mankind. He came
indeed to change the world and to reform it, and to
teach the fulness of all truth, but the results towards
which His reformation and His teaching tended were
not bound by the limits of this world. The " life " He
came to give in such abundance was a life beyond the
powers of sense and understanding, seeing that its aim,
its end, its means and principles, were altogether of
another and higher world. Yet it was the life for
which God made us, the only life that satisfies the
strange mysterious longings of our human nature, and

1 St John x, 10.

1

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gives our complex being its full perfection. Its begin
nings are in time, its foundations and its early progress
can be measured by the lapse of years and the span of
mortal life, but its completion belongs to eternity, and
hence we justly speak of it as supernatural. We pur
pose in these conferences to contemplate the workings
of this supernatural life, to understand the sources of
its power and energy, the means to which it has recourse
in time of weakness and failure and the consequences
of final triumph or defeat. Vital questions, surely, and
most practical, and therefore worthy of our best atten
tion, for if " the proper study of mankind is man," l
we have before our minds the noblest thought of
that same study when we contemplate man s real
life in all its varied stages and consider the great-

O

ness and the goodness of the infinite Creator in this,
the most perfect work of His hands. How many
there are whose lives are failures in the worst sense
of the word, simply because they are so purely
natural, for to live a natural life when we are made
for something supernatural is to fail most pitiably!
How many others too there are, whose feet have trod
these higher paths, and then strayed from them un
finished monuments, exposed to wind and rain, and
falling to decay in consequence how often have we met
with such and wondered at their folly ! Like the
whitened bones on the desert sand, or the buoy that
floats above the sunken ship, they tell us of the dangers
that beset our course, and warn us to be careful, but the
clearest warnings are unheeded if we cannot under
stand them. We must know all we can therefore,
1 Pope s Essay on Man, Epist. ii, 2.

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE. 3

and act upon our knowledge, and so we shall succeed,
and in saying this we are only pointing to the familiar
Catholic doctrine of faith and good works. Let us
begin with faith.

Faith ! The very word would seeni to be repugnant
to the apostles and disciples of that modern craze
known as free-thought. It is quite true that they
know very little about it, but, no doubt, they think
they know enough, and in their opinion, faith is but
another word for self-abasement and self-degradation,
or as Pascal crudely puts it, " Pour avoir la foi, il faut
s abetir." Could anything be more untrue or more
misleading. For what do we mean by " faith " ? We
are speaking of course of divine faith, and the defi
nition given in our Catechism is familiar to all of us,
" Faith is believing without doubting whatever God has
revealed," Yet this simple definition is clear enough
and deep enough to furnish a reply to all their so-called
difficulties and objections. It tells us that faith implies
the assent of the mind to supernatural truths on the
authority of God s word. If we accept the existence
of God, we must also accept the existence of truths of
the supernatural order ; and whether we consider these
truths objectively, and in themselves, or subjectively,
with reference" to our minds and the criteria on which
we base our assent, we are bound to admit their absolute
superiority to those which are within the natural reach
of our understanding. For our assent to these truths
is not based on the evidence they give of themselves,
or on first principles, but rather on the infinite know
ledge and truth of God, who reveals them - l and, for
1 Cone. Vut. sess. iii, cap. 3.

4 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

this very reason, the assent which we give to them is
firmer and surer in every way than any mere natural
certitude, and, without a misuse of terms, cannot pos
sibly be called blind and unreasoning. It is quite true
that the object of our act of faith is something out of
sight, something which is not evident to the under
standing. But whilst we admit all this, and grant
most willingly that a dogma of faith cannot be known
by its own intrinsic proofs, yet it can put forward such
a power of what we may call extrinsic evidence, as to
become at once eminently credible. Hence, as Cardinal
Cajetan points out, although we cannot prove to
demonstration the mysteries of faith, we can most
clearly demonstrate their credibility ; and as it would
be simple folly to deny a fact which proves its truth
by its own intrinsic evidence, so also is it foolish and
most wicked to refuse assent to truths which are divine,
and which by reliable extrinsic evidence proclaim them
selves worthy of our credence.

Now let us try to see how necessary this faith is to
every one, and the wonderful part it has to play in our
supernatural life. According to St Paul, it is its first and
most essential condition. "Without faith, it is im
possible to please God, for he that cometh to God must
believe that He exists and is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek Him." l Faith in God therefore, and
in His generous love of us, is the beginning of the
spiritual and supernatural life, the life of grace ; it is
the gate of that bright pathway of the just, " which as
a shinin" light goeth forward and increaseth even unto
the perfect day." -

1 Heb. xi, 6. 2 Prov. iv, 18.

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE. 5

We have defined it as a firm assent of the mind to
a truth revealed by God. It is therefore a species of
knowledge or vision, by which the mind apprehends
certain truths of which it would be otherwise in
ignorance. For, as an eloquent French writer has so
beautifully pointed out, we may distinguish three
separate and distinct worlds in which the great Creator
manifests Himself and His exceeding glory. He made
man for Himself and for the vision of Himself face to
face, but, for a time at least, the full perfection of that
vision is deferred, for " we see now as in a mirror and
in a dark manner ; " l and in these three worlds, and
by means of them, as by three marvellous stair-ways,
the soul of man mounts up to the throne of God. First
of all there is the world of nature. To see the great
hills towering aloft, half veiled in driving mist, or the
fields and woods and gardens bathed in sunshine, to
stand before the ocean and gaze out upon the mighty
plain of tossing waters, to look up at night to that dark
blue vault above our heads, which our great poet fitly
calls " the floor of heaven, thick inlaid with patines
of bright gold," to think of all these worlds separated
from us and from each other by distances which can
be counted only in heaven, and all following their
appointed paths across the wildernesses of space surely
all this lifts up the mind and heart to God, and makes
the trembling soul fall prostrate in fear and adoration
at the thought of His unspeakable magnificence. Now
all these wonders are revealed to us by that great power
of sight, which God has given to us. It is the eye of
man which leads his soul abroad, and shows him all
1 1 Cor. xiii, 12.

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the beauty of his earthly home. Yet of what use is
the eye without the mind ? What pleasure could it
bring us, unless the mind were there to guide the eye
and help the soul to learn its easy lesson ? And so
there is another world of no less beauty than the world
of nature, yet utterly beyond the powers of sense, an
immaterial world, of thoughts and laws and principles,
to which the mind alone has access; and when the
mind is wanting, when the understanding and intelli
gence of man forget their work, he passes by this world
as ignorant of it and its lessons as the poor blind man
is ignorant of the gorgeous rainbow that spans the sky
above his head. But great minds, on the contrary, can
find such real pleasure in these higher joys revealed to
them by their keen powers of thought, that for their
sake they patiently endure the loss of all beside. It is
naught to them, as Milton wrote so grandly, in his
years of blindness, that earth should be in darkness,
when "in a purer clime the being fills with rapture,
and waves of thought roll in upon the spirit." And
then, once more, beyond the world of nature and the
world of knowledge there is another world higher still,
and far more wonderful, to which they are but as
the stepping-stones across the river to the meadow
lands beyond, the supernatural world of grace. It is
a world which shows us God and His infinite being,
His powers and His perfections, His dealings with His
creatures and His revelations of Himself, not one world
only, but rather many worlds of infinite beauty and
attractiveness, far, far beyond all that the eye of man
can see or the heart of man imagine ! How, therefore,
could man hope to know its wonders, unless the great

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE. 7

Creator and efficient cause of all, who gave him eyes to
see, and a mind to understand, had not once more been
at his side to help him, and, by the gift of faith, com
pleted His own handiwork and man s perfection. This
then is the place of faith, this is its sphere of work
most natural and most reasonable.

Of course there is no absolute necessity obliging
God to speak to us and tell us all these wonders of
Himself ; but once we grant that God created us and
made us what we are, because of His exceeding good
ness, once we grant that that same love and goodness
prompted Him to raise us to a supernatural state, the
end of which is nothing less than intimate union with
Himself, then revelation follows as a natural conse
quence, and is itself the proof of love. This is the
reasoning of St Thomas. 1 " If the end of man," he
argues, " be the vision of God face to face, then must
man do his best to tend to God, and cling to Him by
knowledge and by love, and not by any sort of love or
knowledge, but only by that which we call supernatural,
because the means must be proportioned to the end."
But " means " which in themselves are supernatural
can only be bestowed by God, and hence we have
revelation and the gift of grace. So, on the other
hand, the act of faith by which the soul of man accepts
God s revelation is man s return of love and highest
pledge of loyalty. It is the worship of the understand
ing, the sacrifice of our best possession, the offering of
the brightest jewel in our crown in tribute at God s feet.
God might have acted very differently. He could have
drawn aside the veil and made His revelation so com-
1 St Thos. l a , i, i ; also Cont. Gent, i, 5, ami Hi, 147.

8 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

plete that not a shred of mystery remained, but then our
faith would cease to be a sacrifice, much less a means of
merit, or rather, to speak truly, it would cease to exist.
It is impossible to believe and see at the same time. l
We believe in the existence of Jerusalem, supposing we
have never been there. We know there is a city called
Oxford, and there is no sacrifice on our part or merit to
be found in our admission of this geographical fact.
The apostle St Thomas refused to believe in the
Resurrection ; he craved that lower and more natural
certainty which comes from knowledge, and so drew
upon himself his Master s kind rebuke: "Because thou
hast seen Me, Thomas, thou hast believed. Blessed are
they who have not seen and have believed." 2 Still
there was a blessedness of faith which the apostle
could claim, for, seeing Jesus risen from the dead, he
believed in His Divinity. Hominem vidit, says St
Gregory, et Deum confessus est. He saw a man before
him, and confessed Him to be God. So must it be
with us. Our faith is given to us to pierce the dark
ness of the supernatural world and manifest what
otherwise would be hidden from us. It is the
"evidence of things that appear not"; 3 a mighty
power which only God can give, enabling the soul
to hear the voice of God above the tumult of the
world, and to accept with humble submission all that
He has revealed.

But though the manifestation of supernatural truth
is the first and greatest work of faith, it would be
a mistake to limit it to this ; and it will help us greatly
to appreciate its powers and worth, as well as to reject

1 St Thos. 1* 2 e , 1,5. - St John xx, 29. 3 Heb. xi, 1.

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE.

the foolish sophisms of " free-thinkers," if we reflect
upon the well-nigh universal work of faith in every
plane of life. Divine faith is its highest evolution,
but there is a human faith as well, and what would be
our life without it ? The shallow-minded men, who
talk so glibly of their freedom from all mental shackles,
and express so loudly their conviction that all faith is
but a superstition, overlook the fact that not a day
can pass for any one of them without an act of
faith of some sort or another. When we study
history, what is it but an act of faith ? And, to
descend to commoner things, so also is the reading of
our daily papers. A cup of coffee in the morning is
an act of faith ; still more a dose of medicine. And
who will call us credulous because we do not summon
an experienced analyst to our breakfast table or to our
bed of sickness before venturing to take one or the
other ? Yet even then we should have to make an act
of faith in the skill and truthfulness of the analyst.
So also in our social and domestic life. How strong
the bond of love that binds together parents and their
children, yet what is its foundation but an act of faith ?
An introduction at a dinner party is a triple act of
faith ; in fine, wherever we go, whatever we do, how
ever we may live, an atmosphere of faith and blind
dependence upon others must surround us, and we can
no more escape it than we can escape the air we
breathe, and nobody calls it humbling or degrading.
Yet whilst we are obliged to put faith in each other in
this universal way, there are not wanting those who
try to make us shrink from faith in God, although our
faith in Him and in His word, unchangeable, eternal,

10 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

can never know the doubt or shadow of a cloud which
human faith must ever feel ! Humanum cst errare.

Returning then to our comparison of God s three great
worlds and those distinct mysterious powers which show
them and reveal them to us, it is well to note how, though
distinct in every way, they yet are bound together
in the closest union for mutual help and ready service.
The straight oar dips into the water, and at once seems
broken, but reason comes to our assistance, and reveals
to us those laws of light and its refraction which
explain the erring judgment of the senses. So is it
with our reason and our faith. The one explains the
other. We have already shown the work of reason in
the act of faith. It is the reason which examines and
decides the value of the motives of credibility. It is
the reason which unveils to us the why and wherefore
of God s revelation, the work it has to do, the need we
have of it and all the good it can bestow on us. And
this has ever been the teaching of the Catholic Church
and of those great minds whose intellectual greatness is
the harvest of her blessing and her guidance. There
have been some amongst her children who have sought
to minimize or even to deny the work of reason in what
pertains to morals or religion, but the Church rejects
their wild suggestions, and, on the contrary, has ever
asserted the doctrine so magnificently developed by
St Thomas in his explanation of the opening chapter of
the Epistle to the Komans, 1 and confirmed by her with
all the weight of her authority in the Vatican Council.
There she first of all emphatically denies the possibility
of opposition between faith and reason, and then ex-
1 St Tlios., Lect. vi, epit. ad Horn. cap. i, 18, 21.

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE. 11

plains their close relationship. " Although faith be
altogether above reason, there can never be a conflict
between the two, for the same God who reveals
mysteries, and infuses faith, likewise gives the light of
reason to the soul, and God can never contradict Him
self, nor can one truth be at variance with another. If
at times such opposition seem to exist, it is either
because the dogmas of faith are imperfectly understood,
or the assertions of mere opinions are put forward as the
dictates of reason. . . . And not only can faith and
reason never be in opposition, but they always give
each other mutual assistance, for reason shows and proves
the groundwork of faith, strengthening by its light the
knowledge of divine things, and faith in its turn safe
guards reason from many errors, and assists it in many
different ways." l Then she goes on to brand with her
anathema all those who hold the opposite extreme, and
claiming for themselves the name of " rationalists" and
" free-thinkers " maintain that human reason or " free-
thought" is the one and only measure and criterion of
all truth. 2 " Free-thought " and " free-thinkers ! " Were
ever words so outraged ? Faith and faith alone gives
us free-thought and makes us true free-thinkers, for it
is faith which shows us God the one eternal and un
changing Truth, and this is perfect liberty, as defined by
Christ Himself. " You shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free." 3 For there are golden chains
which honour and adorn, as there are common fetters
which humble and degrade. To know the truth and
place its yoke upon our minds is liberty, but in the

1 Cone. Vat., sess. 3, cap. iv. - Canones, iv, 1.

3 yt John viii, 32.

12 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

minds of these would-be philosophers we see the lowest
form of intellectual slavery. We should not approve of
liberty which allowed a man to pick our pockets or
break into our house, we should call it license, and the
ruin of all liberty ; and justly so, for civil liberty sup
poses laws which safeguard all just rights. And has not
intellectual liberty its laws also, and does not the
defiance of these laws mean intellectual license ? God
made us free, because He made us to His own image
and likeness ; and when a man professes his belief in
God and in God s teaching, he declares that he allows
no barrier in the way of intellectual freedom, save the
barrier of God s truth! "I believe in God," he says,
and in those words sums up the Magna Charta of the
mind. That is the free thought for which our nature
craves, far different from the state of mental chaos
and confusion which is the antithesis of faith, and
everywhere involves a blind obedience to the changing
dictates of our own strong passions, or the opinions of
the latest fashionable writer.

from the mutual relations of faith and reason we
pass on to a closer consideration of the virtue of faith in
itself. When we quoted the definition of faith given in
the Catechism, and tried to show that it implied and
proved the eminent reasonableness of such an act, we
were looking at it, if we may say so, from a purely
objective point of view, or, in other words, with reference
to the truths proposed for our belief. It will help us
greatly if we likewise try to look at it subjectively, for
since we showed the act of faith to be an act of know
ledge, the subject in which this intellectual act takes
place, or the power which gives it being, is necessarily

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE. 13

implied, as well as the object known. So we may say
at once, that to enable us to give an assent to any
supernatural truth, we stand in need of what is called
the light of faith, in other words a supernatural virtue
bestowed upon the understanding by Almighty God.
This is a defined dogma of the Church, 1 and follows
from the very meaning of the definition. An absolutely
supernatural truth is one which is beyond the reach of
any mind, actually existing or even possible, unless its
natural powers be supplemented by an additional gift
which we call the light of faith. It is a light because
it manifests certain truths, a light of faith, because as
we have shown above, these truths cannot be demon
strated by their own intrinsic evidence. The act of
faith is therefore an act of knowledge, elicited by the
understanding, strengthened by this supernatural power,
and moved thereto by an act of the will. 2 It is an act
of the understanding, because its object is a revealed
truth, and truth is the natural object of the mind. But
it is an act which is due to the influence of the will,
because the object of faith is a hidden truth, and there
fore is incapable of causing an assent of the mind, or that
entire adhesion which is certitude. Hence the know
ledge which there is in faith accompanies the assent,
but is not its necessary cause, and this explains the
rationale of temptations against faith. So, concludes
the Angelic Doctor, the intellect concurs in the act of
faith by the assent of adhesion, and the share of the
will is its consent to the adhesion of the intellect. Now

1 Cone. Vat., sess. 3, cap iii.

2 Credere est actus intellectus secundum quod movetur a
voluntate ad assentiendum (S. Thos. 2 a 2 ae , 14, 2).

14 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

note what follows. This influence of the will, having
for its object a supernatural good, must be in itself
a supernatural act, for the nature of an act depends
upon the nature of its object, and as the will left to
itself cannot be the principle of a supernatural act, it
follows that it must owe its action to a gratuitous super
natural help, or in other words, an actual grace from
Grod. "To believe," says St Thomas, summing up the
whole question, is an act of the understanding, assent
ing to a divine truth, being moved thereto by the will
under the influence of grace." 1 "With the heart we
believe unto justice." 2

Evidently then we cannot guard too zealously or too
carefully this most precious gift of God, which like so
many of God s gifts seems so dependent on our feeble
care, and that we may better realize the dangers we
must shun and the efforts we must make, we may take
a parable from nature. When the wintry days are
over, and the warmer winds of spring begin to wake the
life that sleeps within the cold dark earth, the little
plant slowly pushes its head above the ground, and
gradually thrives and nourishes until the flower and
fruit seem close at hand. Yet even then we know that
it may be a failure. Perhaps day after day the hot*
sun beats down upon it, until the earth around it is
parched and broken, and the moisture which gives it
life is all dried up, and one by one the green leaves
droop and fade, and the stalk bends lower and lower,
until at last the plant is withered and dead. Or, on the
other hand, the sun may hardly ever shine at all, but hide
himself for weeks together behind the cold grey clouds,
1 St Thos. 2* 2", 2, 9. " Horn, x, 10.

FAITH, THK GATE OF GKACE. 15

and the sweeping rain may fall incessantly, until the
rich earth is turned to mud, and the roots rot away in
the water. Now the soul of man is like a plant in the
garden of God s supernatural world, " a tree planted by
the running waters," l and we may liken faith to the
beautiful flower that crowns it, and slowly ripens into
the rich fruit of good works. But we have seen what
faith implies lowliness of mind and heart, submission
of will self-surrender therefore carried to its uttermost
limit, and all this is very hard to flesh and blood. For
there is ever whispering in the fallen heart of man the
secret voice of self-love and self-worship, urging him to
rise up against his Maker and tell Him to His face
" Non serviam I will not obey ! " 2 If the soul listens
and consents, the result is obvious. The soft falling
rain of grace will cease, the heavens will become as
brass and the earth as iron, and the heart becomes as
hard as a rock, so that faith, which is the beginning of
the spiritual life, seems quite impossible. We have an
instance of this in the Egyptian Pharaoh, who saw
the wonderful signs wrought by Moses, and " hardened
his heart " 3 and would not believe. Another yet more
striking instance is put before us by the Scribes and
Pharisees, who listened to the preaching of the Son of
God Himself and saw His miracles and would not
believe. They were the wise and prudent of this world
from whom were hidden the things of God to be
revealed to little ones, whose hearts were humble and
submissive, whereas the hearts of these blind leaders
were hardened and burnt up with deadly pride. For it
is just this pride of heart and mind, this independent
1 Ps. i, 3. - Jer. ii, 20. a Exod. xi, 10.

16 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

self-sufficiency that God will destroy at any cost, because
it is so hateful in His sight. He demands of us the
avowal of our own littleness and dependence on Him.
He exacts the humble confession of our own utter
inability to look on Him face to face, and it is only
when the soul has done this, it is only when she has
fallen with her face in the dust, and declared her
nothingness apart from Him and her readiness to accept
what she cannot see or understand, it is only then
that God stoops to look down upon the lowliness of
His servant, and pours into the mind the glorious
light of faith. We humble ourselves therefore, but only
that we may be exalted by God.

Then there is another obstacle to be avoided, another
dangerous enemy to our faith of whom we must beware,
and this obstacle, this enemy, is in many ways more
evident and easy to discover, though perhaps no less
difficult to overcome. Our blessed Lord Himself has
pointed it out to us when He declared that, although
He Himself, the Light of God, had come into this world
to give light to them that sit in darkness, yet men fled
from Him, and preferred the darkness because their
deeds were evil. " For," He said, " every one that
doeth evil hateth the light and cometh not to the light,
that his works may not be reproved." l In other words
there are some hearts so corrupted, so buried in sin, that
they positively shun the light of faith, and dread its
brightness, because it shows them their own moral
vileness in its true colours. 2 In souls such as these
there is not even the wish to believe, and, as we have

1 St John iii, 20.

2 Oculis eegris odiosa lux, quae puris est amabilis (S. Aug.)

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE. 17

said, this readiness to accept the teaching of God is the
essential condition of faith. Such souls may hear of
those wonderful words spoken on the green hill-side of
Galilee : " Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall
see God," 1 but there is no answering echo in their hearts.
They have no wish to " see " God, because their hearts
are so unclean, so soiled with the ,love of all that is
degrading. How can the flower of faith flourish in such
a muddy soil ? Slowly but most surely it must wither
away and die, and leave the unhappy, uncrowned soul
to be cut down and cast into the fire in punishment of
a loss to which it has actually become indifferent. It
is of souls like these that St Peter speaks so indignantly,
comparing them to the irrational beasts, to fountains
without water, to clouds tossed about by whirlwinds,
and assuring us that for them is reserved an eternal
mist of darkness, 2 the darkness of wilful ignorance and
unbelief in this world, and, in the next, the darkness of
the hopeless loss of God.

All this, then, shows us the inevitable conclusion.
Faith implies self-sacrifice. It cannot come to souls
that worship self, and if it has been given to such souls,
it generally fades away and dies. It only flourishes in
souls that are ready to pay the price it necessarily
entails. Even when God does not demand the sacrifice
of the body, the laying down our lives in martyrdom,
He always demands the sacrifice of the soul, the
sacrifice of the understanding and the will, as we have
shown. A heavy price, our human nature cries, yet
even human nature can appreciate the reward, the
peace of God which surpasses all understanding. In life

1 St Matt, v, 8. 2 2 St Peter ii, 17.

2

18 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

it gives us peace that no sorrow can destroy, like the
peace that dwelt in the heart of Abraham when he led
his son his only son towards the hill of sacrifice, and
answered his inquiries with that magnificent act of
faith: Deus providebit, God will provide a victim. 1 And
that same peace of mind does but increase as we near
the dark valley of the shadow of death. Look at the
death-bed of the apostle of free-thought, Voltaire, an
agony of misery and despair, and then turn to the pass
ing away of that great saint and doctor, whose keen
intellect had soared so high on the wings of faith,
St Thomas Aquinas. " Pull of calmness and peace,"
says his biographer, 2 "patient as a child, gentle as
charity itself," he waited for death to come. And when
the Blessed Sacrament was brought to him, " I receive
Thee," he exclaimed, " the price of my soul s redemp
tion, for love of whom I have studied and watched and
laboured. Thee have I preached, Thee have I taught,
against Thee never have I breathed a word, nor am
I wedde d to my own opinion. In entire obedience to
holy Church, I now pass out of this world." And so he
was taken from the twilight of faith to the glory of
the everlasting vision. So was it with all the saints,
so is it, and so must it ever be with all truly great souls,
no matter what their work in life may be, for their faith
is common to them all, and their faith is the secret of
it all. So also will it be with us if we walk in their
footsteps, and this same beautiful gift of faith bestowed
upon us at our baptism, shows us how to succeed by

1 Gen. xxii, 8.

2 Life and Labours of St Thomas of Aquinas, by Archbishop
Vaughan. Vol. 11, chap. x.

FAITH, THE GATE OF GRACE. 19

placing us at the entrance of that narrow way leading
to the eternal home, where we shall see our Maker face
to face. The journey may seem long and tedious, and
full of strange and unexpected turnings, and our souls
may grow weary and our hearts fail us in the darkness,
but faith will ever guide us safely and surely, and enable
us to cry out bravely when our poor human nature
seems tried beyond its strength, "Lord. I believe, help
Thou my unbelief."

II

PltA\EK, THE VOICK OF GRACE.

IF we admit that man was created by Almighty God,
and created for no other end than to know, love and
serve his great Creator, we are also obliged to admit
the duty of prayer. For it is faith, as we have seen,
which enables man to know God as He wishes to be
known by us ; it is faith which draws aside the veil, and
shows us something of His infinite perfections, and so
awakens in our hearts the love which is ever waiting to
be won by all that is good and beautiful and true, and
as soon as faith has done this for us, the soul expresses
itself in prayer. For the knowledge of God s greatness
must reveal to us our own exceeding littleness, the
thought of His power will remind us of our weakness
and dependence on Him, the experience of His love will
win from us a return of love, and the consequence of all
this is prayer. It is the first-fruit of religion. For
religion, according to St Thomas, 1 aims at binding us
to God in closest union. It is a virtue which inclines
us to worship our Creator, and give Him honour as the
first Beginning of all things, their supreme Ruler and
their Lord. To Him, as to the first unfailing principle
of life, we all are bound to cling, at all times and in all
places we must seek Him as our one and only end, and

1 St Thos. 2 a 2 ae , 81, 1.

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACK. 21

when in weakness and in blindness we have broken
from Him by the act of sin, we are straightway bound
to seek Him out again and once more pledge our faith
to Him and to His service, and without prayer all this
would be impossible. We may say that prayer of some
sort is the first and natural duty of man

For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend ?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 1

Yet there are not wanting those who would en
deavour to evade these just conclusions. Just as a firm
belief in God and in His providence implies belief in
prayer, so on the other hand the profession of unbelief,
or that so foolishly mis-called " free-thought," which
really is, as we said in our last conference, the lowest
form of intellectual slavery, naturally involves the
denial of prayer. But there are some who loudly
vaunt their faith in God and in His guiding provi
dence, yet, with a pitiable want of logic and consistency,
find fault with our belief in prayer, and hence it will
be useful to do our best to see and understand the place
of prayer in our religious system, and how it is the
natural and legitimate consequence of faith.

In the first place it is worth our while to notice how
prayer is a duty put before us by our natural instincts,
quite independently of all religious teaching. It would
be hard to point out any power or agency more frequent
and more universal in our dealings with each other than

1 Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur.

22 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

the power and agency of prayer. Society is made up
of different grades and different characters. We cannot
even think of it in any other way. Some of its members
are young, whilst others are advanced in years ; some
are rich, others but scantily endowed with this world s
wealth, whilst others again are altogether destitute ;
some are strong and shrink from nothing, others are
but weak and fearful ; some achieve distinction by a
sort of natural right, others tread a lower and more
ordinary path. Now what is the link between all
these if it be not prayer ? What are the words of
children to their parents but words of prayer ? What
is the expression of filial love, or the petition for some
favour, but a prayer ? When a poor man stretches out
his hand for alms, what is it but a prayer ? When we
look upon the picture of a great man s life and praise
his work, our praise is prayer. Moreover, the power
of prayer increases with the weakness of the suppliant ;
it is the feeblest whose cry is strongest. It was not the
eloquence or the arguments of Arthur which aroused
the pity of his cruel uncle s messenger so much as his
childish helplessness. 1 We all feel this, and act
accordingly, and therefore we may justly ask, if man
can pray to his fellow man or hear his prayers, why
should it be otherwise with God ? As truly as our
conscience tells us that there is a God, so also does it
tell us that He hears our prayers, and no amount of
foolish reasoning or shallow arguments can stifle that
conviction. Even sin, that drags us down so low, can
never chain us down too low for prayer, and the " limed
soul, struggling to be free," can " bow the stubborn
1 Shakespeare, King John, Act iv, .Scene i,

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE. 23

knees " and break the " strings of steel " 1 that bind the
heart, and by its prayer win back the freedom it has
lost. It is this inward faith in prayer which explains
its universal use, so that even heathen nations have
their gods and pray to them, and there never yet was
found a race of men so savage or so debased as to have
lost all knowledge of the use of prayer. But, putting
thoughts like these aside, for after all we can afford to
pass them by since we are Christians, let us try to under
stand what our religion teaches us on this important
subject. We have already stated it in brief in the
opening words of this conference, but now we may go
into it more deeply.

The highest and the noblest gift bestowed upon us
by our Maker is the power of understanding. In the
beginning God made man, and He made him to His
own image and likeness ; that is to say, He gave him
a spiritual nature dowered with intelligence and free
will ; and even when the shining light of faith is
absent, that same intelligence is strong enough to pierce
the clouds of ignorance and error and see something of
that dazzling Sun of glory from which it draws its life
and being. With faith to help it, it can see much
more. By faith the soul knows God, His being and
His attributes and infinite perfections, His boundless
wisdom, His almighty power, His unfailing love ; and
knowing this and seeing this, it cries aloud in wonder
and amazement : " Te Deum laudamus We praise
Thee, God, we confess Thee to be the Lord." For
the soul to refuse this homage would be to deny its
nature and oppose the impulse of its being, for God
1 Hamlet, Act iii, Scene viii.

24 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

Himself has made it for no other end. Not that He
has any need of it or of its praise and worship. God
is God, and therefore self-sufficing. No mind that He
lias ever made or could make knows Him as He knows
Himself, and His own self-knowledge is His own most
perfect hymn of praise. But when His love broke in
upon the silence of eternity, and creatures sprang from
nothing at His word of power, it was and could be for
no other end than His great glory. "Thus saith the
Lord God, He that created the heavens and stretched
them out, He that spread forth the earth and the things
that spring out of it, He that givetli breath unto the
people upon it, and spirit to them that tread thereon.
.... I am the Lord, that is My name, I will not give
My glory to another." l He could not do it, almighty
though He is, or rather because He is almighty, and
therefore the one and only God, the first Beginning
and last End of all. Man therefore lives and breathes
that He may glorify his Maker by his worship and his
adoration, and this worship and this adoration is the
first great act of prayer.

But God has given to man another power, as we
have already said, and from this second power He like
wise looks for tribute. Great and wonderful as is the
gift of understanding, it is but the half of that most
generous dowry given to man at his creation. There is
the will, the affection of the heart, as it is called, and
this is taken captive in its turn by God s exceeding
goodness. He is goodness itself, and we exist, with all
we have and all we are, simply because God is so good.
" Every best gift and every perfect gift is from above,
1 Jsa. xlii, 5-8,

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE. 25

coming down from the Father of lights," in whose love
" there is no change nor shadow of turning." l But
here again the same conclusion stares us in the face.
" The Lord hath made all things for Himself." 2 " God s
goodness," says St Thomas, " is the final cause of all
things," 3 and he goes on to explain how, though the
benefit accruing to the creature from the enjoyment of
God s gifts may be called the motive of creation (finem
operis), yet the motive of the Creator (finem operantis)
could be none other than Himself ; and the Church
herself proclaims this truth in her sacred liturgy when
she calls upon us to adore "the King, for whom all
things exist." Regem cui omnia vivunt, venite adoremus.
It follows therefore that God s gifts are ours, not that
we may rest in them and claim them as our own, but
that, by means of them, we may be lifted up to Him
who gave them in a loving act of gratitude, and in this
gratitude or " thanksgiving " we find the second great
act of prayer.

But to praise God for His great glory and His
infinite perfections and to thank Him for His count
less blessings, what else is this but loyal service, the
loving worship of the mind and heart in prayer ? And
so the Angelic Doctor tells us it is man s peculiar work,
his special office in the great scheme of creation, oratio
estproprium rationalis creaturce* An old Eastern legend
tells us that when God had made the world and
fashioned it so fair and beautiful that even He, the
great Creator, saw that it was very good, He showed
it to the ministering angels gathered round His throne

1 St James i, 17. 2 Prov. xvi, 4. 3 St Tlios. l a , 44, 4.
4 St Tlios. 2 2*e, 83, 10.

26 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

and bade them say if aught was wanting to its full
perfection, and one of them, in bold humility obeying
God s behest, declared that there was one tiling lacking

o o

and one only, and that one thing was an eternal living
voice wherewith the world might glorify its Maker.
This then is man s great work, a work that he alone
can do ; for though the holy Scriptures tell us that the
" heavens show forth the glory of God," l that " the earth
adores Him and chants His praises," 2 though His three
faithful servants standing in the fiery furnace of the
Babylonian King called upon all the works of the Lord
to praise and exalt Him above all for ever, 8 though the
ever-living Church re-echoes their hymn of praise until
the end of time, and daily bids the sun and moon and
stars of heaven, the earth and seas and rivers and all
living things to bless and praise the Lord ; yet in this
universal hymn of worship, the best and highest and
most perfect voice is wanting if man be silent, for man
alone can seek the inspiration of his song in his abound
ing knowledge, he alone can let it sound from the depth
of an understanding heart ; in him alone it is the out
come of free will, and nothing less than this is real
praise and real glory. 4 Some one has compared the
earth, as it swings on its appointed path through space,
to a great thurible before the throne of God. Man s
prayer is surely the sweet smelling incense in which
God finds delight.

All this seems clear enough, and were man still in
his unfallen state it would suffice to prove whatever we
have ventured to assert ; but sin has found a place upon

1 Ps. xviii, 2. 2 Ps. Ixv. :i Dan. iii.
4 St Thus. 1* 2^, -2, 3.

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE. 27

the earth, and with sin, suffering of every kind ; and
therefore mingled with the homage of its praise and its
thanksgiving there rises ever in God s sight the plead
ing cry of our poor suffering race : " Lord, save us, we
perish." l Not here or there, or once or twice in a long
lifetime, but everywhere from first to last man feels the
touch of sorrow ; failure and disappointment dog his
steps, and lest he should despair and give up struggling,
hope speaks to him of prayer, and bids him ever raise
his eyes to the mountains, whence help will surely
come to him in his dark hour if he but ask for it. 2
There is no other way. God will not treat us as He
treats the lower world of nature, and force His gifts
upon us by a law of blind necessity ; much less can
feeble man presume to claim what he requires and take
it by main force ! God s honour is as real as man s
liberty. Hence there remains a third way, the way of
persuasion, which we call prayer, a power which often
wins the victory when other means have failed. So
Homer tells us 3 how King Priam knelt before Achilles
and begged him to restore the body of Hector, and how
the sight of that old man, kneeling before him and
kissing the hand that had slain his dearest son, moved
Achilles to forego his oath and show some pity and
respect to his dead enemy. Is God less pitiful than
man ? St James assures us that "the prayer of a just
man availeth much," 4 and the great Bossuet would have
us set no limits to its power, seeing that in prayer man
clothes himself in God s omnipotence. 5 Manifestly

1 St Matt, viii, 25. " Ps. cxx.

3 Iliad., bk 24, 592-3. 4 St James v, 16.

5 L liomme revfetu de la toute-puissance de Dieu,

28 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

then, if prayer is a solemn duty imposed upon us by
our position as creatures, it is also an undeniable need.
Even if man could stifle all tbe nobler instincts of his
nature, closing his eyes to God s perfections and shut
ting his heart against God s blessings, he still must
feel the smart of suffering obliging him to go to God for
help and comfort and relief.

Yet it is here that we part company with many who
would shrink from calling themselves unbelievers, but
who fail to see how prayer of this sort and God s provi
dence can work together, so false and so distorted is
their idea of God and the workings of His providence.
This prayer of petition, they say, is useless and im
possible, so we must try to explain how it is neither one
nor the other. And first of all we may point out that
it is God who makes this law of prayer, a law most
natural, most reasonable in every way, for the God we
worship is the supremely intelligent Being, not a mere
impersonal collection of the blind forces of nature, and
therefore we believe that He ever treats His creatures
in accordance with the nature He has given them. The
little grain of wheat owes its being to Him, and depends
on Him as absolutely as does the highest archangel.
It has no knowledge of existence, and can ask for
nothing as it lies buried in the cold earth, yet God, who
" covereth the heavens with clouds and prepareth rain
for the earth, who maketh the grass to grow upon the
mountains, and herbs for the service of men," l remem
bers it, and sends the rain and the life-giving sunshine ;
and the answer of the buried grain of wheat, unconscious
though it be, is seen in the waving field of golden corn.
1 Pa. cxlvi, 8.

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE. 29

So also the psalmist tells us that " the young lions roar
after their prey, and seek their meat from God," l and
that " He gives their food to the beasts of the field and
to the young ravens that call upon Hirn." 2 Not that
the roaring of the wild beasts or the lowing of the
cattle or the cries of the birds are a real prayer any
more than the silence of the buried seed ; but, according
to St Thomas, they are said to call upon God, because
of those natural wants which move them to follow out
the end for which they were made, and so partake of
the divine Goodness, just as they are said to obey God
when they follow the instinct by which God moves
them to fulfil His purposes. 3

But man is surely on a higher level, and must be
judged by other laws. He has the power of realizing
all he needs and longs for, since his understanding,
guided by the double light of reason and of faith, shows
him his last end and all the means he must employ in
order to attain it. It shows him his own weakness and
the many possibilities of failure ; it shows him God,
almighty, merciful, full of love and pity ; and then it
tells him of the clear command which God has laid
upon him : " Ask, and you shall receive." Obedience,
therefore, to this law of prayer is a duty manifestly put
before us by our faith and reason, here as elsewhere,
working hand in hand, no less than by that daily
experience and mutual intercourse of which we have
already spoken. Nor may our opponents hope to found
a serious objection on the ground that prayer between
man and man is necessary in order to make known our
wants, whereas they are already known to the all-

1 Ps. ciii, 21. - Ps. cxlvi, 9. u St Thos. & 2 ilu , 83, 10.

30

CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

seeing mind of God, as He Himself assures us : " Your
Father knoweth that you have need of all these
things." 1 We do not beg for help from God and
manifest our wants to Him because He knows them
not, but rather to remind ourselves of our necessities
and consequent dependence. 2 The rich man in the
Gospel, counting up his gains, and full of confidence
in their abundance, laying aside all care and preparing
to eat, drink, and be merry, was but a type of what our
fallen nature ever tends to do when cares and sorrows
seem to pass us by. Animal instincts gain the upper
hand, and the beast within us overcomes the man. To
eat, drink, and be merry is right enough in season, but we
were not made for that alone, and from time to time
we need reminding that a day will come for us, as for
that poor foolish glutton, when our soul will be required
of us. Our many needs and wants do this for us. They
force God s claims upon us when we would forget them.
" It is not," says St Thomas, " that Almighty God is
wanting in generosity, for He showers upon us many
gifts that we have never thought of asking for, because
He is so generous and so liberal in our regard; but
there are many things for which He wishes us to ask,
since He will only give them in answer to our prayers.
He does this for our sakes, for by these prayers our
faith in Him as the author of all good becomes more
real, and our hope and trust in Him are wonderfully
strengthened." s Then the Angelic Doctor goes on to
show how prayer is eminently calculated to increase
the virtue of religion in our hearts, since it implies this

1 St Mutt, vi, 32. y St TLos. 2 a 2, 83, 2, ad 1.

3 St Thos. 2* 2o, 83, 2, ad 3.

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE. 31

spirit of submission and dependence upon God for all
good things. 1

But, our opponents insist, granting all this to be as
true as it is plausible, there is another difficulty in the
way, which seems to prove the utter uselessness of
prayer. God, they say, is of His very nature quite
unchangeable, for change of any sort implies potenti
ality and imperfection, and God, according to the
teaching of the Catholic faith, is what we call a pure
act, absolutely simple .and infinitely perfect, incapable
therefore of any sort of change. 2 Moreover, this eternal
" fixity " applies to all His attributes. His knowledge
is unchangeable ; the things that were are still before
His mind, the things that are not yet are visible to
Him. He cannot learn or be informed of anything.
So also with His will. It is infinitely free, and yet
eternally determined. " The counsel of the Lord," says
the psalmist, " standeth for ever ; " 3 and by the mouth
of His prophet God Himself declares : " I am God, and
there is no God beside. . . . My counsel shall stand,
and all My will shall be done." 4 But once we grant
all this, and all who believe in God must grant it, it
seems impossible to admit the utility of prayer. If
God must listen to me and grant my prayer, He must
in equal justice hearken to the prayers of countless
millions, often contradicting one another in their
petitions ; and in face of such a state of things what
would become of God s unchanging will and those most
wonderful and equally unchanging laws by which the
universe is governed ? Surely, if we pray at all, our

1 St Thos. 2 a 2 ae , 83, 3. 2 St Thos. !, 9, 1. y Ps. xxxii, 10.
4 Isa. xlvi, 9, 10.

32 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

prayers should be confined to acts of worship and
thanksgiving, and submission to the dread, unknown,
inevitable future, already fixed and ruthlessly deter
mined by God s will. What a religion, what a (rod
this teaching puts before us, or rather what an ignorance
of God and all religion in those who follow it ! Yet
these theories are not new. Six hundred years ago
St Thomas calmly weighed them, and examined them,
and rejected them as worthless, in words as brief as
they are clear and convincing. " The use of prayer,"
he says, " does not in any way interfere with the
absolute freedom of the creature or the unchangeable
will of the Creator. In order to see this clearly we
must remind ourselves that the eternal Providence of
God not only determines beforehand the various things
that are to take place, but it also predetermines and
prearranges their various causes and mutual relations.
Amongst these different sorts of causes we must
naturally include human actions. It follows therefore
that when men do certain things, their actions by
no means interfere with the divine pre-arrangement,
but on the contrary, by these very actions they bring to
pass certain effects in the way that God desires. And
this is the way in which we must look at prayer. We
do not pray in order to change God s arrangement of our
lives, but rather to bring to pass that arrangement which
God has decreed to bring to pass by means of our prayers ;
or, as St Gregory says, 1 By their prayers men fit them
selves to receive the gifts which the Almighty from all
eternity has decreed to give them. " 2

The fallacy of our opponents, therefore, consists in
1 Lib. 1, Dialog., cap. viii. - Thos. 2 a 2 ae , 83, 2.

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE. 33

ignoring the great law of prayer, the law of cause and
effect, whilst they so loudly vaunt their admiration for
the laws of God in general an intellectual position so
illogical and foolish, that even Voltaire scoffs at it.
Look at the world of nature. Far from being a sort
of register of hard and fast laws, each restricted in
action and effect to one particular sphere, it is rather
a marvellous union of forces working together on what
we may call the principle of give and take. Forces
which at one time seem to work together, at another
show themselves in opposition ; sometimes they com
bine to overcome a third, whilst at another they produce
a state of equilibrium. There is a law by which a solid
or a liquid suddenly converted into vapour must find
room for its expansion, and this it sometimes does with
such terrific energy as to destroy the strongest obstacle.
But the intellect of man has made that law subservient
to his wants, and uses it to drive the locomotive or
the steamship, as well as for the more destructive pur
poses of modern artillery. So also in the sphere of
medicine. How many thousands have been slain by
epidemics of small-pox. Now vaccination well nigh
puts an end to any danger, whatever Boards of
Gruardians may say. It looks as though the physical
world were in revolt against the rule of man, but man
possesses powers by which he may subdue it once again.
Why may we not apply our argument to the moral
world ? " You cannot bring a solitary objection against
prayer," says a great French philosopher, "that does
not also strike at medicine or science. This sick man,
you say, will either die or not, and therefore prayer is
useless. But, I retort, then medicine is also useless ;

3

34 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

why trouble about doctors ? Where is the difference ?
It is simply a question of cause and effect. The man s
death or his recovery depends upon the use of certain
remedies, and this condition is included in God s eternal
decree." l Why should not God also have decreed that
the man would recover in answer to fervent prayer ?
Nor can we call this " interference " on the part of God,
or relegate it to the sphere of miracles. It is in no
sense a miracle. It is the ordinary working out of the
divine plan. If man s intelligence can bring one cause
to bear on another, and so neutralize its effect, God
knows the workings of all causes in all orders, since He
is the efficient cause of all and moves them all. All the
laws and all the powers and all the forces of the
universe are in His hands, and hence He can employ
causes which our ignorant folly would condemn as
impotent, to bring about results our weakness judged to
be impossible. A vast building is wrapped in darkness,
and a little ignorant child stands frightened and helpless
before the very key-board of the electric light. Its father
comes in answer to its call, and unhesitatingly puts out his
hand, and touches one of the many ivory keys, and the
whole place is flooded with light. It was only necessary to
know which key to turn and to be able to reach it.
There is one last objection which St Thomas seems
to hint at when he quotes the old pagan philpsopher :
" Nothing is so dearly bought as that which costs us
prayers," 2 and which modern infidelity claims as its
very own. Prayer is an insult to the dignity of man
hood, most lowering and degrading ! " Stand up ! " says

1 De Maistre, Soirtes de St Petersbourg, 1.

a Nulhv res carius eniitur (jiiem quoe precibus empta est (Seneca).

PRAYER, THE VOICE OF GRACE. 35

Rousseau, addressing man with empty boastfulness,
"You are small enough to begin with. Instead of pray
ing, act. A beggar is always repulsive, whether he is
calling upon God or man." We should hardly choose
Jean Jacques Rousseau as the champion of human
dignity, but it often happens that the lowest and the
worst are most in evidence ; and so we may consider
him as representing others. Is it true then that prayer
is degrading in any sense of the word ? We have no
excuse for those presumptuous souls who look for
miracles when common sense is needed ; we are not
endeavouring to defend the follies of " peculiar peo
ple"; most firmly we believe that God desires us to
employ all natural means, and that heaven helps those
who help themselves ; but there are times when the
struggle seems in vain, when heart and brain are
wearied with brave effort, when the waves of suffering,
sorrow, and failure, seem about to close above our head,
and then from the tired soul there bursts the cry of
faitli : " Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee,
Lord ! " Who can say that such a prayer dishonours or
degrades ? If I believe in God at all, I believe Him to
be infinitely good, infinitely powerful, infinitely loving,
always able, therefore, to assist, and always willing to
do it, if -it be good for me ; and to appeal to Him in
trouble, is to lift myself up and proclaim myself His
child, His friend, His instrument, His fellow-worker;
and what honour could equal that ? Through us, in us
and by us God rules the world, and brings to pass His
great designs, and prayer puts us in His hands. By
prayer we merit, and become more pleasing in His
sight and more efficient instruments for the accomplish-

36 CONFEEENCES ON GRACE.

ment of His will. 1 By prayer we break the chains that
hold us down to earth, and soar aloft in purer light,
more fitting to our spiritual nature, where our intelli
gence can feed on truths that never fail, and where our

O

heart can open out to welcome all the world. Far then
from lowering him, prayer is man s patent of nobility.
Eaised as we are by God to the high and supernatural
state of grace, with corresponding duties and rewards,
it is by prayer that we fulfil the one and win the other,
and so attain our real greatness and perfection. Faith
shows us God, our one last End, the place of our
repose, and prayer unites us to Him, so that " in Him
we live, and move, and have our being." 2

But if our prayer can do all this, and wields this
mighty power, when it is but the feeble cry of one poor
solitary heart, what must it be, and what must be its
power when it ascends from many hearts, firmly bound
together in the ties of kinship ; the loving praise and
worship of a united home ? What must it be when it is
the prayer of a great nation ; above all, what must it be
when all nations and all peoples unite in the grand chorus
of prayer that goes up from the universal Church. It is
no longer the voice of " two or three gathered together "
in the name of God. It is the voice of the whole human
race, or rather, it is the Bride of Christ speaking for
humanity, the Spirit of God Himself inspiring her prayer
and speaking with her ! What then is our conclusion ?
Possessed as we are of the light of faith, showing us
our true dignity, our work, our abundant helps, we can
but blame ourselves if our lives are spoiled by moral
failure. We are only what we are because we do not pray !
1 St Thos. 2 a 2 e , 83, 15. 3 Acts xvii, 28.

37

III

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WORK OF GKACE.

WHEN we speak about the " supernatural life of grace,"
we mean an earnest persevering effort to attain our last
end by a loyal obedience to God s commandments, and
any deliberate and wilful failure on our part we un
hesitatingly characterize as sinful. This is practically
the definition of sin given by St Thomas, 1 and so clear
is our conviction of its truth that proof seems quite
superfluous. Similarly, when the Angelic Doctor tells
us that this moral failure, which we call sin, leaves
a stain upon the soul, our conscience once again bears
witness to the truth of his assertion. The very fact
that we are reasonable beings, and that the essence of
sin lies in its deviation from the law of right reason,
obliges us to feel the moral humiliation which is its
consequence and to acknowledge the stain it leaves
upon the soul. Hence this question of sin and its con
sequences, and the remedies against it prepared by our
Creator, must necessarily come before us when we begin
seriously to consider the supernatural life. We could
not pass it over even if we would. Supposing there
were no such thing as sin, it would be different. Our
worship of Almighty God might then indeed be limited
to fervent prayers of praise and adoration, but the sad
1 St Thos. 1*, 63, 1.

38 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

knowledge of good and evil is the fatal inheritance of
our fallen race. Hence, at all times and in all places,
we find men bearing witness to this fact, and in various
ways, according to the best of their ability, endeavouring
to undo the work of sin and blot out its dishonouring
stains by rites of expiation. Our minds are therefore
quite prepared to admit that in the one and only true
religion, which is meant to lead our souls to God, there
must be some such means provided for us. Our reason
tells us that it must be so, our faith declares it is so,
and bids us see and wonder at the power and wisdom
and mercy of our God in the priceless sacrament of
Penance.

The sacrament of Penance ! It is a world of
theology in itself, embracing as it does the teaching
of our faith on sin and grace and the sacraments ; it is
perhaps the commonest of God s supernatural dealings
with our souls, and yet by no means the least wonder
ful ; it is the most beneficent of all His condescensions,
and yet the very one that is the most traduced and
hated. To us, on whom God has bestowed the light of
faith, the need of such a sacrament seems so manifest,
that we feel we could almost prove its existence to any
reasonable mind by a priori arguments. For once we
grant the possibility of sin in those who have received
the grace of baptism, we are compelled to grant that
another sacrament for the remission of such sins would
only be what we might expect from God s great good
ness, especially since it is His way to treat us in
accordance with our nature, and make material things
the channels of His grace. It is quite true that He
died to make atonement for our sins, and that His

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WORK OF GRACE. 39

sufferings are the superabounding cause of all grace
and all satisfaction. 1 But belief in His atonement does
not mean that we are henceforth free to please our
selves and indulge in every sin without fear or remorse.
He laid down His life "for us, but, as He Himself
declared, 2 it was of His own free will, for no one could
take it from Him, and dying for us freely, He could and
did determine how the abundant fruits of all His
sufferings were to be applied to the souls whom He had
so generously redeemed. He instituted the sacraments.
We believe that He blotted out the hand-writing that
was against us, 3 and opened the closed gates of heaven
to the human race ; but we also believe that He laid
down a clear condition, " Unless a man be born again
of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter the king
dom of God," 4 and hence we teach that baptism, either
actually or by desire, is an essential condition of salva
tion. But when we grow up, and our reason and free
will assert themselves, it often happens that we soon
forget how much we have been favoured. Freely and
deliberately we turn our backs upon our Maker, and
declare our independence, and even as a beautiful
flower, just opening its white leaves to the bright sun
shine, loses all its frail loveliness, and is sullied and
destroyed when it is trampled in the dust, so also is the
soul of man sullied and defiled when he consents to sin.
What then can he do ? He may repent, and indeed his
reason tells him that repentance is essential ; but is
his repentance real enough to merit God s acceptance,
and will* He accept it ? Hope says He will, but have

1 St Thos. 3 a , 48, 49. 2 St John x, 18. 3 Col. ii, 14.

4 St John iii, 5.

40 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

we no visible assurance, such as God gives us in baptism ?
Must we be like the King of Nineveh, who hearkened to
the preaching of God s prophet, and proclaimed a solemn
fast, for " "Who can tell," he said, " if God will turn and
forgive, and turn away from His fierce anger ? " l Who
can tell ? There is the difficulty. So faith steps in,
and tells us that there is another sacrament, " a second
plank after shipwreck," a visible outward sign of the
cleansing work of grace, the sacrament of Penance.

But there is another way of looking at this dogma
of our faith. A sacrament is denned to be an outward
sign of inward grace ordained by Jesus Christ. All its
powers must come from Him, for nobody could make
a sacrament, and bind the supernatural power of grace
to visible things but the Author of grace Himself ; and so
we venture to say that any candid mind looking at this
institution as an existing fact in the world, and seriously
considering it, must see in it the handiwork of God, and
confess it to be a sacrament, or means of grace, and
a most efficient factor in the spiritual life.

In the sacrament of Penance, or " Confession " as it
is commonly called amongst Catholics, we have to
acknowledge two most wonderful creations utterly
beyond the power of man, or any natural agency what
ever ; for since this marvellous institution implies the
confession of one s sins to a fellow-creature, it neces
sarily supposes the one who confesses his sins, and the
one who receives the confession ; the self-accused
transgressor of the law and the judge who is its repre
sentative ; the penitent and the confessor. Analyse
these two ideas, and try to see what they imply. Who
1 Jouas Hi, 9.

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WORK OF GRACE. 41

is the penitent ? He is a human being, humbly avow
ing his sins at the feet of a fellow-man. According to
St Thomas, 1 pride may be looked at as a special sin in
itself, or as the fountain-head of all sin. He shows us,
moreover, how it is the worst of all sins, because the
furthest point of sin, and yet, though we may admit the
reasoning of the Angelic Doctor and accept his con
clusions, we cannot help feeling somehow or other that
pride is the most excusable of all sins, probably
because so natural to our fallen and perverted will.
Miserable and poor and blind and naked as are the
very best of us from a supernatural point of view, we
are all, nevertheless, infected with this vice of pride.
It hides itself under many forms. It often wears the
robe of virtue, and the proudest man will often urge
that he is only overstocked with self-respect. Yet,
proud as man is by nature, stubborn and sensitive and
reserved in every way, he is, by this sacrament, laid under
a law which at first sight seems an outrage on human
nature. For it is a law which obliges him to come and
kneel at the feet of one of his fellow-men one perhaps
who in the social scale may be in every way inferior
and of less account, one who may be less clever, less
learned, less refined and there reveal the sins of his
life. Neither age, position nor experience may avail as
an excuse. All must obey. The pope himself, who
claims to be the vicar of Christ on earth, is as much
under the law as the youngest cleric in the Church.
Kings and queens are bound equally with the poorest
of their subjects. Old men bowed down by the weight
of years, young men in the fierce strife of passions that
1 St Thos. 2 a 2 ae , 84, 2.

42 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

make up the battle of life, children who have but begun
to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, all
are under the same law. And they must confess all.
It might not seem so hard to be obliged to confess the
public crimes that outrage every law of public morals,
the sins against society and its ordinances, the offences
that are committed in the light of day and under the
eyes of our neighbour ; but the law of confession goes
further than that. All sinful acts, all moral failures
and humiliations in thought, word and deed, all are to
be avowed. This is the inexorable law, and the world
cries out against it as a sheer impossibility. But it
is only half the wonder ! Difficult as this may seem
to human reason, impossible as it may appear to
the world, it is surely still more difficult, still more
impossible to make the confessor. For a confessor in
the sacrament of Penance has not merely to listen to
the self-accusation of his neighbour, and be the
recipient of his confidence. His task is something far
more wonderful than that, it is nothing less than super
human! The burden laid upon him, in the exercise of
this office, is beyond the strength of angels, yet in him
self he is but a man as other men ; like to them in
body and soul and mind and heart. And what is the
heart of man the will of man ? A power with high
ideals, lofty aspirations, capable of heroic sacrifice, yet
at the same time capable of yielding to most selHsli
cravings and weak enough for any fall ! Manifestly,
therefore, before it can undertake a work like this it
must be changed, and cleansed, and strengthened until
it hardly seems the same. So when Jesus Christ
bestowed upon His apostles the power of forgiving sin,

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WOKK OF GRACE. 43

holy Scripture tells us 1 that He breathed upon them,
to signify that He gave to them a new spirit, a better
and more perfect heart. He showed them by that
mysterious sign that He would have them work by His
Spirit and His Heart ; or, in the words of holy "Writ,
He gave to them " wisdom and understanding exceed
ing much, and largeness of heart even as the sand that
is on the sea-shore." 2 The work of a confessor demands
no less. For it implies a heart full of an unwearying
love, a love that can bear up against the sins, the
faults, the weaknesses and follies of humanity, coupled
with a sense of duty that will enable him to sacrifice
home and kindred and friends and pleasant occupa
tions ; or, if needful, willingly brave suffering and
danger and death, often to meet with no other reward,
as far as this world is concerned, than the misunder
standings, criticisms and revilings of those whom he
has tried to serve. Moreover, real and true and deep
as is to be this love of souls, it may not be confined to
any narrow circle. It must be ready to embrace all ;
the poorest of the poor as well as the rich and nobly
born, the old and feeble as well as the young and light-
hearted ; the innocent and pure side by side with the
sin-stained and the fallen. But because love is a fire
which may burn and consume, it must be tempered by
a purity like unto that of the angels of God, and
guarded by a prudence and discretion not of this earth.
Then again, these extraordinary gifts, so wonderful and
so supernatural, were not to be conferred on one or two
more perfect souls ; but all over the world, in all
nations and in all peoples, amongst the cultured white
1 St John xx, 22. * 3 Kings iv, 29.

44 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

races aiid the despised negroes, these representatives of
Christ were to be found, so that everywhere, until the
end of time, wherever sin existed, there also must be
found the confessor to break asunder its chains. This
is the miracle of the sacrament of Penance, and for
nineteen centuries it has been before the world. Only
one conclusion is possible. "This is the finger of
God." l " It is the Lord s doing, and it is wonderful
in our eyes." 2

It seems hardly worth our while to insist upon a
further argument ; though we may pause to point it out,
for it is not without its special value, and it is to be
found in an appeal to history and its evidences. It has
a negative as well as a positive side, and the former may
be summed up in the pertinent question, who is the
author of the practice of confession, if it be not our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ? The Catholic Church
is not unmindful of the great names in her history, the
many holy pontiffs, kings and warriors, martyrs and con
fessors, who have deserved well of her. Their names and
their achievements are ever being handed down to after
ages with their fitting meed of praise ; but nowhere is there
mention of the one who placed within her hands this
means of boundless influence. Her enemies, on the
other hand, are equally silent. " Free-thought " is not
the exclusive product of the nineteenth century, it has
its votaries in every age, and what were they doing
when this outrage on their theories was first introduced?
Those others, too, whose boast it is to steer a middle
course between the license of free-thought and the
authority of the Church, have they no words to say, no
1 Exod. viii, 19. 2 Pa. cxvii, 23.

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WOEK OF GEACE. 45

plea of " novelties " to urge until the middle of the
sixteenth century. Full five or six hundred years
before the so-called Ee formation, the Greeks had
broken away, but the Greeks uphold confession. If we
go back another six hundred years we find Nestorius,
Eutyches, and others cutting themselves adrift, but never
because of the dogma of confession. Surely all this
silence, the silence of the centuries, speaks as eloquently
as any argument, and were we now to turn to Catholic
writers for the positive proofs of history, and in each
succeeding age bow down before the clear, unfaltering
teaching of its greatest sons ; it would not be because
we needed more convincing evidence, but only that we
loved to hear the voice of truth triumphing over error,
and proclaiming aloud to the whole world that Penance
is really and truly a sacrament ordained by Jesus Christ.
Passing over, therefore, the testimonies of these
saints and fathers of the Church, let us turn to the
book of God s word, and see when our Saviour bestowed
upon us this fresh proof of His love for our souls, and
His anxiety for their salvation. Just as in the case of
the Holy Eucharist, the Son of God seems to prepare
the minds of His apostles for so great a gift by fore
telling its bestowal, for in the eighteenth chapter of St
Matthew s Gospel, after speaking of the power of the
Church, He uses these solemn words : " Amen, I say un
to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be
bound also in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose up
on earth shall be loosed also in heaven"; 1 and then when
the fitting time had come, He fulfilled His promise by
conferring upon them the awful powers necessary for so
1 St Matt, xviii, 18.

46 CONFRRENCES ON GRACE.

great a work. The beloved disciple describes the
wonderful scene : " Now when it was late that same
day, the first of the week, and the doors were shut, when
the disciples were gathered together for fear of the Jews,
Jesus came, and stood in the midst, and said to them :
Peace be to you. And when He had said this, He
shewed them His hands and His side. Then were the
disciples glad when they saw the Lord. And again He said
to them : Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent Me,
I also send you. And when He had said this, He
breathed on them, and said to them : Receive ye the
Holy Ghost, whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven
them, and whose sins you shall retain they are retained." 1
Every word seems to ring with a power and authority
all divine. " As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you.
Receive ye the Holy Ghost." In these words of her
divine Founder, the Catholic Church has always recog
nized the institution of the sacrament of Penance, for
they most certainly and most explicitly confer the
power of forgiving and retaining sin ; and hence they
imply the duty of confession, for how is the divinely-
appointed representative of Christ to exercise His power
of forgiving and retaining sins, unless the sinner himself
reveal them to him.

Now let us look into this teaching of our faith more
closely, and see for ourselves how perfectly it corre
sponds to the natural wants of man ; and how, therefore,
far from being a burden, it is in reality a very great help
and consolation. For if God is our last end, it follows
naturally that every single law laid upon us by Him is
meant to be the echo of His voice, the beckoning of
1 St John xx, 19-23,

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WORK OF GEACE. 47

His hand, now calling us onward, now warning us
backwards, but ever showing us the way to Him.
Hence every duty we owe to Him, every obligation
under which we lie, is really meant to be a help to us.
It is in absolute accordance with right reason and with
our nature, and necessarily tends to perfect it by unit
ing it with its last end ; and we assert that confession
is no exception to this universal law, although we
often hear it attacked by non-Catholics as unnatural
and unreasonable and therefore most certainly not of God.
But it is easy to prove our contention. The heart of man
has been well compared to a vessel filled to overflowing,
and this overflow cannot fall back upon itself, but by its
very nature seeks another resting place, or, in other words,
seeks and craves for sympathy. This sympathy implies
confidence, and what is confession but confidence
carried to its utmost limit, and made wholly super
natural by the grace of God ? It also implies a fellow-
creature, for if we could confess to God, we should
require that God should manifest Himself and His
acceptance of our confidence, and in our present state of
probation, this could not be. We feel that we must
lay the burden of our miseries at the feet of one like
unto ourselves, and yet one who can speak to us in the
name and with the authority of God Himself. More
over, quite apart from any supernatural motive, con
fession is the natural instinct of a remorseful conscience.
It is the soul s spontaneous and voluntary rejection of
evil. But when we pass into the supernatural order,
and consider it as the remedy for sin, the violation of
God s law, then is its fitness even yet more clearly
manifest. For in every serious sin we can discern two

48 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

elements, a turning away from God, who is our last end,
and a turning to the creature; in other words the rejection
of the Creator for the creature. 1 The turning away
from God is the outcome of pride. Our fallen nature
tends to worship self, and craves to be its own master
that it may please itself and its own inclinations at
whatever cost. It was this love of self which the devil
aroused in our first parents when he asked : " Why hath
God commanded you that you should not eat of every
tree of paradise," and then in answer to the reason
given : " No, you shall not die, but in whatsoever day
you shall eat thereof your eyes shall be opened, and
you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Then
came the second element of sin, the act of preference.
" When the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and
fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold, she took of the
fruit thereof and did eat," 2 and so God s law was
broken ; for when the sinner, turning away from God
and preferring some created good, finds his moral
freedom barred by the divine command, he spurns it
with contempt, and so these two elements combine in
one foolish act of revolt.

Now look at confession. In it you will find pre
cisely the contrary elements to those which constitute
the act of sin. In opposition to pride, self-indulgence
and rebellion, it imposes on us an act of true humility
and self-sacrifice, and an act of child-like obedience to
God s law in the submission of the will and the sorrow
ful avowal of our fault. How wonderful are the ways
of God ! Had our divine Saviour not vouchsafed to
bestow it upon us, no one would have dared to dream of
1 St Thos. 1" 2, 87, 4. 2 Gen. iii.

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WORK OF GRACE. 49

such a remedy ; but now that He has given it, we have
but to look upon it to see in it His handiwork, at once
a marvellous token of His power, His wisdom and His
love. Moreover, it is a special privilege, for which we
cannot show ourselves too grateful. St Thomas tells
us 1 that the word " privilege" implies a sort of private
law, or favour, granted only to a few, and though all
the sacraments might justly claim the title, yet in some
way it seems especially to describe the sacrament of
Penance. The very beautiful chapter in the Old Testa
ment which gives us the story of Naainan the Syrian
serves as a good illustration. 2 Naainan was the general
of the Syrian army ; valiant, rich and powerful, but
a leper. Amongst his many slaves there happened to
be a little Hebrew girl, who understood her master s
trouble, and spoke about the great prophet in her own
country, and told how God had blessed him with
miraculous powers, so that he was able to cure all
diseases, even leprosy. So Naaman set out for the laud
of Israel, and having found out who this prophet was,
and where he dwelt, he came to him with all his grand
retinue, and made his prayer. But the prophet did not
trouble to see him ; he merely sent his servant with
a message, directing him to bathe a certain number of
times in the river Jordan, and promising, if he did so,
that he would be healed. Now mark the sequel.
Naamau s pride was hurt. He wanted to be healed,
but he also wanted to dictate the manner of his heal
ing. He wanted more attention and more ceremony,
and he was actually returning in anger to his own
country, when his servants ventured to appeal to his

1 St Thos. l a 2 ae , 96, 1 ad 1. 2 4 Kings v.

4

50 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

common sense : " If the prophet had bid thee do some
great thing, surely thou wouldst have done it ; how
much rather what he now hath said to thee, Wash, and
thou shalt be clean." So he obeyed God s prophet,
and he was healed. The lesson is most evident : If the
prophet had bid thee do some great thing, surely thou
ivouldst have done it. Sin is a moral leprosy. Did we
but realize this, no sacrifice would be too great to get
rid of it, and to recover that rectitude of soul, that
cleanness of heart which we have lost ; and it is our
wonderful privilege to be able to win it back at what is
comparatively no cost at all. Moreover, the sacrifice,
such as it is, not only cleanses us from the stain of sin
and heals us of our disease, but over and above this, it
rewards the effort we have made, by filling the soul
with a new happiness, born of a superabundance of
comfort and light and the perfect consciousness of for
giveness. It gives us comfort. All sorrow conies from
sin, for sin is the only real sorrow, the only real misery.
With our spiritual sense so unrefined it may perhaps
be hard for us to see this, but reason teaches it, and
faith asserts it. St Thomas was wont to declare that
lie could not understand how a person living in sin
could ever smile. How can there be real peace in the
heart that has knowingly turned away from its last
end ? But by casting out sin we recover peace, for
that act of self-humiliation and self-sacrifice, by re
storing grace, opens the door of the soul to its true
Friend, who reveals Himself to us under the gracious
name of " Paraclete," or Comforter. And with con
solation comes light. By the sin of our first parents,
as we showed in our previous conferences, our minds

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WOEK OF GRACE. 51

have been grievously darkened, and every sin that we
commit deepens this intellectual darkness ; so that, like
poor, blind men, we stumble along, running the risk of
a fall or taking the wrong turn at every moment. Our
divine Master is the Light of the world, and His word
is a " lamp unto our feet " and a " light upon our
path." l " He that followeth Me," He has declared,
" walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of
life." 2 There is the public light of His authoritative
teaching, and the special light of grace bestowed upon
each soul in proportion to its need, enabling it to see
its own littleness and narrowness and poverty ; and the
light of this self-knowledge does not dishearten, but, on
the contrary, helps us on by making us more kind and
patient with ourselves and with others. Lastly, there
is the sense of forgiveness, the crotvning joy of all.
The world never forgives. Even when the poor un
fortunate who has defied its laws has paid the penalty
of his rashness, he is not forgiven. The stain remains,
a blot upon his life and the lives of his children. Our
own conscience never forgives. " I can never forgive
myself," says a man, when lie realizes some irreparable
mistake, and he speaks the literal truth. Our con
science never speaks of sin, but it speaks to reproach
and condemn ; and though we may refuse to listen, and
even do our best to stifle it by pretending to believe
that it is " but a word that cowards use, devised at first
to keep the strong in awe," 3 yet will a day come when
it repays such wrongs with interest and seems to have
" a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings

1 Ps. cxviii, 105. 2 St John viii, 12.

3 Shakespeaie, Richard III, Act V, Scene 3.

52 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

in a several tale " l to condemn us. But God forgives,
and His forgiveness is complete and perfect. It matters
not how low the fall, how far the wandering, " Whose
sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven," a truly royal
pardon, begetting in the repentant soul that peace which
the world cannot give, since it comes from Him who
alone has the right to say : " Go in peace, thy sins are
forgiven thee."

We have every right therefore to point to the
sacrament of Penance as a special privilege of our holy
faith, and one of the chief glories of the Catholic Church.
To the priest who wields this wondrous power of binding
and loosing the members of Jesus Christ it is a royal
unction, consecrating him a king amongst souls, at the
same time filling his heart with wonder and amazement
and pity and zeal, and a readiness to spend himself
and be spent in the service of his brethren. But, in
addition to this spiritual royalty, it gives him a spiritual
fatherhood, for when he sees at his feet the souls for
whom His Master died, laying bare before his eyes the
troubles of their souls, the human spirit dies within
him to give place to something more divine, so that he
may justly say with St Paul : " I live, now not I, but
Christ liveth in me." 2 No wonder that Luther, in the
hour of his fall, hesitated to uncrown himself of this
bright diadem. Confessio miro modo placet, he wrote, et
utilis imo necessaria est, nee vellem earn non esse in Ecclesia
Christi. But his apostasy had sown the storm, and he
lived to reap the whirlwind.

We have surely said enough to prove what we
advanced, and to show the special place occupied by the
1 Ibid. 2 Gal. ii, 20.

CONFESSION, THE CLEANSING WORK OF GRACE. 53

sacrament of Penance in that supernatural life of grace
to which we have been called. We may conclude with
the words of the beloved disciple : " These things we
write to you that you may rejoice, and your joy may be
full. ... If we say that we have no sin we deceive
ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we con
fess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our
sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity." l

1 1 St John i, 4, 8, 9.

54

IV

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE.

OUR reason tells us that Almighty God, the Creator of
the universe, is not only infinite in power but also
infinite in goodness ; and from this St Thomas argues,
in the beginning of his wonderful treatise on the
Incarnation, that as it is the nature of goodness to com
municate itself to others, it is only fitting that God, who
is the Supreme Goodness, should communicate Himself
to His creatures in a supreme and infinite way. 1 Quod
quidem maxime fit, says the Angelic Doctor, per hoc
quod naturam creatam sic sibi conjungit, ut una persona
at ex tribus, Verbo, anima et carne, sicut elicit
Augustinus. In this wonderful mystery God became
man, and all creation bent the knee in adoration before
One who was truly God and Man ; yet even here His
infinite goodness would not find its limitations. By the
Incarnation He had joined our nature to His own, so
that we, who are made a little lower than the angels,
are in a manner raised above them by this act of
infinite condescension on His part ; for, as St Paul says,
" He took not on Him the nature of the angels, but of
the seed of Abraham He taketh hold." Yet He desired
to do more for us. Not only did He seek a union with
our nature, but also with each individual member of our

s. 3 a , 1,1.

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE. 55

race, as though His love were ever urging Him to
perfect and complete that union which is the end of
love and for which He made us. In God s love of His
creatures, therefore, is to be found the explanation of
the mystery of the Incarnation; and that same infinite love
is likewise the only possible explanation of the mystery
of the Blessed Sacrament, of which we have now to speak.
The blessed Sacrament ! All the sacraments are holy
and blessed because of their nature and their super
natural work ; but here the love of God has won so
glorious a triumph that human language is unable to
express it, and can only repeat Sanctissimum Sacra-
mentum the most Holy Sacrament, the Blessed
Sacrament ! Hence it naturally holds a special and a
most important place in our brief survey of the spiritual
life, completing and perfecting the good work which
baptism begins, so that we should stand in need of it
and its abundant blessings even if we were so happy as
to have never lost our baptismal innocence, 1 and it is
not too much to say that all the other sacraments are
but a preparation for the Holy Eucharist. 2

The first thing that ought to strike us when we begin
to consider this uttermost pledge of God s love of us, is
the variety of names that have been given to it, although,
as we have just remarked, our language finally confesses
its unfitness for a subject so august, and " the Blessed
Sacrament," the name which expresses the least, and
therefore perhaps suggests the most, is the commonest
name of all. The explanation of these various names,
as given by St Thomas, is worthy of notice. " In three

iStThos., 3 a , 84, 6.

s., 3 a , 65, 3, and 75, 1.

56 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

different ways," says the saint, " may we look at this
Holy Sacrament. With reference to the past, it calls to
mind the passion of our Lord, which was a true and real
sacrifice, and hence this name is given to it as well, and
we speak of it as the Holy Sacrifice. With reference
to the present, it shows forth the unity of the Church,
of which it is the bond, and therefore it is called the
Communion. And lastly, with reference to the
future, it is a type of that divine fruition which will be
given to us in our eternal home, and since it is the way
thither, we call it our Viaticum, or again, the Eucharist
great grace either because the grace of God is life
everlasting, 1 or because it gives us Christ, the author of
grace." 2 But all these names assume the real presence
of our Saviour in this sacrament, and therefore for the
greater increase of our faith in this, the central dogma of
our Catholic worship, we may, with all due reverence,
examine into it more closely.

It goes without saying that we cannot prove the
real presence of Jesus Christ iu the Blessed Sacrament
by any arguments which have the force of demon
stration. But in our first conference we showed
that in addition to the senses and understanding, we
have another source of knowledge in the supernatural
power of faith, and it is by faith, and faith alone that
we can penetrate the veils that shroud this mystery. 3
Nevertheless, here, as in all God s works and manifesta
tions of Hims elf there is a striking fitness which appeals
most strongly both to faith and reason. The Old Law,
as the inspired writer reminds us, was but a " shadow
of good things to come." 4 Its various sacrifices were a
Rom. vi, 23. 2 StThos.,3 a , 73, 4. 3 StThos. 3 a ,75,l. 4 Heb.x,l.

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GKACE. 57

type of that most perfect sacrifice, which the Incarnate
Son of God would one day make, and all their power
and spiritual worth was due to that great fact. But
when the New Law came to put an end to types and
shadows, it seems but fitting that its sacrifices should be
a reality ; and that the victim offered on its altars
should be in very deed and truth the Lamb of God, who
taketh away the sins of the world. Moreover, since it
is by faith that we please God and are brought near to
Him, and faith is " of all things that appear not," the
more the object of faith is hidden and concealed, the
more perfect will be our act of faith, and the more
pleasing its sacrifice in God s sight. Hence when the
apostle saw his Master standing before him in all the
beauty of His risen life, and fell down at His feet with
that cry of adoration, " My Lord and my God," it was
the hidden Godhead which his faith confessed. He saw
the humanity, and believed in the divinity ; " More
blessed are they," said our Lord with gentle reproof,
"that have not seen, and yet have believed." 1 This
blessedness of faith is peculiarly ours, for in the most
holy Sacrament, Manhood and Godhead are equally
concealed.

Plagas, sicut Thomas, non intueor,
Deum tamen meum Te confiteor,
Fac me Tibi semper magis credere,
In Te spem habere, Te diligere. 2

But the true explanation of the real presence is to
be found in that " exceeding love wherewith Christ
hath loved us." We must remember that we are speak
ing of love that is infinite, wielding power that is infinite
1 St John xx, 29. 2 St Thos. Aquinas.

58 CONFERKNCES OX GRACE.

likewise. It was this love, as we have already said,
which made the Son of God become incarnate, and
because a friend delights in the society of his friends,
the Son of God finds His delights amongst the children
of men. His visible, bodily presence will be our
reward when the time of trial is over, but whilst it lasts,
we must walk by faith rather than by sight ; and His
impatient love, as though unable to wait, obliges Him
to give us an abiding presence none the less real because
hidden under a veil.

Se nascens dedit socium,
Convescens in edulium,
Se moriens in pretium,
Se regnans dat in premium. 1

Love therefore is the only explanation of this mar
vellous condescension on the part of God, and if the love
of God be in our hearts, our faitli in it becomes an easy
task. To refuse to believe in it is to deny God s love of
us. For love of us God became incarnate, He who is
the " Brightness of God s glory," veiled His Majesty in
the bonds of weakness, and appeared in the world as a
helpless little child. For love of us, He would go even
further, and He veiled the winning beauty of His human
nature under the whiteness of a little bread ! And we ?
"Let us love God," says St John, "because God hath
first loved us." 2 But how can we prove our love ? By
believing in His love of us, and imitating it in our feeble
fashion. For love of Him we strip ourselves, not of
any just rights, but of the stolen, gaudy trappings of
self-love, we lay down at His feet the empty claims of

1 St Thos. Aquinas. 1 John iv, 19.

COMMUNION, THE NOUKISHMENT OF GRACE. 59

foolish vanity, which make us odious even in the sight
of men ; we hide ourselves beneath the sober garments
of obedience, and placing upon our minds the chains of
faith, in lumine Tuo, videbimus Lumen in the light He
gives our blindness disappears.

Let us turn now to the sixth chapter of St John s
Gospel, in which we have recorded the promise of the
Blessed Sacrament. The Evangelist tells us first of all
of the wonderful miracle of the multiplication of bread
in the desert, and calls our attention to its immediate
consequence. " When those men had seen what a
miracle Jesus had done, they said : This is of a truth the
prophet that is to come into the world." l The Jews
expected a Messiah or Saviour, and the sign of His
presence amongst them was to be His power of working
miracles like to those of their great leader Moses. On
this occasion, therefore, when our Lord had fed them
witli miraculous bread in the desert, the remembrance
of the manna must have flashed across every mind in
that great multitude, and the conclusion seemed obvious :
" Of a truth this is the prophet that is to come into the
world." Jesus Christ accepted the comparison, for He
was the Saviour and Messiah promised from the
beginning, but the sign which He would give was some
thing far more divine than the mere multiplication of
bread ; and on the very day following this great miracle,
He declared its nature in the most emphatic language
to the crowd who followed Him with such enthusiasm.
" Moses gave you not bread from heaven," He said,
" but My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.
For the bread of God is that which cometh down from
1 St John vi, 14.

60 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

heaven, and giveth life to the world." l But as the Jews
understood Him to refer to some earthly sort of bread,
like the manna in so far as it was food for the body
only, our Lord at once explained His words, and at some
length, and with the greatest clearness put before them
the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. " Amen, amen,
I say unto you, he that believeth in Me hath everlast
ing life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat
the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is
the bread which corneth down from heaven, that if any
man eat of it, he may not die. I am the living bread
which came down from heaven ; if any man eat of this
bread he shall live for ever, yea, and the bread which
I will give is My Flesh for the life of the world. The
Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How
can this man give us His Flesh to eat ? Jesus therefore
said unto them : Amen, amen, I say unto you, except
you eat the Flesh of the Son of man and drink His
Blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth
My Flesh and drinketh My Blood hath everlasting life,
and I will raise him up at the last day. For My Flesh
is meat indeed, and My Blood is drink indeed. He that
eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood abideth in Me,
and I in him. As the living Father hath sent Me, and
I live by the Father, so he that eateth Me, the same,
shall live by Me. This is the bread which came down
from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna and are
dead, he that eateth this bread shall live for ever." 2
The effect of these words of our Blessed Lord upon His
audience was immediate and startling. " This is a hard
saying," they exclaimed, an impossible doctrine, " who can
1 Ibid, v, 32, 33. - St John vi, 47-59.

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE. 61

hear it, who can believe it ? And many of His disciples
went back, and walked no more with Him." l Now if
our Lord had not meant the real presence as we under
stand it, how strange and unreasonable must His con
duct and His language appear ! For He had reminded
them of the manna, formed by angels, miraculous in
every way, and He promised to give them something
greater. How could mere bread and wine compare with
such a gift ? It might indeed, like the manna be the
figure of something else, but it would be incomparably the
weaker figure of the two. His hearers took Him at His
word, and understood Him literally, and, instead of
correcting them and putting an end to their difficulties,
He confirmed what He had said, and allowed them to
depart. Must we say that He deceived them, or that
He promised what He could not perform, He who was
the Almighty God of truth ? Our faith in Jesus Christ
bids us see in these words of His, the promise of the
Blessed Sacrament, and that same faith shows us the
literal fulfilment of the promise, when on the last night
of His life He took the bread and wine into His hands,
and changed them into His own very Body and Blood
by His word of almighty power. We naturally turn
once more to the divinely-inspired words of holy Writ.
" Now whilst they were at supper, Jesus took bread and
blessed and broke it, and gave it to His disciples, arid said :
Take ye and eat, this is My Body. And taking the chalice,
He gave thanks, and gave to them, saying : Drink ye all
of this, for this is My Blood of the new testament, which
shall be shed for many, unto the remission of sins." 2
The reformer Melancthon compares these words to the
1 St John vi, 66. a St Matt, xxvi, 26-27.

62

CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

dazzling flash of the lightning. "What comment," he
asks, " can the terrified mind of man venture to make on
them ? but what a strange perversion of reason is im
plied in those who are not ashamed to argue that when
the incarnate God is heard to assert so solemnly, " This
is My Body, this My Blood," He really meant us to
believe that it was nothing of the kind. For us, as we
have said, the real presence is a matter of faith. " If
any one," says the Council of Trent, "shall dare to
deny that the Body and Blood together with the soul and
the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ are truly, really
and substantially present in the most holy Sacrament of
the Eucharist, but shall assert that they are only there
virtually or as in a type or figure, let him be anathema." 1
And then again : " Since Christ our Saviour declared that
that which He offered under the appearance of bread, was
truly His Body, the Church of God has always held,
and this holy synod once again affirms, that by the con
secration of the bread and the wine, the whole substance
of bread is changed into the substance of the Body of
Christ our Lord, and the whole substance of wine into
the substance of His Blood, a change which the Church
justly calls transubstantiation." 2

With this same loyal profession of faith in our
hearts and on our lips we may now reverently investigate
this wonderful " mystery of faith." For it is something
more than a mere presence, marvellous as that may be.
We said that the only possible explanation of such
a miracle was to be found in the boundless love which
God has for His creatures, and that same love is the

1 Cone. Trid., De Euch. Sac., canon 1.

2 Cone. Trid., Sess. xiii, cap. iv.

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE. 63

key to a yet greater mystery. For the very words of Jesus
Christ, both in the promise and in its fulfilment, as well
as the accidents or appearances of bread and wine which
form the inpenetrable veil that hides the Holy of holies,
all tend to make us understand that this sacrament
is meant to be the food and nourishment of our souls,
and that the mystery of the real presence is but, as it
were, the stepping-stone to the mystery of communion.
Hence from the very early ages we find the Fathers
heaping words upon words in order to impress this
wonderful truth upon the minds of the faithful. They
speak of the " table of the Lord," " the holy table," " the
divine banquet," " the bread of the Lord." " the heavenly
bread," " the cup of salvation," " the cup of life," " the
holy bond of union," " the holy communion," and so on.
But the Angelic Doctor seems to have surpassed them
all, and sums up the whole teaching of the Church in
this matter in those magnificent words which we may
call the anthem of the Blessed Sacrament : " sacred
banquet, in which Christ is received, the memory of
His passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory is given to us." a Let us try
to fathom some of the depths here revealed to us by
the greatest of the Church s Doctors.

Sacred Banquet ! The Sacraments of the Church
have been instituted for no other end than to enable us
to make progress in our spiritual and supernatural life.
Now there is a great resemblance between this same
spiritual life and the life of the body ; for, after all,

1 O Sacrum convivium in quo Christus sumitur, recolitur
memoria passionis ejus, mens impletur gratia, et futurae glorise nobis
pignus datur (St Thos. Aq., Office of Blessed Sacrament).

64 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

material things are meant to bring home to our senses
the more hidden wonders of the spiritual world. Hence,
just as the life of the body begins its existence by the
act of generation, and then by degrees acquires strength
and energy, and has to be sustained by nourishment, so
also in the spiritual life. Baptism is the new birth, our
spiritual regeneration, and the Sacrament of Confirma
tion is meant to strengthen the soul in its new life, and
fit it for its work. But something else is necessary, and
so in the Holy Eucharist the soul finds that spiritual
nourishment for which it craves. 1 All this seems
evident to common sense. Life, wherever it be found,
of whatever grade or perfection it may be, is always
dependent upon nourishment ; and if we admit the
existence of the spiritual and divine life, to which our
souls are raised by the gift of supernatural grace in
baptism, we seem compelled to admit the necessity of
spiritual food. The one is not more wonderful than the
other. What strange things science tells us of the
marvellously complicated process by which the body is
nourished and kept alive ! Chemistry steps in, and
declares that, as a matter of fact, our bodies and all
material things are built up by the combination of a few
primary elements, but that only increases the wonder.
A little grain of wheat, itself made up of certain
elements, is hidden in the earth, and straightway it
begins to live, and work, and seek out other elements by
which it lives its vegetable life and at the same time
gathers to itself all that is necessary for ours. It becomes
our food and once more surrenders all those elements it
so unerringly sought out ; some being taken by the

St Thomas, 3 a , 73, 1.

COMMUNION, THE NOUBISHMKNT Off GKACE. 65

blood, others by the nerves, others again by the bones,
just as our nature requires. Now if God has done all
this for a life so weak and so imperfect as the life of the
body, what will He not do for a life which is divine ? l
Its end and object is Himself, and so He makes Himself
its food. But, because as long as this world lasts, our
human nature bears the penalties of sin, and has to
tread a path of life surrounded by the thorns and briars
of suffering, He wisely gives us this same supernatural
food in a way most fitting to our state. Not in all the
pomp and majesty which surround Him on His throne
at the right hand of the Father, nor yet in the dazzling
brightness with which He clothed His human nature at the
moment of theKesurrection ; but, on the contrary, in meek
ness and lowliness, and with a helplessness which speaks
even yet more powerfully to our hearts. It is as though
He had searched all the riches of creation, and finding
nothing worthy of His infinite love and our inexhaust
ible needs, nothing good enough for souls that He had
created, redeemed and sanctified, and at the same time
simple enough for hearts so weak and wavering, He
appealed to His own most sacred human Heart, and
its answer was the Blessed Sacrament. Most truly
can we call it sacramentum caritatis, the sacrament of
love. 2 Love, as we have said, desires union, and what
union could be comparable to this ? There is a union
indeed, like that which binds together in the one Person
of Jesus Christ the divine and human natures ; but
such a union would fail here because of its excess,
since by it man s personality would cease to be. There

1 cf. "Partakers of the Divine Nature" (1 Pet. i, 4).
a St Thos. 3 a , 73, 3 ad 3 um .

5

66 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

is a moral union, like that which links together hearts
and minds in earthly friendship, and that was not
enough for love which is divine. Hence His wisdom
devised and His power effected a union, which was at
once most human and divine, most perfect and yet most
natural ; for He made His living self our nourishment,
and since such food is of its very nature incomparably
above us, instead of being lowered to our level and trans
formed by us, it conquers us and makes us like unto itself.
It was this truth which transported the soul of St Augus
tine. "I am the food of grown men," said the Voice within
his soul, " grow, and thou shalt feed upon Me, nor shalt
thou change Me, like the food of thy flesh, into thee, but
thou shalt be changed into Me." " Truth, who art
eternity," was the answering cry of his heart ; " Love,
who art Truth ! Eternity, who art Love." l

Most truly, therefore, have we here a sacred ban
quet, at which we assist on bended knees, seeing that
the food is nothing less than the Body and Blood
of Christ. " sacred banquet, in which Christ is
received ! " Let us now go a step further.

The words of consecration pronounced by the right
fully-ordained successors of the apostles are the self
same words as those spoken by the Saviour of the
world at the moment of the institution of this most
Holy Sacrament. But a wonderful thing has happened !
As though astounded and overwhelmed by the greatness
of the mystery, the Church, by the mouth of her priests, 2

1 Conf. St Aug., bk VII, x.

2 The words " mysterium fidci, the mystery of faith, " found no
where else but in the Roman Missal, was, we are told, added as
a sacred tradition preserved by St Peter." Father Gallwey, S.J.
The Watches of the Passion, vol. I, p. 435.

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE. 67

breaks in upon these sacred words : " Take ye and
eat, for this is My Body. Drink ye all of this, for
this is the chalice of My Blood, of the New and Eternal
Testament mystery of faith which shall be shed for
you and for many unto the remission of sins." It is as
though the overpowering realization of the effect of
those divine words had on the instant provoked this
strange outburst of adoring fear. For think of all that is
implied by these words ! " One moment," says a great
spiritual writer, " and there is bread in the priest s hands,
and wine in the chalice on the corporal. One moment,
and there is the substance of bread, with its accidents
inherent in it, and it would be the grossest of idolatries
to offer any manner of worship to that senseless
substance. Another moment, and what was bread is
Grod ! A word was whispered by a creature, and lo ! he
has fallen down to worship ; for in his hands is his
Creator, produced there by his own whispered word.
One moment, and at the bidding of a trembling,
frightened man, omnipotence has run through a course
of resplendent miracles, each more marvellous than
a world s creation out of nothing." l Yet all this is
summed up in those brief words of St Thomas :
" sacred banquet, in which Christ is received ! " The
instant the words of consecration are pronounced the
change takes place. 2 Instead of the bread and the
wine, there is present on the altar the Body and Blood
of Jesus, living, glorious and triumphant. Therefore
His majestic soul is there as well, the masterpiece of
divine power and love, the treasury of supernatural

1 Faber, The Blessed Sacrament, page 161.
3 St Thos. 3 a , 75, 7.

68 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

gifts. Nor is this all. This human nature is in
separably united to the Person of the Eternal Word,
for the one cannot be without the other ; and lastly,
because it is a principle of faith that in all God s
beautiful works outside Himself, the Blessed Trinity of
Persons work together, and where there is One Person
there also are the other Two, it follows that under the
veil of this most Holy Sacrament, within our grasp, as
it were, yet hidden from our eyes, lives and works that
mystery of all mysteries, the most blessed and un
divided Trinity. " Under the veil," we said. " The
Eucharistic presence," as Bishop Hedley remarks, " is
meant to have a double power over our beings. It has
the effect of physical sense and the effect of faith." 1
Since our Blessed Lord wished to appeal to our faith by
remaining invisible, it was necessary that there should
be a veil to hide Him ; and on the other hand, since
He desired to be really, truly, and substantially present,
this same veil would serve to indicate the place of His
hiding. Something to point Him out to us, and at the
same time to hide Him from us, this was what the real
presence demanded ; and since He also wished to make
Himself the food of our souls, He chose the veils of
bread and wine. In these two material things, as in
everything else of a like nature, we must clearly
distinguish between the substance itself, which is hidden
from the senses, and its outward visible appearances.
As the Council of Trent declares in the words above
quoted, it is the substance which is changed by the
words of consecration ; the appearances or accidents
are kept to form the veil which hides even whilst it
1 Bishop Medley s lietreat, p. 275.

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE. 69

reveals the real presence of Jesus Christ. St Thomas
teaches that these appearances remain in their entirety, 1
supported by the power of Him who has chosen so to use
them, and he replies to the foolish objection of those who
would argue from this that God deceives us : " The
senses," says the Angelic Doctor, " are not deceived.
Their legitimate work is to judge of the accidents or
outward appearances which are really and truly present
before them. It is for the intellect alone to judge of
the substance, and in this case the understanding is
preserved from making a false judgment by the light
of faith." 2 Time will not allow us to linger over the
many other wonderful and most interesting truths
which are the consequences of the real presence, and
which St Thomas explains to us with such clearness in his
great " Summa," but we may at least quote 1 the lines of
the " Lauda Sion," in which this same great Doctor and
poet-saint sums them up in his own incomparable way :

Sub diversis speciebus, signis tantum et non rebus,

Latent res eximise.
Caro cibus, sanguis potus, manet tamen Christus totus,

Sub utraque specie.
A sumente non concisus, non confractus, non divisus,

Integer accipitur.
Sumit unus, sumunt mille, quantum isti, tantum ille,

Nee sumptus consumitur.

Fracto demum Sacramento, ne vacilles, sed memento,
Tantum esse sub fragmento, quantum toto tegitur.
Nulla rei fit scissura, sigui tantum fit fractura,
Qua nee status, nee statura, signati minuitur. 3

To attempt to express in our own language the theo
logical terseness of these wonderful lines of St Thomas
would be to set ourselves an impossible task. It has

1 St Thos. 3 a , 75, 5. 2 St Thos. 3 a , 75, 5 ad 2.

3 Cf. also St Thos. 3 a , 76 and 77,

70 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

been well said of all his hymns that they are well-nigh
"supernatural, uniting the strictness of dogma with
a sweetness and a melody more like echoes of heaven
than mere poetry of earth." l

We may now return to the anthem of the Blessed
Sacrament, and briefly touch upon the remaining
thoughts which it suggests, and without which our idea
of this adorable mystery would be very incomplete.
When our Lord instituted this most sacred pledge of
His love for us, and for the first time uttered the
solemn words of consecration, He added to them a com
mand, full of divine power and authority, and yet at the
same time of the most affectionate tenderness : " Do
this," He said, " in remembrance of Me." Having
spoken as our God and our Saviour, He now pleads as
a most loving friend, and, with the very words with
which He authorizes His apostles to work this miracle
of love, He begs us to look upon it as a memorial of
Himself and all that He has done for us. 2 We must
once more remind ourselves that infinite love is the key
to the mystery of which we are speaking. There are
some who pretend to see in it nothing but a memorial,
and they base their opinion on these very words of our
Lord. What a poor idea of the love of Jesus Christ !
The Blessed Sacrament is indeed a memorial, but it is
one in every way worthy of the Son of God. Earthly
friendship may be, and surely is the brightest sunshine
of our darkened lives; yet even when it shines its
brightest, there looms on its horizon the cloud that may

1 F. Faber, The Blessed Sacrament, p. 18.

2 St Thos. 3% 7| 5 and 82, I ; also Cone. Trid., De Saor.
Missoe, Can. 2, and Sess xiii, cap. ii.

COMMUNION, THE NOURISHMENT OF GRACE. 71

overcast it, forgetfulness and death. Hence we try to
save ourselves, and fight against the threatened dark
ness by every means within our power, and even when
we feel that separation is at hand, most certain and
inevitable, we make a last attempt to overcome its con
sequences by every sort of touching artifice. Not
content with promises and pledges, the one we love, and
whom we now must lose, will link himself to some
memorial, and leave that to us, to speak for him when
he is gone. And speak it will :

For while the wings of fancy still are free,
And I can view this mimic show of thee,
Time has but half succeeded in his theft
Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left. 1

Yet, after all, how weak the power of such memorials,
how terribly inadequate their success, when measured
by our longings and our hopes ! So Jesus Christ, loving
us all so dearly, and foreseeing the hour of separation,
loved us to the very end infinem dilexit and gave us
a memorial of Himself and His great love : " Do this in
remembrance of Me." And what was His memorial ?
Not the crib in which He rested as a little child, on His
first coming into our cold world, not the cross, all
stained though it was with the Blood so lavishly
poured forth in the hours of His death-agony, but His
own real Self. "For," says St Thomas, "a memorial
is something to take the place of one s own personality,
and hence, the more we can attach ourselves to it, and the
more of ourselves we can put into it, the more real and
perfect it will be. We try to do what we can, because
our love is the shadow of God s infinite love, and we

1 Cowper, To My Mother s Picture,

CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

fail pitiably, because we are only human. Jesus ^Christ
wished for a memorial because His Heart was human,
and succeeded because He was God. " Take ye and
eat. This is My Body. Drink ye all of this. This is
My Blood. Do this in remembrance of Me."

A few more words and we have done. " sacred
banquet in which Christ is received, the memory of
His passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory is given to us ! " All the
sacraments are the efficient instrumental causes of
grace, 1 since they exist for no other end, but the Holy
Eucharist has a power beyond them all, and very
naturally so, since it contains the Author of all grace,
and by His sacramental presence He pours upon the
soul that torrent of grace let loose upon the world by
the mystery of the Incarnation. " He that eateth Me,
the same shall live by Me." Moreover, since this
sacrament is a real memorial of His passion, its power
upon the souls of men is in all respects the same as
that which so effectually blotted out the handwriting
that was against us, and brought redemption to our
fallen world. 2 It is given to us as food and drink for
no other purpose than to make us understand that it
must be to our souls what food and drink are to the
body, for it is meant to give us that strength and sup
port, that new life and those new powers of which we
stand in need, in other words, it is an unfailing source
of grace. " The mind is filled with grace." And because
the grace of God is life everlasting, in this same most
Holy Sacrament, a pledge of future glory is given to us.

1 Cf. Conferences on grace.

2 St Thos. 3% 74, 1 ; and 76, 2 ad 1.

COMMUNION, THK NOURISHMENT OF GEACE. 73

All this grace is the promise of the glory that is to
come, the fruitful seed of an eternal harvest, even as
our Lord Himself declared : "He that eateth this bread
shall live for ever." The attainment of everlasting life
is the chief and principal effect of this sacrament,
according to the teaching of St Thomas. 1 For whether
we look at the Holy Eucharist in itself as the Body
and Blood of Christ, or whether we consider it more as
a means placed at our disposal by our all-merciful God,
the one end for which it ever works is the completion
and perfection of man s supernatural life, the glory of
the kingdom of heaven. It is the Body and Blood of
Him, who by His death opened to us the gates of
heaven, and so became the " Mediator of the New
Testament," " that they that are called may receive the
promise of an eternal inheritance." 2 With regard
to our use of it, it is, as we have said, a heavenly food, and
at the same time a foretaste of that union with God to
which we must aspire. It is always under the " veil," and,
therefore, its delights and pleasures can never fully be
appreciated here. But it is the " pledge of future glory,"
enabling us to wait until the appointed time. It will be
to us what the heaven-sent food was to the prophet, in
the strength of which he traversed the weary desert
land and reached the mount of God. 3 All this is most
perfectly summed up by St Thomas, in words that are
often on our lips, though rarely truly fathomed by our
minds and hearts ; they may serve as a fitting conclusion.

O Salutaris Hostia, quse cccli pandis ostium,
Bella premunt hostilia, da robur, fer auxilium.
Uni trinoque Domino, sit sempiterna gloria,
Qui vitam sine termino, nobis donet in Patria.

1 St Thos. 3*, 79, 2. 2 Heb. ix, 15, 3 3 Kings xix, 8.

74

THE FOUNTAIN OF GRACE.

THE concluding thought of the last conference was one
which cannot be too clearly impressed upon our minds.
It was summed up in the beautiful words of St Thomas,
and it reminded us once again that Jesus Christ, true
God and true Man, is the author and source of all
our grace ; and since, in His loving goodness, He has
vouchsafed to remain on our altars under the veils of
the Blessed Sacrament, it is to this same most Holy
Sacrament that He would have us look for all the
grace and help of which we stand so much in need.
Every poor tabernacle, therefore, is the prison-house of
this divine Victim, whose deatli on the cross blotted
out the handwriting that was against us, and gave us
back our heavenly inheritance ; and from that same
lowly hiding-place He sustains us in the wearisome
struggle of life, and encourages us to win a place in His
everlasting home. Salutaris Hostia !

O Victim of the world s salvation, that wide the gates of heaven

hast thrown,
The foe brings war and desolation, give timely aid and guard

Thine own.

To Thee, in triune Godhead dwelling, be glory everlasting given,
Be ours the joys, the bliss unfailing, that crown our endless life

in heaven. l

The Blessed Sacrament is therefore the means by
which our Blessed Lord carries on the work He came on
earth to accomplish, the sanctification and salvation of
1 Salutaris Hostia, translated by Fr Aylward, O.P,

THE FOUNTAIN OF GKACE. 75

our souls ; and that we might the more easily realize
His most gracious design, He gave us this great pledge
of His love on the last day of His mortal life. For
although He was about to withdraw His visible presence
from the world, it seemed as though He could not leave
us altogether; and so He veiled His Godhead and
Humanity beneath the sacramental species, that we
might know and feel the consolation of His presence.
Moreover, as St Thomas so very justly says, 1 when friends
are on the eve of being parted, the near prospect of
separation seems to give a new and mightier power
to their mutual love, and the last words of farewell are
treasured up with the most affectionate reverence ; and
our Lord appealed to this most natural human feeling
when He gave to His apostles this token of His love in
their last hour of sorrowful farewell. But there was
another reason, the most important of all. He was
about to lay down His life in atonement for the sins of
all the ages, past, present and to come ; and since it is
only " through faith in His Blood " 2 that salvation is
offered to all, it was fitting that in all ages, men should
offer to their Creator some representation of this life-
giving atonement. Before His coming into this world,
there were the various sacrifices of the Old Law, which
were in every way, as we shall see, most perfect types of
His great sacrifice ; and so on the eve of their fulfilment,
He looked forward to the ages yet to come, and provided
them with a sacrifice which should be at once the
memorial and renewal of His own. In other words, the
real presence of Jesus Christ on our altars is something
more than a sacrament, or an outward sign of the
1 St Thos. 3 a , 73, 5. a Rom. iii, 2$.

76 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

mysterious working of divine grace ; it is a sacrifice as
well, and it is this truth that St Paul asserts so briefly
and yet so forcibly when he declares that we also "have
an altar." 1 " We have an altar," that is to say, our
churches are not merely places of prayer and devotion,
they are not merely the successors of the synagogues, in
which we may hear the reading of the sacred Scriptures ;
but they are to us what the Temple of Jerusalem was to
the Jews ; they are places of sacrifice, and in them there
is an altar, before which stands a consecrated priest,
and on which, day by day, the blood of a victim is offered
up to God. In the Temple of Jerusalem, the victim offered
up was a poor trembling animal ; on our altars the sacrifice
appears to be of bread and wine, but, says St Paul,
" The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the
communion of the Blood of Christ ? and the bread which
we break, is it not the partaking of the Body of the
Lord ?" 2 This is the great truth we have now to consider.
The doctors of the Church, and spiritual writers at
various times, have suggested different derivations for the
word " religion," each conveying a more or less correct
idea of its meaning, but St Thomas reminds us 3 that,
whichever we may prefer, the virtue of religion
necessarily implies the subordination of man to God.
We manifest this subordination by the various acts of
worship and honour, which we offer to God as the first
beginning and last end of all things. Some of these acts
are altogether interior, such as the raising up of the
mind and heart to God in prayer ; whilst others demand
an exterior manifestation. It is not simply for God s
sake that His creatures shew Him honour and due
1 Heb. xiii, 10, - 1 Cor. x, 16, 3 St Thos. 2 a 2 !ve , 81, 1.

THE FOUNTAIN OF GRACE. 77

reverence. Every such act implies a real blessing, the
enjoyment of which is altogether our own. God is
infinitely perfect in Himself, and therefore self-sufficing
in every way, and creatures cannot add to His essential
happiness. But by giving to the Creator that honour,
praise and worship which is His due, the creature places
itself and its whole being in subjection to Him, and in
this submission ever finds its own true happiness and
perfection.

Now we have it on the authority of the apostle, 1
that it is by the visible, sensible things of this material
creation, that the unseen things of God are brought
home to the soul of man, for the work of his under
standing depends on them to a very great extent, 2 and
hence, man necessarily employs various outward and
visible signs to stir up in his soul those interior acts
which form the essence of religion, the first and most
important of which we have already touched upon, when .
we treated of prayer. It is not that God has any need
of them, for He can read the heart ; the necessity is alto
gether on the side of man, and is the outcome of that
nature, which leads him to manifest his thoughts by out
ward signs ; since, as we have pointed out, it is by means
of outward signs and objects that he receives his know
ledge. Hence St Thomas concludes 3 that the duty of
offering sacrifice to God is laid upon us by the law of
nature, or the dictates of our own reason, since it is
that same power of understanding which prompts us to
make use of exterior things, and offer them to God as a
token of submission and obedience, and an acknow-

1 Rom. i, 20. - St Thos. 2* 2, 81, 7.

3 St Thos. 2 2 au , bo, 1.

78 CONFERENCES ON GRACK.

ledgment of His universal dominion. For when man
realizes the power of the Almighty Creator, and is filled
with the sense of his own littleness and absolute depen
dence, the desire to express these feelings of reverence
is a natural consequence, and impels him to have recourse
to sacrifice. It is the highest act of worship of which the
soul of a man is capable, and one which can be given to
God alone; for it implies the total oblation of oneself,
body and soul, to that infinite Being whom we thereby
acknowledge to be our Creator and Master ; it confesses
Him to be the only Lord of life and death, the supreme
Euler of all things.

The very earliest records of our race show us man
engaged in this most solemn act of worship, for we read
in holy Scripture how Cain offered to God the fruits
of the earth, and Abel the firstlings of the flock. 1
The first act of those who were saved from the
Deluge was to offer sacrifices 2 to the Lord, and the
history of the patriarchs is full of similar pictures.
Then came the law. It was promulgated amidst all
the pomp and majesty of Sinai, in order to impress its
importance upon a stiff-necked people, and, clear and
distinct as is every part of it, the divine legislation
with regard to sacrifice seems to stand out above all the
rest in minuteness of detail. There were to be sacrifices
for sin, sacrifices of thanksgiving, sacrifices of suppli
cation, and they were not merely types and shadows
and empty figures and ceremonies. They were ordained
by the infinite wisdom of God to fulfil a double
purpose. 3 Sacrifice is, as we have said, a most solemn

1 Genesis iv, 3, 4. 2 Genesis viii, 20.

3 St Thos. 1 2>, 102, 2 and 3.

THE FOUNTAIN OF GEACE. 79

act of worship, and these multitudinous sacrifices of the
Old Law were intended, first of all, to keep alive in the
hearts of the chosen people the worship of the one true
God. They were a public and official recognition of
the great truth, that the whole earth and the fulness
thereof belonged to God, and existed but for His glory,
since He it was who had given life and being to all
things. " Thine are the riches," said David, 1 when he
had gathered together all that was necessary for the
building of the temple Thine are the riches, and Thine
is the glory, Thou hast dominion over all .... all
things are Thine, and we have but given Thee what we
received of Thy hand." But what follows from this ? In
all these acts of sacrifice, men were but offering God s gifts
back to Him, and they were His lesser gifts, the lesser
tokens of His goodness, never therefore really worthy of
His acceptance. A more perfect gift was to come.
" God so loved the world as to give His only-begotten
Son ; that whoso believeth in Him may not perish, but
may have everlasting life." 2 Hence the best and most
perfect of all sacrifices was that which was accomplished
when the only-begotten Son of God offered Himself to
His Father " as an odour of sweetness," 3 and therefore
the second purpose of the stately ceremonial of the Old
Law was to shadow forth and prefigure this supreme
and most complete sacrifice, in which it found its own
fulfilment. And how clear was the shadowing forth !
How complete the fulfilment ! We read of the solemn
feasts of expiation, when a poor innocent animal was
brought before the high-priest, that he might lay his
hands upon its head, and humbly confess all the

1 1 Paral. xxix, 12-14. - St John Hi, 16. 3 Ephes. v, 2.

80 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

iniquities of the people, and then how it was driven
forth into the wilderness to die, 1 the innocent victim of
others sins, and we are vividly reminded of One who
took upon Himself the sins of the whole world, and
atoned for them by His death, suffering "without the
"ate." 2 Or again there was the sacrifice of the paschal
lamb, so marvellously eloquent and significant. It was
to be a lamb without spot or blemish, offered up by the
whole people ; 3 its innocent blood was to be sprinkled
on the doors to ward off the vengeance of the destroying
angel, and its flesh was to be eaten with unleavened
bread. "Who could consider this most touching rite in
the after light- of the Gospel, and not see in it with St
Thomas 4 the most perfect type of that divine Saviour,
the " Lamb of God," who died for us on the Cross and
abides with us in the most Holy Sacrament ?

The sacrifice of Jesus Christ is therefore at once the
explanation and consummation of all other sacrifices.
He came into this world to save and redeem a fallen
race, and He accomplished this by the sacrifice of Him
self on the cross of Calvary. It was a mighty work, and
one which He alone could do, for being both God and
man, He was able to make an infinite atonement for an
infinite offence, and merit for man an infinite reward.
This is the necessary consequence of the Incarnation.
Because He was God, every act that He performed was
the act of a divine Person, and was therefore infinitely
meritorious ; and because He was man He was able to
die for us. The motive of the Incarnation, therefore,
was our redemption, 5 and at that most solemn moment

i Lev. xvi, 21. a Heb. xiii, 12. 3 Exod. xii.

4 St Thos. 3 a , 73, 6. 5 St Thoa. 3, 1, 3.

THE FOUNTAIN OF Gil ACE. 81

when " the word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us,"
He entered upon His office as the " one great Mediator," 1
at once the great High Priest of the world and its
Victim. "How great is Thy love for us, tender
Father," says St Augustine, 2 " seeing that Thou hast
not spared Thine only Son, but hast delivered Him up
for us poor sinners .... for us to Thee, both Victor
and Victim, and therefore Victor because the Victim ;
for us to Thee, Priest and Sacrifice, and therefore Priest
because the Sacrifice ; making us of servants sons, by
being born of Thee and serving us." We do not think
enough about this glorious office of our Saviour, and
our faith needs something of the proud loyalty of
St Paul when he speaks of " our . great High Priest
Jesus, the Son of God." 3 For what is a priest but
a mediator between God and man, inasmuch as by his
office he is obliged to be their teacher, their mouth
piece, and, in a sense, their victim. " For the lips of
the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the
law at his rnouth," 4 and he, in return, must speak to
God for them, and " offer gifts and sacrifices for sins " ; 5
and all this is pre-eminently the work of Jesus Christ. 6
But He was more than our priest. He was, as St
Augustine so beautifully puts it in the passage we have
just quoted, Sacerdos et Sacrificium, et ideo Sacerdos quia
Sacrificium. Try to realize what our Blessed Lord has
done for us by His Incarnation. He was " delivered up
for our sins," 7 and so obtained their forgiveness ; He
obtains for us the grace we need, being " made for all

1 1 Tim. ii, 5. - St Aug., Conf., bk X. a Heb. iv, 14.

4 Mai. ii, 7. 5 Heb. v, 1. 6 St Tlios. 3- 1 , 22, 1.

7 Rom. iv, 25.

6

82 CONFERENCES ON GKACE.

that obey Him, the cause of eternal salvation," 1 and
lastly, it is only through His Blood that we can win
eternal glory. But it is precisely because of our great
need of these three favours that we have recourse to
sacrifice, and that we see God in the Old Law ordain
ing sin-offerings and peace-offerings and holocausts,
and therefore, concludes the Angelic Doctor, 2 our Lord
and Saviour was not only our great High Priest, but
likewise our Victim and Sacrifice in every sense of the
word. And He is our Priest and Victim for ever. It
is true that He can no longer suffer and die as He
suffered and died on Calvary, for " death shall no more
have dominion over Him." 8 But besides the act of
sacrifice in itself, we have to consider in the work of
a priest the consummation of the sacrifice, which con
sists in the attainment of its fruits by those for whom
it is offered, and in this sense our Lord s priesthood
is eternal. 4 " Because He continueth for ever," says St
Paul, " He hath an everlasting priesthood, whereby He
is also able to save for ever them that come to God by
Him, always living to make intercession for us." 5 What
a wonderful thought is this, and what happiness it
ought to bring to us who have the grace of faith ! The
death of Jesus Christ on Calvary was the central point
of all creation. Around it revolved the eternal designs
of God, as well as the faith and hope and love of all the
hearts of men ; and the ages that had gone before, as
well as those that still lay hidden in the unknown
future, were blessed and sanctified and consecrated in
that most solemn moment when God heard the loud cry

1 Heb. v r 9. - St Tlios. :*, 22, 2. 3 Rom. vi, 9.
4 St Thos. 3 a , 22, 5. 5 Heb. vii, 24, 25.

THE FOUNTAIN OF GRACE. 83

of His incarnate Son, and saw Him, Priest and Victim,
die upon the altar of the cross, crimsoned with His
Blood. For "He was wounded for our iniquities and
bruised for our sins. ... By His bruises we are healed
.... and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us
all." By the sacrifice of this divine Victim, the most
ample atonement was made to God, and abundant grace
was purchased for the cleansing of all sinful souls ; 2 and,
therefore, all the sacrifices that had been the types of
this were now fulfilled, and all necessity for future
sacrifice was entirely abolished. But see the goodness
of our loving God ! When justice and mercy were
satisfied, love yet demanded more, and " because of the
exceeding love wherewith He loved us," He determined
that His great sacrifice should endure until the end of
time, not as a mere commemoration or as an empty
ceremony, but in all its august and dread reality.
Listen to the authoritative words of the Council of
Trent : " Because of the imperfection of the Levitical
priesthood .... it was fitting, in accordance with the
designs of the Father of mercies, that another Priest
should arise who should be able to sanctify and make
perfect all the elect, our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
And although He, our Lord and our God, would win
our eternal redemption by the oblation of Himself to
His Father in death, on the altar of the cross, yet by
death, His priesthood was by no means to come to an
end. Hence, at the Last Supper, on the night of His
betrayal, He arranged to leave to His beloved spouse
the Church, a visible sacrifice, such as our human
nature requires, which should represent the sacrifice of
1 Isa. liii, 5-6. - St Tlios. 3 a , 22, 3.

84 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

suffering accomplished once for all on the cross, and be,
at the same time, a perpetual memorial of Himself, and
a means of applying His saving graces to our daily
offences. Declaring Himself, therefore, a priest for ever
according to the order of Melchisedech, He offered up
His own Body and Blood to God the Father, under the
appearances of bread arid wine, and then gave It under
the same symbols, as food to His apostles, whom He then
and there constituted priests of the New Testament.
Moreover, by the words, Hoc facite in meam commemo-
rationem, He commanded them and their successors in
the priesthood to offer It up in like manner, as the Cath
olic Church has always believed and taught. This is that
clean oblation which God Himself, by the mouth of the
prophet Malachy, foretold should be offered up in every
place, and which can in nowise be polluted by any wicked
ness on the part of those who offer it. This, in fine, is
the sacrifice which was prefigured by all preceding sacri
fices, since it contains all the good things signified by
them, and is at once their completion and perfection." 1
In these words we have summed up, clearly, dis
tinctly, and authoritatively, the teaching of the Catholic
Church with regard to that special sacrifice of the New
Testament which we call the Mass. We believe it
to be the self-same sacrifice as that of Calvary, per
petuated and continued, the self-same Victim, the
self-same priest, only the altar and manner of the
sacrifice being changed. There is the self-same Victim ;
for, as the holy Council says, it is the Body and Blood
of the Incarnate God, under the appearances of bread
and wine, so that, although the manner of the sacrifice
1 Cone. Trid. Sess. xxii, cap. 1.

THE FOUNTAIN OF GRACE. 85

is changed and there is no pain, no suffering, no agony
of death, no violent shedding of blood, there are never
theless all the constituents of a true sacrifice. A sacri
fice consists in the oblation of any sensible thing, which
undergoes some change by being given to God and
consecrated to Him, by a duly appointed minister, and
the essence of the Eucharistic sacrifice lies in that
mysterious change by which Jesus Christ becomes
present under the sacramental veils, and offers Himself
to God, His heavenly Father. It is the equivalent of
His death on the cross, for He becomes present on the
altar as a helpless Victim, in a state which is a sort of
death, and this change is sufficient for a true sacrifice.
When His Mother Mary and the weeping apostles
adored His lifeless Body swathed in the wrappings of
the grave, He was not more helpless or more passive
than when He lies on the corporal, hidden under the
white veils of the sacred host. Moreover, just as His
precious Blood was drained from His most holy Body
on the altar of the cross, so on our altars the Body and
Blood are mystically separated by that twofold conse
cration which is necessary to complete the sacrifice.
But if the victim is the same, so also is the priest.
When our Lord Himself offered this mystical sacrifice
for the first time, the very words which He used called
attention to the act of sacrifice : " This is My Body
which is given for you ; this is the Chalice, the New
Testament in My Blood which is shed for you;" and
then by a further exercise of His almighty power He
bestowed upon His apostles a share in the character and
attributes of His priesthood, and commanded them to
offer the same sacrifice in remembrance of Him. They

86 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

shared His power, therefore, in the sense of being its
administrators and His instruments ; and so at the
solemn moment of the most holy Eucharistic sacrifice
the individual priest who stands at the altar seems to
disappear, and for the moment He clothes Himself with
the awful personality of the Son of God. " This is MY
Body," he says ; " This is the chalice of MY Blood." The
words are the words of Jesus Christ, the act is the act
of Jesus Christ, the power which effects the miracle is
the power of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate God. What
a privilege then is ours to possess in our midst such
a manifestation of God s power and wisdom and love,
such an inexhaustible fountain of richest graces. By
means of the holy Mass we can offer to God a perfect
worship, and pay our debts to Him, to the very last
farthing, infinite though they may be. We owe Him
a debt of praise and adoration. Think of the ages that
passed over the world before the Incarnation, the long
centuries during which the earth had never once been
able to give to its Creator an act of worship worthy of
Him. For the law was laid upon it from the beginning,
" Praise the Lord according to the multitude of His
greatness," l and His greatness is infinite in every way.
The angels had veiled their faces in adoration ; patriarchs
and prophets and holy kings had wept and prayed and
multiplied their sacrifices, and God stooped to accept
them, simply because their very insufficiency had drawn
from the bosom of the Godhead that cry of the eternal
Word, " Ecce venio " : Behold I come a promise to be
fulfilled on Calvary, and then to go on re-echoing until
the end of time on every Catholic altar.

We remember our manifold sins and their appalling
1 Ps, cl, 2. a ?s. xxxix, 8.

THE FOUNTAIN OF GRACE.

consequences, and we realize that we owe to God a debt
of satisfaction which far exceeds ten thousand talents,
and which we can never hope to pay if abandoned to
ourselves. But He who so patiently bowed His thorn-
crowned head in death on the cross, by the unspeakable
dignity of the Godhead which was one with Him, by
the extent and intensity of the sufferings through which
He passed, no less than by the exceeding love with which
He welcomed them and endured them, offered to God an
atonement infinitely surpassing the debts of a thousand
sinful worlds. And that same sacrifice of propitiation is
daily placed at our disposal in the holy Mass, for there
we are once again face to face with " Jesus, the Mediator
of the New Testament, and the sprinkling of blood
which speaketh better than that of Abel." l He pleads
for us, and intercedes for us, and obtains for us not only
the forgiveness of our sins, but likewise the many graces
and helps of which we stand so much in need.

What then must be our thanksgiving ? When we
think of all God s gifts to us gifts in the order of
nature, our life, our health, our strength, our friends,
our homes, our many joys, past, present and to come
gifts in the order of grace, our faith and its priceless
consequences, we are forced to ask with the royal
prophet, " Quid retribuam -What shall I give back to
the Lord for all he hath given to me," and then hearken
to the inspired answer, " Calicem salutaris accipiam I
will take the chalice of salvation, and I will call upon
the name of the Lord." At the best, we can but lift to
heaven sin-stained heads and sin-stained hearts, we can
but give to God the remnants of our spoiled and wasted
lives ; but when the priest in the Mass offers up in our

xii, 24.

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name the chalice of salvation, he offers to God the
praise and thanksgiving of Him, by Whom God has
given to us all these good things, and through Whom
and in Whom likewise, He receives all honour and glory.
" Through Christ our Lord, by whom, Lord, thou dost
ever create, sanctify, quicken, bless and give us all
these good things. Through Him and with Him and
in Him, is to thee, God the Father Almighty in the
unity of the Holy Ghost, all honour and glory." 1 For
when the awful mystery is accomplished, and Jesus is
" transfigured " before us, though so very differently
from that transfiguration on the mountain top in the
days of His mortal life, yet faith is quick to see His
glory, veiled beneath the whiteness of His sacramen
tal garments, and hears from out the cloud the voice of
the eternal Father, " This is My beloved Son, in whom
I am well pleased." 2

What then should be our devotion to the holy
Mass ? What should be the place in our thoughts and
in our lives given to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament ?
It was at the foot of the altar that St Thomas found
the secret of all holiness and purity and intellectual
greatness, for holiness of soul and cleanness of heart and
true knowledge go hand in hand, and God is the giver
of these as of all other good gifts. But He only gives
them to those who seek Him and prefer Him before all
His gifts. " Well hast thou written of Me, Thomas,"
said the voice of Jesus to the great Angelical; "well
hast thou written of Me ! What shall be thy reward ? "
" Lord," replied the saint, " naught, save Thyself ! " May
God bestow on us something of this spirit.

1 Canon of the Mass. 2 St Matt, xvii, 5.

89

VI

PURGATORY, THE PKISON-HOUSE OF GRACE.

WHEN we speak of the " Communion of Saints " we sum
up one of the most important dogmas revealed to us by
our holy Catholic faith. It is at the same time one of
the most comprehensive and most interesting, and, we
may add, perhaps one of the least understood. It seems
to say so very little, whilst it implies so much. It is
the consequence of our redemption and sarictification,
the fruit of Christ s passion and the life of grace to
which we have been raised. For, by this most glorious
gift of grace, purchased for us by the sufferings and
deatli of the incarnate Son of God, we are all made
members of His mystical Body, and by mutual help,
mutual support, and mutual sanctification, we are meant
to carry on His divine work, looking forward to the day
when that work shall be made perfect and complete by
the gathering together of all the elect in the kingdom
of heaven. Hence, to souls bound together by this
supernatural chain of faith and hope and love time is
as though it were not, and real separation is impossible.
Life passes away swiftly enough, and, sooner or later,
death must come to all of us, but even death, to souls
in grace, is but a passing change, and when we mourn
for those whom it has taken from us, we " sorrow not as
others, that have no hope." 1 On the contrary, we may
1 I Thess. iv, 12.

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truly say that human affection finds in death its surest
triumph, for whereas the many troubles that sur
round us and the weaknesses of our own frail nature
must necessarily make the strongest love rejoice with
trembling, death, viewed as grace would have us view
it, puts an end to all these dangers, and gives to earthly
love the immortality for which it craves, making it at
once unchanging and eternal. " True love," says the
inspired writer, " is strong as death," and therefore
" many waters cannot quench it, neither can the floods
drown it;" 1 it builds abridge across that dark abyss,
so terrifying to our weakness, and that bridge is the
" Communion of Saints." Our God, as Jesus Christ
Himself reminds us, 2 is not the God of the dead but
of the living, and therefore those of His creatures who
die in grace are never dead to Him. Underneath them
are the everlasting arms, as surely as they are beneath
us, and in this firm faith the loneliest soul can always
find abundant light and consolation. The task before us
is to contemplate this life of grace in the world to come,
to see and understand, as far as possible, all that
our faith can tell us of the dead who die in the Lord,
and therefore are so truly blessed. 3

Our thoughts go up at once to that great multitude
which no man can number, standing before the throne
with palms in their hands, for ever reigning with Christ
on high, 4 but even as that glorious vision seems to
pass before our minds, the consciousness of sin and im
perfection strikes us down and bids us realize our
deep unworthiness. He who tells us of that white-

1 Cant. viii. 2 St Mark xii, 27. :! Apnc. xiv, 13,
4 Apoc. vii, 9,

PURGATORY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE. 91

robed multitude tells us also 1 they are sine macula,
spotless and unstained, and therefore we must first of
all direct our thoughts towards that other world revealed
to us by faith and reason as the dwelling-place of all
those souls, who, though God s friends, are yet unworthy
of a place amongst His saints. We call it Purgatory,
and we speak of those abiding there as the souls of the
faithful departed. We could not justly claim to be the
children of the Church, were we unmindful of those for
whom the Church is so solicitous. She never forgets
them. Morning by morning the sacrifice of Calvary is
renewed in her midst ; morning by morning the divine
Victim is offered up on her altars, and following closely
on the loving welcome with which she greets His
sacramental presence is a prayer of supplication for the
dead. " Memento Domine Be mindful, Lord, of Thy
servants who have gone before us." It is an indication
of the spirit she would foster in our hearts, for the same
thought concludes all her prayers. " May the divine
assistance remain always with us," she says, " and may
the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy
of God, rest in peace."

We believe then, as Catholics, that there exists a
place of waiting, a place therefore of trial and most
keen suffering, created by an infinitely wise and loving
God for such souls as depart out of this life in a state
of grace, but yet in some way debtors to His justice.
It is a dogma of our faith, which hardly seems to stand
in need of proof, so strongly does it appeal to reason
and conscience, so manifestly does it fit in with all we
know of God. If we believe that heaven is the home
1 Apoc. xiv, 5.

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of absolute purity and perfection, and that nothing
which is in any way defiled can pass its gates, if we
believe hell to be the prison-house of those who die
in grievous sin, rejecting God s most patient love and
hating Him until the last, we must admit the existence
of a middle state for those who are not pure enough to
see God face to face, and yet have not deserved eternal
banishment from Him. To deny this consequence
would be to lower our idea of heaven, until it ceased
to be a motive for our hopes and longings, or to create
a hell so cruelly unjust as to be unreasonable and im
possible. Even the heathens could not be so foolish,
and Plato graphically describes a future state of punish
ment for those who have done evil, where some must
suffer hopelessly because so hopelessly corrupted, but
where others, on the contrary, h nd a real good in what
they have to undergo, since by it they are freed from all
their stains. 1 It would surely therefore be a matter for
astonishment were we not to find some traces of this
same belief amongst the Jews, but, instead of traces
only, we have the dogma put before us in its fulness, by
no less an authority than the inspired word of God. In
the Book of the Machabees 2 we read how Judas sent
an offering to Jerusalem that sacrifices might be offered
for the souls of the soldiers who had fallen in battle,
since " it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for
the dead, that they may be freed from sins." Yet it
was not until the so-called " reformers " of the sixteenth
century had ventured to assail this well-nigh universal
belief, that the Church confirmed it by a solemn defini-

, cap. liii, - 2 Much, xii, 46.

PUKGATOKY, THE PKISON -HOUSE OF GKACE. 93

tion, and declared it to be the divinely revealed dogma
of our faith. 1

But if, as we have said, it is a doctrine which in
every way accords with what we know of human nature,
its weaknesses and capabilities, not the less does it
accord with what we know of God. Without it, faith
in God would be impossible. True there are many who
profess belief in God and yet deny this doctrine, but
a little thought would show us that their God is not
the infinitely perfect Being who is our last end, but
a counterfeit deity formed and fashioned by their own
poor darkened minds. Infinite perfection implies the
possession of all perfections in an infinite degree. God
is therefore just, and His justice is infinite; yet at the
same time He is merciful, and His mercy is equally
limitless. But because He is infinitely just, He must
necessarily banish from His presence any creature in
whom His all-seeing eye discerns the faintest shadow
of an imperfection, and because He is infinitely merciful,
He is ready to forgive the worst of sinners. How can
we reconcile these two most glorious attributes of God
except by purgatory ? Think what sin is and what
are its consequences. Broadly speaking, sin is the
aversion of the will from God, 2 and the immediate
consequences of this are twofold, for it inflicts a stain
upon the soul, and at the same time makes it a debtor
to God s justice. The soul of man is pleasing in God s
sight because of the bright, shining light of reason, and
that glorious participation of the divine light which we
call grace ; but when man s will consents to sin, it violates

1 Cone. Trid., Sess. vi, Can. 30; and Sess. 22, Can. 3.

2 St Thos. l a , 94, 1.

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the order of right reason as well as the order of grace,
and withdrawing itself as it were from these refulgent
sources of brightness and spiritual loveliness, it buries
itself in what is vile and earthly, and so incurs the
stain 1 of sin. Moreover, by that same act it violates
the order of divine justice, and thereby lays itself under
the obligation of restitution by making itself God s
debtor. In other words, the unlawful self-indulgence,
which we call sin, must be expiated by voluntnry or
involuntary punishment, and this holds good even when
the stain of sin may have been blotted out by sorrow
and repentance and the return of the will to God. So
David sinned, and repented of his sin on hearing
Nathan s parable. "I have sinned against the Lord,"
he cried; and Nathan said: "The Lord hath taken
away thy sin." 2 But though the sin was forgiven,
atonement had to be made, and a heavy punishment
was inflicted. How many there are like David, who
may have sinned grievously, and like him also have
wept bitter tears for their sin, crying out with him in
the anguish of a truly contrite heart : " Peccatum meum
contra me est semper My sin is always before me," and
this although many years may have passed away since
that dark hour when first they fell from grace. For
who can measure the debt incurred by such a fall, quite
apart from all those constantly recurring minor faults
and sinful inclinations which are its miserable fruits ?
And how will such souls stand when death comes to
weigh them in the scale of the awful exacting justice
of Almighty God ? Then there are others who, though
perhaps they never have rejected God so utterly, have
1 St Thos. l a 2 ao , 16, 1 and 2. a 2 Kings xii, 13.

PURGATORY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE. 95

nevertheless learnt by sad experience the weakness of
our human nature in those daily falls and imperfec
tions of which we think so little, but of which God
necessarily thinks so much, and who may perhaps
have suddenly been called away, without a moment
for repentance. How must God treat them ? If we
except the little child who passes from this world
in all the beauty of unsullied innocence, or the brave
martyr who pours out his blood in one supreme and
generous sacrifice, what must be the state of nearly
every soul that quits this life in friendship and union
with its Maker. It stands before His judgment seat,
and for the first time realizes justice which is infinite.
It sees the many follies of its life on earth, the countless
faults and imperfections for which it never even grieved,
the many others, sorrowed for it may be, and yet not
fully expiated, the divine likeness in its being, which is
its only claim to glory, so miserably disfigured and
defaced what fate could it expect save instant and
eternal banishment, were justice only to be heard ? But
mercy speaks as well, for in all God s works, says the
Angelic Doctor, 1 mercy and truth go hand in hand,
or, as the inspired writer expresses it : " Mercy and
truth are met together, justice and peace have
kissed each other." - The soul passes from this world
into the world of Purgatory, its stains are burnt away,
its debts are fully paid, and the beauty of God s image
is marvellously restored. 3 Truly we have here a wonder
ful revelation of God and His attributes, and it was
no exaggeration to say that without this dogma of our

1 St Thos. 1, 21, 4. 2 p a . i xxx i V) 10.

3 St Thos. 3 a suppl. 72, 4 aud 5.

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faith, belief in God would seem impossible. For not
only does the teaching of the Church on this point
reconcile these two grand attributes apparently so con
tradictory, but it goes further, and explains them in the
fullest way. We have already considered the light it
throws upon God s justice, and its dealing with us, but
as a revelation of God s mercy it is so wonderful that
we may look upon it as its very masterpiece. For
when we contemplate the world in which we live, and
see and note the well-nigh universal triumph of the
powers of evil, when, day by day, in a thousand different
ways we are brought face to face with moral failure,
and so realize though ever so faintly the utter forget-
fulness of God in which the vast majority of His
creatures seem to live, the sight of all this, the know
ledge of all this, would surely extinguish our faith in
God as the Almighty Ruler, our hope in Him as the
Saviour of mankind, our love of Him as a most tender
Father, were it not for this creation of His mercy, where
justice and mercy are so wonderfully blended. Purga
tory is the solution of this most terrifying mystery.
There God wins back all that He seemed to lose in life,
and the many defeats of time are more than compen
sated for by the great victory of eternity. There must
be millions of souls who during life have wandered far
from God, and yet have ever kept alive that little
twinkling light of faith and reason which, even at the
last hour, can show them how to find Him once again,
and what we call a death-bed repentance, though always
a miracle of mercy, must be a frequent source of joy to
the angels of God. An old English writer expresses
this very vividly in the well-known lines :

PUKGATORY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE. 97

Between the stirrup and the ground
I mercy asked, I mercy found. 1

Aud it would not be just to call this a mere poetic
exaggeration, for all that God wants is the beginning
of the great work of grace, the conversion of the will,
and purgatory will do the rest. We could not easily
believe that one little act of contrition, imperfect perhaps
in many ways, would have sufficient power to carry the
sinner s soul into the glory of God s presence, but we
can believe it strong- enough to break the chains of sin,
and make the soul God s friend, and then in that
mysterious world where sin becomes impossible, and
grace triumphant, God repairs His handiwork, and tits
it for a place in His eternal kingdom. " Souls must be
saved," says a spiritual writer, 2 " and the saved multi
plied, and the heavenly banquet crowded, even if the
constraints of fire be needed to anneal the hastier works
of grace. Therefore is it that the vast realms of purga
tory are lighted up with the flames of vindictive love.
Thus a huge amount of imperfect charity shall bring
forth its thousands and its tens of thousands for heaven.
Eedemption shall cover the whole earth and be
plentiful indeed, and the very un worthinesses and
shortcomings of the creature shall only still more
provoke the prodigality of the Blood of the Creator.
Oh, the mercy of those cleansing fires ! What could
have devised them but a love that was almost beside
itself for expedients ? " And again, appealing to the
very sufferings of purgatory as a proof of God s
wondrous mercy, the same writer continues : " The
extreme severity of the punishments of Purgatory is
1 Camden s Remains. - Faber, Creator and Creature, p. 313.

7

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a consideration which leads the mind to contemplate
the immense multitude of the saved, and of those saved
with very imperfect dispositions, as the only solution of
these chastisements. Purgatory goes as near to the
unriddling the riddle of the world as any one ordinance
of God which can be named. . . . Now does it come
natural to us to look at all this system, this terrible
eighth sacrament of fire, which is the home of those
souls whom the seven real sacraments of earth have not
been allowed to purify completely does it come natural
to us to look at it all as simply a penal machinery ?
.... Does not the view at once recommend itself to
us that it was an invention of God to multiply the fruit
of our Saviour s passion, that it was intended for the
great multitudes who die in charity with God, but in
imperfect charity, and therefore that it is, as it were, the
continuance of death-bed mercies beyond the grave ? " l
Let us then go down in spirit to that land of patient
suffering, and contemplate the state of those most holy
souls holy, because incapable of sin, because so patient
and resigned, because so precious in God s sight. It is
quite possible, probable even, that many of them are
bound to us by ties of blood and kindred, or the yet
tenderer ties of love and friendship ; once, perhaps, they
shared the joys and sorrows of our lives, and helped us
by their sympathy ; for many reasons, therefore, we
ought to feel compelled to do our best to find out all our
faith can tell us of their state. Two things only has
the Church defined in this most interesting subject,
firstly, that there is a purgatory, and secondly, that the
souls therein detained are helped by our prayers and
1 Ibid. p. 376.

PURGATORY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE. 99

good works, but this implies enough to satisfy the most
anxious inquirer, and with it as our groundwork, we
may listen to what the saints and doctors of the Church
can say by way of explanation.

It is quite true that, as a rule, the revelations of the
saints cannot be put forward as an argument, but the
teaching of St Catharine of Genoa on this subject is
so solidly theological that we may be pardoned if we
quote it here. In purgatory, she tells us, there is the
extremity of suffering and the extremity of joy. The
suffering is so great that no tongue can tell it, no mind
can understand it, and on the other hand the joy is so
abounding that there is nothing to compare with it,
save the happiness of heaven. Moreover, it is a joy
which is ever on the increase, as the separation between
the soul and God is gradually destroyed. But this
contentment does not take away the pain, for it is the
retarding of love from the possession of its object which
causes the pain, and the pain is greater according to the
greater perfection of love, of which God has made the
soul capable. Thus the souls in purgatory have at once
the greatest contentment and the greatest suffering,
and the one in no way hinders the other. 1 A very little
thought will show us how profoundly true and theo
logical is this teaching. It puts before us joys and
sorrows well-nigh unspeakable, and without appealing
to the example of St Paul and other saints of God, who
superabounded with joy in all their tribulations, our
own little experience is sufficient to convince us of the
possibility of a union of the two. We will take the

1 St Catharine of Genoa s Treatise on Purgatory, cited by
F. Faber, All for Jesus, p. 372.

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sorrows first, because in our minds, the idea of suffering
is always uppermost when we think of purgatory.

These holy souls suffer, and suffer most grievously.
They are banished from God s presence at the very
moment when for the first time they appreciate Him as
He deserves. The heart of man was made for God,
and God alone can satisfy its boundless power of love.
In this life many tilings combine to lead it far astray,
and make it seek elsewhere the good for which it was
created, but when death comes, and, for the first time,
all created things must stand aside, the soul sees the
truth, and with a passionate longing craves for that
union which alone can make it blessed. But there
is a barrier in the way. With that first mighty act of
love there comes the realization of sin, the bitterness of
separation which it involves, and the anguish of that
" hope deferred, which maketh the heart sick." l St
Thomas maintains 2 that this -suffering is far beyond all
that we can feel or imagine in this life. It is, he
explains, of a twofold nature, the pain t of loss, which
is the postponement of the sight of God, and the pain
of sense, by which we understand the punishment of
fire, and in both respects, says the Angelic Doctor, the
least pain of purgatory exceeds the sharpest pain we
could be called on to endure in this life. For the more
intensely we long for anything, the more keenly do we
feel its loss ; and because the longing of these holy souls
for Him who is their highest good is most intense, since
the time for enjoying it has come, and there is nothing
to distract the mind in any way, the anguish of their
disappointment is unspeakable. So also with regard
1 Prov. xiii, 12. - St Thos. 3 il , suppl. 7 2, 1.

PURGATORY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE. 101

to what we call the pain of sense. It is altogether
dependent on, and in proportion to, our sensibility, and
hence it is that mental sufferings are worse than bodily,
and any pain which acts directly on the soul itself, the
source and cause of all sensibility, must of necessity be
the keenest pain of all. Once we understand the two
fold cause of purgatory the loving torment of un
satisfied desire for God, and the vivid realization of the
horror of sin we need say no more about the intensity
of its sufferings. Cardinal Newman most perfectly and
most beautifully expresses the same teaching in his
"Dream of Gerontius":

When then if such thy lot thou seest thy Judge,
The sight of Him will kindle in thy heart
All tender, gracious, reverential thoughts.
Thou wilt be sick with love, and yearn for Him,
And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself, for though
Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinned
As never thou didst feel, and wilt desire
To slink away and hide thee from His sight,
And yet will have a longing aye to dwell
Within the beauty of His countenance.
And these two pains, so counter and so keen,
The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not,
The shame of self at thought of seeing Him,
Wilt be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory.

So the work of expiation is gradually accomplished.
How long it takes, God only knows ; but with fixed un
wavering patience, the holy souls endure it all, lonely,
though in the midst of such a multitude, in intensest
silence, since their thoughts are not for words to utter,
incapable of forgetfulness, or even of one poor solitary
distraction, their whole being throbbing and pulsating

102 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

with the fiery burning of a longing love, compared
with which all other fire is but a painted imitation, ever
waiting for the hour when suffering shall have done its
cleansing work, and God s angels come to call them to
their home of everlasting rest. And this leads us to the
joys of purgatory, for, as we said, it is a land where joy
goes hand in hand with sorrow, and the first and most
abundant source of joy is to be found in this sure hope
and certain knowledge of their final deliverance. For
when the waiting seems most wearisome, when the keen
fire thrills them through and through with anguish,
when their whole being seems upon the point of being
drowned in bitterness, there sounds within their souls
the music of an angel s whisper : Confortetur cor tuum,
et sustine Dominum Let thy heart be comforted, and
wait for the Lord. These words are the conclusion of
the twenty-sixth Psalm, and seem to come as an inspired
answer to the beautiful acts of hope of which the psalm
is full, so that we might almost call it the Psalm of the
Holy Souls :

The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the protector of my life, of whom shall I be afraid ?
My enemies that troubled me have themselves been weakened

and are fallen.
One thing have I asked of the Lord, this will I seek after, that

I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.
My heart hath said to Thee, my face hath sought Thee, Thy face,

O Lord, will I seek.
Hide not Thy face from me, and turn not away in anger from

Thy servant.
Be Thou my helper, forsake me not, do not Thou despise me,

God my Saviour.
I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land

of the living. 1

1 From Ps. xxvi,

PURGATOEY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE. 103

And oh, the flood of joy and happiness unspeakable
which sweeps through these sorely tried souls at this
thought : Credo videre bona Domini I believe, I know,
that I shall see the good things of the Lord ! The
certainty of heaven ! Could any suffering neutralize
a joy like that ? But there is another joy to be found
in the sufferings themselves, because of the clear under
standing the holy souls have of them, their knowledge
of their work and purpose, and the loving resignation
with which they accept them. They are the means
ordained by God for the breaking down of the barriers
sin has raised, by them they are enabled to pay back the
debt they have incurred, even to the very last farthing,
and hence they submit to them most willingly. 1 " When
the soul, separated from the body," to quote once more
St Catharine of Genoa, " finds itself wanting in requisite
purity, and sees in itself an impediment which cannot
be taken away except by purgatory, it at once throws
itself into it with right good will. Nay, if it did not
find this ordinance of purgatory, aptly contrived for the
removal of this hindrance, there would instantly be
born in it a hell far worse than purgatory, inasmuch as
it would see that because of this impediment, it could
never get to God, who is its End. Wherefore, if the soul
could find another purgatory fiercer than this, in which
it could the sooner get rid of this impediment it would
speedily plunge itself therein, because of the impetu
osity of the love it bears to God." 2 Here again we may
turn to the beautiful poem of Newman above quoted,
and in the exquisite lines in which he expresses the

1 St Thos. 3 a , suppl. 72, 2.

2 F. Faber, All for Jesus, p. 368.

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feeling of the soul at the judgment seat, we may trace
once more the marvellous identity of thought between
the Italian saint and the great English cardinal :

Take me away, and, in the lowest deep,

There let me be.
And there, in hope, the lone night watches keep,

Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain,

Lone, not forlorn,
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain

Until the morn.
There will I sing and soothe my stricken breast,

Which ne er can cease
To throb and pine and languish, till possess d

Of its sole peace !
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love.

Take me away,

That sooner I may rise and go above,
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.

Each moment, as we have said, sees the sufferings
lessen and the joys increase. The brightest jewel in the
world, to borrow a striking comparison from St Catharine,
cannot reflect the sunlight, if it be hidden beneath a
coating of impurities, but as these are cleansed away, it
manifests its brightness more and more, until at last we
see it in its perfect beauty. So is it with the soul in the
cleansing fires of purgatory. Its earthly stains are
gradually destroyed, and when at last the work is done,
God draws it to Himself, and being brought face to face
with Him it is made like to Him and shines with the
brightness of His glory.

Such then is the dogma of purgatory, most beauti
ful, most reasonable and most consoling. For us it has
a practical conclusion which we must not overlook, for

PURGATORY, THE PRISON-HOUSE OF GRACE. 105

the Church has also defined that these most holy souls
are helped by our prayers, and we cannot refuse that help
unless we are utterly wanting in generous love of our
neighbour, in zeal for God s glory, and in care for our own
interests. We have seen how they are suffering, and Q-od
longs to give them rest, eternal rest, and justice bars the
way. Therefore He turns to us, and placing in our hands
the boundless treasures of His atonement, He begs us, out
of love for Him and pity for those souls, to pay their many
debts. That is our share in the beautiful Communion
of Saints, and its reward is something hard to put in
words, though faith can well imagine it, the unending
gratitude. of a ransomed soul. Hush for a while the many
noises and distractions of a sinful, disappointing world,
and with ears quickened by faith, listen to the grand
harmonious song for ever going up before the throne of
God from all His children, the hymn of the Communion
of Saints : the voice of the Church Suffering, patient
and pleading, " Have pity on me, have pity on me, at
least you my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath
touched me," the voice of the Church Militant tender
and compassionate, "Eternal rest give unto them, O
Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them," the
voice of the Church Triumphant, ringing with gratitude
and conscious power, "Vouchsafe, Lord, for Thy
name s sake, to reward with eternal life all them that
have done us good."

106

VII

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE.

IN the nineteenth chapter of St Luke s Gospel, the
Evangelist puts before us a scene which is one of the
most beautiful, most touching, and most instructive in
Holy Scripture. He describes in most graphic words
our Blessed Lord s last and most solemn entry into
Jerusalem, the enthusiasm of the crowds that sur
rounded Him, the joy and. gladness of His disciples,
the fervour of their hosannas, the impotent envy of
His enemies, and then the strange and sudden
contrast, " seeing the city, He wept over it, saying :
If thou also hadst known, and that in this thy day,
the things that are to thy peace, but now they are
hidden from thine eyes." 1 It is indeed a wonderful
picture, and it is likewise a striking and instructive
lesson. Holy Scripture is the word of God, whose
understanding is infinite and almighty, and therefore it
is not surprising that He should teach us not merely by
the words He speaks, or which He inspires, but also
by the actions which those words describe. There is
nothing extraordinary, therefore, or far-fetched, in taking
the city of Jerusalem as a figure of the individual soul,
and the story of God s dealings with that ungrateful
city as a picture of His dealings with so many of His
creatures. There is the same abundant outpouring of
favours and blessings on the one side, the same in-
1 St Luke xix, 41, 42.

HELL, THE FAILUKE OF GRACE. 107

gratitude and repeated rebellion on the other, and the
picture is completed by final rejection and terrible
punishment when that ingratitude reaches its limit.
The inspired writer tells us l that the Lord loved the
city of Sion above all the other dwelling-places of His
chosen people, and yet He caused it to be utterly de
stroyed and laid waste, because it had not known the
time of its " visitation." So, contemplating as we are
the workings of the supernatural life of grace, its pro
gress and development, we dare not venture to pass by
in silence the possibility of its utter failure and all which
that implies. We must consider, and consider carefully,
in the light of faith and reason, the final state of those
souls who, like the city of Jerusalem, have neglected
the things that were for their peace, the eternal destiny
of those who obstinately refuse to acknowledge the end
of their creation and to fulfil it, and who, therefore,
are at last crushed down by the unutterable sorrow
of knowing that it is for ever hidden from their eyes.
We must consider Hell, the only part of (rod s vast
creation on which the sunlight of His blessing never
falls, the only kingdom in His mighty empire where
grace cannot and may not rule supreme ; " the land that
is dark, and covered with the mist of death ; a land of
misery and darkness where the shadow of death and
everlasting horror dwelleth."

It is a curious fact, and one well worthy of our close
attention, that belief in hell is as universal as belief in
God. St Paul reminds us 3 that faith in God, as the
rewarder of our works, is an essential condition of our
service of Him, but independently of this supernatural
1 Ps, Ixxxvi. 2 Job x, 21, 22, 3 Heb. xi, 6.

108 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

knowledge, we can discern in all people, of all ages,
a more or less distinct belief in God, and in a future
state of happiness and misery, the lingering remains, no
doubt, of the first great revelation granted to our race.
It would be superfluous to appeal to the ancient writers
of Greece and Rome ; every student of the classics is
familiar with their teaching. The learned writers of the
East are not less definite, and even Mahomet, who surely
tried his best to invent and propagate what we might
call a " comfortable " religion, has nevertheless retained
the dogma of eternal punishment. Those who broke
away from the Church in each succeeding age of its
existence, never based the motive of their separation
and revolt on this stern truth ; it seems to have been
reserved to our own age, so full of pride and inde
pendence, so greedy of indulgence and every sort of
pleasure, to put itself in opposition to the universal
feeling of past ages, and deny not merely the exist
ence, but the very possibility of what we call hell. In
deference therefore to the age in which we live, we may
begin by seeing what our reason ought to tell us on this
subject, and how far its light can lead us in such an
all-important controversy. Faith and reason* never can
oppose each other. That is a trutli we often find our
selves forgetting, when specious arguments plunge the
mind in darkness ; to qualify a dogma of the faith as
" unreasonable " is a gross misuse of terms, as well as
a proclamation of our own ignorance. Faith and reason,
as we tried to show in our first conference, are given to
us by God to help us in our search for Hirn ; if they
seem to be in opposition, and to impede our progress,
the fault is ours, not God s ! To quote once more the

HULL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE. 109

teaching of the Vatican Council on this point : " God
cannot contradict Himself, nor can truth ever be op
posed to truth. Whenever there appears to be a sort
of contradiction, it is because the dogmas of the faith
have not been rightly understood and perfectly explained,
or else because the assertions of opinions are taken for
dictates of reason." l What then does our reason tell
us about eternal punishment ?

Without plunging into metaphysics, or indulging in
digressions to explain the nature of good and evil in the
moral order, we can all admit that they are two oppos
ing forces, working, so to speak, in opposite directions.
The difference which divides them is something more than
accidental, it is rather what we call essential ! To use
an ordinary comparison, however poor and inadequate,
they run on lines which from the first diverge, and are
not merely parallel, much less converging. It would
seem to follow, therefore, that as long as good is good,
and evil evil, they never can produce the same result, or
arrive at the same term, no matter how indefinitely the
lines may be prolonged. St Paul s comparison of the
wild olive 2 is strongly to the point, for the wild olive
remains useless as long as it is the wild olive. But if,
as the apostle says, a branch cut from the wild olive
be grafted on a good tree, then it will bring forth fruit
because it is a wild olive no longer. Hence our Blessed
Lord Himself so pertinently asks : "Do men gather
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? " 3 But if you do
away with the eternity of hell, you must infer that you
do expect to find grapes growing on thorns, and figs on

1 Cone. Vat/, sess. iii, cap. iv, De Fide et Ratione. 2 Rom. xi, 24.
3 St Matt, vii, 16.

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thistles, for you infer that good and evil, sooner or later,
produce the same effect, and therefore that the difference
between them is but accidental, or, in other words, that
their nature is essentially the same ! What appalling
consequences such teaching would produce if really
believed ! It would not matter whether we formed our
lives after the example of Nero or St John, Jezabel or
the Immaculate Mother of God, the end eventually
would be the same ! Could anything more absurd be
imagined ? But there is another consideration. Belief
in God, as we said in one of our former conferences,
necessarily implies belief in God s almighty power. He
is the supreme and absolute Master of all the works of
His hands, and possesses an unquestionable right to
their dutiful service. But in His superabounding good
ness, He has bestowed on man the power of free-will,
enabling him to give, or to refuse this service as he
chooses, and a deliberate refusal on the part of man is
what we call sin. Sin is therefore literally and truly
war between the creature and the Almighty Creator, but
it is a war which can have only one possible result.
The final victory must lie with God. Of course there
is the victory of grace, which means the absolute sub
mission and repentance of the sinner, but we must put
that aside for the present. Our argument here supposes
deliberate rebellion, deliberately and wilfully and obsti
nately persevered in until the last. That such folly is
possible is necessarily implied by the possession of free
will, and it equally implies as a logical consequence
the possibility of eternal banishment from God. History
records the despairing cry of Julian the Apostate as he
fell in battle : " Galikean ! thou hast conquered! " But

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE. Ill

were there no eternal hell, he might have hurled a last
defiance at his Maker, and then endured with patience all
the torments which the Galilsean could inflict, triumph
ing in the consciousness that one day they would end,
and that, in reality, ho would he the final conqueror.

Now we may go a little further and listen to the
arguments of faith, and here as elsewhere the great
est of the Church s theologians shall be our guide.
According to St Thomas, 1 sin is an " inordinate act,"
because it is a violation of the right order of things,
and therefore in addition to the stain which it inflicts
upon the soul, it makes it a debtor to the law so vio
lated ; and as long as this perversion continues, as long
as the right order of things is being disturbed by the
sinner, so long is he justly deserving of punishment.
In some cases this disturbance is only transient, whereas
in others it is irreparable. If the earthquake only
breaks the windows or topples down the chimneys, the
damage can be easily repaired, and the house remains
as good as ever ; but if the foundations are thoroughly
shaken and undermined, the building can no longer
be considered safe or habitable, and had better be
destroyed at once. In other words, says St Thomas,
if the defect be of such a nature as to destroy the very
principle or foundation, then the harm is irreparable;
but if, on the contrary, the principle remains un
touched, it is always able to repair and make good
all other injuries. For example, if owing to disease or
any other cause a man s eyes have to be removed, or if
the optic nerve be utterly destroyed, the blindness
which results is quite incurable ; but if he suffers from
1 St Thos. l* 2*>, 87, l.

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cataract or some other minor malformation, the blind
ness is but temporary, and may be done away with by
proper care and nursing, or a successful operation. In
the one case the very principle of vision is destroyed,
in the other its working is but hindered for a time.
To apply this then to the act of sin : if it be of such
a nature as to utterly subvert the principle of that
relationship which ought to bind our souls to Grod,
and which consists in cleaving to Him as our first
beginning and last end, or, in other words, the state of
grace, then is its effect eternal, and the injury inflicted
on the soul irreparable, though not of course beyond
the healing power of God. But the rupture of that
bond of love which is our only means of union with
Grod is just what theologians mean by mortal sin ; and
hence, concludes St Thomas, whatever sins so turn the
soul from Grod as to destroy the bond of charity, incur
a debt of everlasting punishment. We might almost
venture, therefore, to define hell as the state of mortal
sin, made eternal and indelible by the sinner s own de
liberate act, and fully realized by him. " Grod," says
Father de Ravignan, " has no need of changing any
thing in the state of the sinner s soul in order to punish
him. He abandons him to his sin, and in that the
reprobate finds his everlasting hell." It is a thought
the importance of which cannot be over-estimated.
We are so apt to appeal to our imagination in this
matter instead of to our reason, and so we imagine
eternal punishment as a sort of unending penal ser
vitude, a terrible expiation exacted by vindictive
justice for crimes over and gone long ago, when in
reality it is nothing of the kind. It is rather the

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE. 113

perpetual accompaniment of the conscious malice of
deliberate rebellion, eternally persisted in, and eternally
realized as hopeless and unreasonable. An old legend
represents the devil as reproaching God with never
having offered him a chance of repentance after his
fall, and there is a world of truth in God s reply,
legend only though it be : " Have you ever asked for
it ? " So also with the reprobate soul. " It is not
God who is angry," says Bishop Hedley, speaking of
a soul in hell ; "it is the sinner who places a barrier
between himself and that Being who alone is his
happiness. The sinner therefore damns himself. A soul
in mortal sin only requires the dissolution of its mortal
frame to be by that very fact in hell." It might per
haps be objected that it is very hard to understand
how the mere fact of death, "the dissolution of this
mortal frame," can effect that tremendous difference
which the Catholic faith supposes to exist between the
comparative happiness of a sinful life on earth, and the
misery of life in hell; and the difficulty is not un
reasonable, though a very little thought should be able
to explain it. Grievous sin implies the loss of God,
and the loss of God is hell ; but as long as life lasts
the soul may obstinately refuse to realize its miserable
destitution, and endeavour with some show of success
to make up for the loss of God by the use, or rather v
the abuse, of God s gifts. The varied picture of the
world around us, the many joys of life, the pleasures of
sense, and those still higher intellectual pleasures which
gratify the mind, the society of friends and relations
all these things are tokens of God s goodness, gifts
from the Giver of all good gifts, most wonderfully de-

8

114 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

signed to lead us on to Him if rightly used, but by
their very excellence and variety quite capable of at
tracting and enslaving the hearts and wills of those
who use them for themselves and their own gratifica
tion, and not in obedience to God s law. But death
puts an end to the delusion. When the soul of the
sinner goes forth from its earthly tabernacle, it loses in
an instant all that made existence pleasant, or even
bearable, and what does it receive in exchange ?
Nothing ! God ought to be all in all, for it was made
for Him ; but it has deliberately rejected God, and
must now fall back upon itself, only to feel every
faculty burning with the agony of desires that can
never be gratified. It is this very truth which Cardinal
Newman, in Callista, puts as an argument in the
mouth of St Cyprian, in order to bring home to the
heathen mind of the heroine the possibility of ever
lasting punishment : " Perhaps you will tell me," he
makes the bishop say, " that, after death, you will
cease to be. I don t believe you think so. I may
take for granted that you think with me, and with
the multitude of men, that you will still live and
that you will still be you. You will still be the
same being, but deprived of those outward stays and
reliefs and solaces which, such as they are, you now
enjoy. You will be yourself shut up in yourself. If
then, on passing hence, you are cut off from what you
had here, and have only the company of yourself, I
think your burden will be so far greater, not less, than
it is now. Suppose, for instance, you had still your
love of conversing, and could not converse ; your love
of the poets of your race, and no means of recalling

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE. 115

them ; your love of music, and no instrument to
play upon ; your love of knowledge, and nothing to
learn ; your desire of sympathy, and no one to love ;
would not that be still greater misery ? Let me pro
ceed a step further. Supposing you were among those
you actually did not love ; supposing you did not like
them, nor their occupations, and could not understand
their aims; suppose there be, as Christians say, one
Almighty God, and you did not like Him, and had no
taste for thinking of Him, and no interest in what He
was and what He did ; and supposing you found that
there was nothing else anywhere but He, whom you
did not love and whom you wished away, would you
not be still more wretched ? And if this went on for
ever, would you not be in great inexpressible pain
for ever ? Assuming then, first, that the soul ever
needs external objects to rest upon ; next, that it has
no prospect of any such when it leaves this visible
scene ; and thirdly, that the hunger and thirst, the
gnawing of the heart, where it occurs, is as keen and
piercing as a flame ; it will follow there is nothing
irrational in the notion of an external Tartarus." 1

Nothing irrational ! The unreasonableness is surely
on the side of those who refuse to realize this, and who
vainly try to silence the understanding by the murmurs
of an unregulated imagination and the protestations of
a sickly sentimentalism. Tor Catholics, at all events,
the existence of a place of eternal punishment is a
dogma of faith, and we profess our sincere belief in
it in the concluding words of the Athanasian Creed:
" They that have done good shall go into everlasting

1 C allista, chap. xix.

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life, but they that have done evil into everlasting
punishment."

Having seen, therefore, how reason and faith are
united in obliging us to admit this stern truth, the
existence of a place of punishment which we call
" hell," set apart for souls who persist in rebellion
against God, and who, therefore, die in a state of
grievous sin, we may now look at the subject more
closely and endeavour to gather from the teaching of
our faith some idea of the nature of eternal punish
ment. The genius of Dante sums it all up in that
terrible inscription which his imagination saw embla
zoned on the gates of hell :

Through me you pass into the city of woe,

Through me you pass into eternal pain,

Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the Founder of my fabric moved,

To rear me was the task of power divine,

Supremest wisdom and primaeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things

Eternal, and eternal I endure !

All hope abandon, ye who enter here ! l

But we have no need of poets, even though they be as
great and as truly theological as Dante, to help us to
put in words the nature of eternal punishment. From
the many pages in Holy Writ, in which this truth is
plainly put before us, we need only turn to one, in
which our blessed Lord Himself describes the day of
judgment, and with His own sacred lips formulates the
final sentence which He will pass upon the souls of the
reprobate : " Depart from Me, accursed, into everlasting

1 Inferno, Cant, iii, Gary s trans.

HELL. THE FAILURE OF GRACE. 117

fire." 1 We need no more. These dread words of God
Incarnate sum up briefly but most clearly all that we
want to know. Let us do our best then to realize
something of their meaning.

" All punishment," says St Thomas, 2 must be
proportionate to the offence or sin for which it is
inflicted. But in every sin we may distinguish two
acts of the will, inasmuch as by sin, the soul first of all
turns away from God, the unchanging, infinite Good,
and in this respect is guilty of an infinite offence, and
then, in the second place, chooses in place of God some
transitory pleasure, an act which is finite in every way.
The rejection of God is punished by the loss of God,
which may be truly called infinite, since it is the
deprivation of an infinite good, and the unlawful
preference of the creature is expiated by the finite pain
of sense." Our Blessed Lord expresses this double
penalty in the words of His dread sentence : " Depart
from Me, into everlasting fire" ; the pain of loss, and
the pain of sense.

The pain of loss ! We have already tried to show
the origin and cause of this suffering, but a little re
petition may help us to see it more clearly. Almighty
God has created us for Himself, bestowing upon us
a spiritual nature, which implies an instinctive longing
for Him, and for the happiness which can only come by
seeing Him face to face and possessing Him. During
the time of this life of probation, He hides Himself
behind a veil, and asks us to give Him our free service,
seeing Him only by faith, possessing Him by hope and
love. But when death comes, the veil is drawn aside.
1 St Matt, xxv, 41. 2 St Thos. 1" ll ae , 87, 4.

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The time of probation is over. The soul understands
perfectly that God is her last end, and she longs for
Him and desires to possess Him because the possession
of Him is perfect happiness. But, as we have already
said, if she be in the state of grievous sin, the love of
God, which is the principal and only means of union
with Him, is altogether absent ; it has been wilfully
destroyed. The soul sees, therefore, that she never can
possess God, that she has lost Him for ever, and the
realization of that loss is hell The possession of God
is eternal happiness, the loss of God is eternal misery ;
and when those awful words, " Depart from Me," ring
through the silence of eternity, they are to the lost
soul the revelation of its hopeless fate. God is light,
infinite light, uncreated light. In its mortal life the
soul has enjoyed the possession of this light to a greater
or less degree ; now she has approached the unfailing
source of it all, only to see it disappear for ever, and to
feel herself plunging into an intellectual darkness that
will last for ever.

And love has gone too ! Light is the food of the
understanding, and love is the food of the will, and
God is light, and God is love, for He is the one object
of the mind and the heart ; we mean nothing else when
we say that He is our last end. He Himself is the
eternal home of all the souls whom He calls out of
nothingness, for He made them for Himself, and, there
fore, during the time of their probation in this world
His voice is ever calling them : " My son, give Me thy
heart" ; " I am thy reward, exceeding great " ; but this
gracious voice no longer speaks to the reprobate. They
chose their own way, they lived for themselves and- not

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE. 119

for Him, they made their home on earth and in the
things of this world, only to realize too late that it has
all passed like a dream, and that their heavenly home
is closed against them ; and with a mind crushed down
by darkness, and a will broken by the greatness of its
misery, though still rebellious and unrepentant, the
lost soul enters on its everlasting exile. Perhaps we
might as well confess at once that we cannot put in
words the exceeding horror of the loss of God, because
we do not appreciate Him as we ought, nor do we
understand His infinite beauty and attractiveness.
What a power there is in the beauty and loveliness and
attractiveness of earthly things ! The wanderer in a
foreign land thinks of his own home and country, and
because the beauty of it haunts his memory all else
grows dull by comparison. The artist lives apart in
a world of beauty of his own, a world of ideals it may
be, and yet so real a world to him that the ordinary
things of earth can hardly win a passing thought from
him ; and our own hearts too, do they not clothe with
beauty everything to which they cling, and faces that
have long since passed away still linger on unfaded
in our hearts, because of the beauty which is theirs,
a beauty none the less real to us because, perhaps,
our own creation. Yet the beautiful as existing in the
world around us, or as seen by the mind and the heart,
is after all but a participation, and a feeble participa
tion, of the unspeakable beauty of God. What then
would be its power upon the soul ? What the agony
of its loss ?

It may seem well-nigh useless to speak of the " pain
of sense," seeing that it must be insignificant when

120 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

compared with pain which in itself is infinite and
eternal ; but if, as we have said, the pain of loss would
seem to be beyond our understanding because of its
greatness and its purely spiritual nature, the pain of
sense on the other hand appeals to us with a special
force for the very opposite reason. Hence this secon
dary punishment, and all the suffering which it
involves, is frequently put before us by the Holy
Scripture in the most vivid language, and is usually
expressed by the one term "fire." "Depart from Me,
into everlasting fire." With regard to the nature of
this fire the Church has defined nothing ; we are free
to follow our own opinion. In the ages of faith, the
common Catholic teaching maintained that the fire of
hell was a real material fire, but since it is the fashion
now-a-days to look askance at the theories of these
old-fashioned teachers, and even to reject them as im
possible in the light of our superior education, we
may devote a moment to the examination of their ex
planations of this difficulty. It may be, after all, that
they are not so foolish or unreasonable as we are tempted
to think. St Thomas shall be their spokesman ; he, at
least, is never foolish or unreasonable, even when cross-
examined by a nineteenth-century intellect, and here
as elsewhere there is a weight and grandeur in the
arguments of the Angelic Doctor which must win our
admiration, even if they fail to win our full assent.
Great as St Thomas was, or rather because he was so
great, he had a child-like reverence for the words of
Jesus Christ and His inspired servants, and, therefore,
all his efforts go to show how the words of Holy Writ
can reasonably bear a literal sense, instead of weakly

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRA.CE. 121

yielding to the clamours of an empty so-called science,
and endeavouring to explain them all away. St
Thomas teaches, therefore, that the spiritual im
material souls really suffer from the fire of which God s
word so often speaks, because it is made the instru
ment of divine justice, and as such binds them down
and holds them fast within its fiery grasp, a penalty
so utterly repugnant to their spiritual nature and
its natural rights and dignity, as to cause the keenest
anguish. For it is unnatural, as he says, that a spiritual
being should be so imprisoned in anything material as
to be cut off from all enjoyment of its natural freedom,
and the torment of the penal fire is due to this power of
imprisoning the soul, a power conferred on it by God as
the instrument of His justice. 1 But whatever opinion
we may hold as to the nature of the fire, it is surely
sufficient for us that our Blessed Lord, who could not
and would not exaggerate, repeatedly alludes to it as
a very terrible suffering; and yet, after all, as a spiri
tual writer well says, once we put aside the thought of
the loss of God, we are speaking of hell with the hell
left out ; 2 so we may pass on to consider one or two of
the many objections put forward with such assurance
by modern " thinkers." The objections themselves are
not modern. St Thomas discussed them and replied
to them more than six centuries ago, but they reappear
from time to time in a new garb and with a fresh flour
ish of trumpets, as though they were the special intellec
tual product of each particular age. They are based,
as indeed are all objections against revealed truth,
on a more or less voluntary misconception and mis-
1 St Thos. 3 a , suppl. 70, 3, 2 Faber, Spirit. Con/., 419.

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statement of the dogma they assail, and though the
manner of attack may differ, its groundwork is ever
the same. They protest against the doctrine of eternal
punishment because they consider it to be altogether
repugnant to (rod s justice and God s love. It is
repugnant, they say, to God s justice. St Thomas thus
formulates their objection : " No sin can deserve eternal
punishment, because there must be some proportion
between the punishment and the offence for which it is
inflicted. But what proportion is there between the
act of a moment and an eternal hell ? " l The Angelic
Doctor, in reply, points out first of all that this argu
ment, taken literally, would be fatal to all justice, human
and divine, for we constantly see crimes that were com
mitted in a moment punished by years of imprisonment,
or even death, which is the human equivalent of eternal
punishment ; the obvious explanation being that the pro
portion between the crime and its punishment is never
based on the duration of the act, but on its malice and
gravity. It is quite true that at first sight there seems
to be a terrible disproportion between the momentary
act of sin and eternal reprobation, but we have to take
into account what that momentary act involves. It is
not easy, and indeed it would be presumptuous to judge
of individual acts that come under our notice, but
looking at the matter in the abstract, and taking mortal
sin to be what we have explained it to be, the wilful,
deliberate, eternal rejection of God, we are bound to
admit that it deserves an eternal hell. For the soul
that consents to such an act does so with full knowledge
of the consequences. It is not taken by surprise ; it
1 St Thos, 1 2^, 87, 3, ad 1.

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE. 123

has every chance. It has been sealed with the image
of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ, crowned with
the most wonderful gifts and graces, and yet it de
liberately refuses to listen to the dictates of its own
reason, it defaces and destroys as far as it can the
beauty of the divine likeness, it wilfully abuses and
flings away its graces and its gifts, it tramples under
foot the blood of its Saviour, and then, rebellious to the
last, it passes out of this world. It has literally chosen
sin for its last end, and therefore, as St Thomas says, it
lias the will to sin eternally. But, it might be urged,
may it not repent after death ? Even Holy Scripture
seems to imply this when it represents sinners in hell
"repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit," and
saying, " we have erred from the way of truth, and
the light of justice hath not shined unto us, and the
sun of understanding hath not risen upon us. We
wearied ourselves in the way of iniquity and destruction,
and have walked through hard ways, but the ways of
the Lord we have not known." l Is not this something
very like repentance, and if so, is it altogether useless ?
It most certainly is useless, for the simple reason that
the time for repentance has passed away. Grod has
given us the day of this life as the time of merit, and
He bids us " work whilst we have the day, because the
night cometh when no man can work." 1 If He had
promised us a second chance in eternity, how should
we employ the time of this life ? If so many lead care
less and wicked lives now, what would it be like under
such conditions? Common sense obliges us to see
the reasonableness of a fixed time of probation, to be
1 Wisd. v, 3, 6, 7. - St Johii, ix, 4,

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followed by just rewards and punishments. But, after
all, is this " repenting and groaning for anguish of
spirit," which Holy Writ attributes to the reprobate,
true and sincere repentance ? Is it repentance at all ?
According to St Thomas, 1 repentance or contrition
implies a sorrow of heart which is based on the love of
God, inspired therefore by His grace, and meritorious in
His sight. But it is manifest from what we have said
that however real the grief of the reprobate may be, it
is certainly not prompted by the love of God. The free
will of the reprobate soul is turned away from God,
seeing that he loves the wickedness for which he is
punished, and would indulge in it again if he could,
though he hates the punishment which is its con
sequence. 2 His grief therefore is based on the hatred
of punishment rather than on the hatred of sin. And
in another place 3 the Angelic Doctor says : " The
repentance of the lost is useless, because their wills are
confirmed in wickedness. They have no regret what
ever for the malice of sin, but only for the punishment
it has entailed; and hence, instead of suggesting any
hope of forgiveness, their grief only fills them with
despair." Evidently then God s justice is not at fault,
and so an appeal is made to His love as an argument
against eternal punishment ; but this objection is even
more unreasonable. It is precisely because God is
infinite love that there is such a place as an eternal
hell. To quote Dante once more :

To rear me was the task of Power Divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and Primaeval Love.

1 St Thos. 3 a , suppl. 5, 3. 2 St Thos. 2 a 2 ae , 13, 4.

3 St Thos. 3 a , 86, 1.

HELL, THE FAILURE OF GRACE. 125

Notice the words primceval love primo amorc.
Not love such as we know it, full of countless im
perfections even at its best ; but primo amore the
first, the best, the most perfect, most patient, most
generous love: love, in fine, which is infinite and
eternal, and when such a love is wilfully, deliberately
and persistently rejected, and rejected with contempt,
it is at last withdrawn, and its absence creates an
eternal hell.

The dogma of everlasting punishment is a standing
rebuke to man s self-worship. It is a perpetual re
minder of his littleness, his ignorance and his depen
dence on Grod, and that is why it is such a stumbling
block in the way of those whose only creed seems
to be the exaltation of self, the glorification of fallen
humanity. It is not that they cannot believe it, the
evidence for it is too convincing; but they will not, and
no amount of evidence can overcome that obstacle.
Our Lord Himself has said it, and as a fitting con
clusion we may listen to His words :

" There was a certain rich man, who was clothed in
purple and fine linen, and who feasted sumptuously
every day. And there was a certain beggar named
Lazarus, who lay at his gate, full of sores, desiring
to be filled with the crumbs that fell from the rich
man s table. But no man gave unto him ; moreover
the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to
pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the
angels into Abraham s bosom ; the rich man also died,
and he was buried in hell. And lifting up his eyes
when he was in torments, he saw Abraham afar off and
Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said : Father

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Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he
may dip the tip of his finger in water to cool my
tongue, for I am tormented in this flame. And
Abraham said to him : Son, remember that thou didst
receive good things in thy life-time, and Lazarus evil
things, but now he is comforted and thou art tor
mented. And besides all this, between us and you
there is fixed a great abyss, so that they who would
pass from hence to you cannot, nor from thence come
hither. And he said : Then, father, I beseech thee that
thou wouldst send him to my father s house, for I have
five brethren, that he may testify unto them, lest they
also come into this place of torments. And Abraham
said to him : They have Moses and the prophets ; let
them hear them. But he said : Nay, father, but if one
went to them from the dead they will do penance.
And he said to him : If they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither loill they believe if one rise again from
the dead." l

1 St Luke xvi.

127

VIII

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE.

Grratia Dei vita ceterna ! In the last of our Conferences
on Grace, we pointed out that the works of God, in the
lives and souls of His creature.s, may be looked at in
two ways. We may consider them according to their
pre-existence in the eternal all-seeing mind of G-od, as
determined by His will, or we may study them as they
are in themselves, in their varied order and succession,
the many changes they undergo, their actions and
sufferings, as they gradually develop and finally attain
the purpose of their being, or fail in its accomplishment.
We were then considering man s supernatural life from
the former point of view, whereas, in these conferences,
we have confined ourselves to the latter, since our pur
pose was, as we stated, " to contemplate the workings
of this supernatural life, to understand the sources of its
power and energy, the means to which it has recourse
in times of weakness and failure, and the consequences
of final triumph or defeat." By this route we have
once more arrived at the term ; we are once more face
to face with that most glorious supernatural end for
which God made us, the perfect knowledge, love, and
possession of Himself ! Gratia Dei vita ceterna. The
grace of God is everlasting life !

Man has an instinctive hope of a higher and nobler

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life than this world can give, and the groundwork of
this hope is his faith in a future state. We appealed to
this universal belief when we were speaking of eternal
punishment, for, as we then pointed out, it is not merely
the idea of a future state, which reason puts before us,
but a future state of happiness or misery, reward or
punishment, according to the life we live here below.
For man, as a reasonable being, gifted therefore with
understanding and free-will, is the master of his own
acts, and deliberately chooses for himself the paths he
intends to pursue. In other words, there is and must
be some clear and definite end before his mind, moving
him to this or that particular course of action ; and it is
the moral goodness or badness of the purpose he has in
view which specifies his action, and stamps it as good or
bad in the moral order. 1 But common sense forbids us
to suppose an indefinite series of such incentives to
action. There must be what we call a last end, an end
in which the will of man finds all that it can desire, and
to whicli in reality all other ends are but as means.
And what is this last end ? According to St Thomas,-
it is nothing less than perfect happiness, for nothing less
than that can satisfy the heart of man ; and hence it is
that all men are of one accord in seeking happiness,
though, as we must confess, all are not agreed as to how
and where this happiness may be found. Some would
have us seek it in the paths of honour and glory, or in
the possession of abundant riches, and the enjoyment of
the many pleasures of mind and body that are their
fruits ; but the voice of nature is not easily silenced, and
it tells us very clearly that it was not for such things
1 St Thos. l a 2" e , 1. a Ibid, art 7.

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 129

as these that we came forth from nothingness, crowned
with such manifold gifts. No created good can give
us perfect happiness. 1 The good we seek is limitless
and boundless nothing less therefore than the source of
all good, (rod Himself, who alone can satisfy our desire
with good things. 2

It surely cannot be denied that life would be a
dismal failure, if this world were the end of all. Quite
apart from what we learn by faith, a daily experience
burns in upon the soul the knowledge of that conflict
between the opposing powers of good and evil, ever
waging in us and around us, and so frequently resulting
in the triumph of the latter. The many so-called "social
problems " are an evidence of this. Something has gone
wrong somewhere, causing suffering and sorrow as a
necessary consequence, and against this all our natural
instincts rise in obstinate revolt, urging us to do our best
to set things right, even though we feel we know not
how or where to begin. For we are convinced that
suffering and injustice cannot be the normal condition
of things. " It is one of the strong proofs of (rod s
existence, and man s immortality," says Bishop Hedley, 3
" that there lies in the heart of every human being the
inextinguishable conviction or inspiration that evil can
not finally triumph." We cannot believe that so many
millions of our race have lived and suffered and died in
vain f We cannot persuade ourselves, no matter how
we try, that so many brave, enduring men and loving
women have borne the burden of the day and the heats,
only to rest for ever in the grave ! The very thought

1 St Thos. 1 2 ae , 2, 8. - Ps. cii, 5.
3 Retreat, j>. 96.

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of it makes our hearts ache, and it would be but a poor
and empty consolation to say to ourselves : " All this is
fate, all this is the result of hopeless necessity and must
go on for ever, and the only prospect before us is the
nothingness of death." It cannot be ! It is against the
instincts of our reason, and the dictates of our common
sense, ever loudly protesting that there must come a
time when virtue is rewarded and vice punished, and
when justice reigns supreme. We talk about " success "
and " failure " in this life, but no matter how sincerely
we may wish to talk, there is deep in our hearts a strange
uneasy consciousness that the words are but conven
tional. They might possibly change places, we cannot
help thinking, if right were might, and we feel that
a day will come when they may be transposed for good
and all. It is this hope of better things which makes
our lives worth living, and enables us to solve its
puzzling riddles and endure its heavy burdens. Look
at that wonderful story put before us by Holy Scrip
ture, which by its very pathos, no less than by its moral
grandeur, has become so familiar to all of us as well-
nigh to have grown into a proverb, the story of Job and
his sufferings. We should utterly miss its real lesson
were we to imagine that it had been handed down
through the long ages merely to teach us patience under
trial. The heart of its teaching is disclosed to us in the
magnificent profession of faith and hope uttered by an
innocent man in the hour of his abasement, when sorrow
and misunderstanding had crushed him to the very
earth : " I know that my Eedeemer liveth, and that at
the last day I shall rise out of the earth and be clothed
again with my body, and in my flesh I shall see my

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 131

God, whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall be
hold, and not another : this my hope is laid up in my
bosom." l For our experience of life, at all events, but
rarely brings us face to face with sufferings so mani
fold, and, of their very nature, so ennobling as those
which were laid upon him. What we see is in every
way more vulgar and more commonplace, of the sort
imagined so vividly and expressed so powerfully by
a well-known modern writer in words which we may
be allowed to quote in full. "Thou knowest my life,

God ! that I was poor, so poor, and unlovely and
alone ! And each day I awoke so weary that I had
scarce the strength to struggle up that I might go forth
to work for the day s bread. And night after night

1 laid me down so tired, too tired to sleep. And, as
I lay, the unendurable thought of the burden which I
must take up on the morrow, and every morrow, and
the still more unendurable thought of dying, and being
thrust down among foul and rolling things into black
nothingness and decay, set my heart leaping like the
heart of the hunted and desperate creature which hears
the hounds behind it, but sees no nook or cranny into
which to creep that it may escape their cruel fangs." 2
But if this be a true picture of countless lives, and it
most surely is, who could look upon it, and realize its
utter misery, and then profess his faith in the existence
of Almighty God, unless that same firm faith in God
assured him that the sufferings of this life were not
worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed ?
For faith in God implies belief in a God of infinite
power, infinite wisdom, and infinite love. It was this

1 Job xix, 25, - Coulson Kernahan, God, and the Ant, p. 19,

132 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

faitli which nerved the heart of Job and upheld him in
his hour of tribulation ; and it was this faith which
enabled him to pass through the furnace of trial, seven
times heated though it was ; a faith, a belief, within the
reach of our poor ordinary efforts also, a knowledge we
possess in common with him by virtue of our common
humanity. Once again then, as ever, we see our faith
and reason walking hand in hand, showing us the same
truth, enforcing the same lesson, for whilst reason so
unfalteringly asserts the existence of another life
beyond the grave, in which its natural instincts place all
that is good and beautiful and true, faith stands by
its side to help it and confirm it, by declaring that the
good and true and beautiful for which we long is in
reality infinite in perfection, being none other than the
Goodness, Truth and Beauty of the infinite God Him
self. This is the great truth we have now to examine,
the nature of that " Heaven," placed before us by divine
revelation, when it bids us ever to incline our hearts to
keep God s justifications, " because of the reward."
What then do we mean by heaven, and what does our
faith teach us about it ?

Heaven is the beautiful dwelling place of the Sacred
Humanity of Jesus, the everlasting home prepared from
before the foundation of the world for those of God s
creatures who should be found worthy of a share in its
blessedness. Its gates were first thrown open when the
trial of the angels was accomplished and the light of the
vision of God burst upon the intelligences of those who
had persevered. But they, like God Himself, were
purely spiritual, and therefore we may say that it was
not until our Blessed Lord ascended from the Mount of

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 133

Olives and enthroned His human nature at the right
hand of the Father, that heaven became, as He Himself
described it, and as we now love to think of it, the many
mansions of our Father s house. Where in the mighty
universe this land of happiness may lie we do not know,
for God has not revealed it to us ; but it would be a
great mistake to hastily conclude that therefore we know
nothing, and that all that we can say is purely fanciful.
Though, for His own good reasons, God has left us
ignorant as to where it is, He tells us clearly what it
is, and from the high mountain of revealed truth, as
from another Nebo, we can see the promised land ; and
no matter how many years of wandering in the desert
lie before us, we can, whenever we wish, refresh our
wearied hearts and spur on our lagging footsteps, by
turning our eyes towards that world of happiness where
Grod will be all in all.

The very first truth impressed upon the minds of
her children by the Catholic Church is that God has
created us to His own likeness, marking our souls with
the seal of His own adorable image that we might
know and understand the purpose of our creation, that
we might realize our own great task of living for Him
and for His glory, and so give back to God the things
that are God s. It is in this likeness or resemblance to
its Creator that the perfection of the rational creature
consists, being gradually worked out and developed in
this life and only finished and completed when the veil
is drawn aside and the soul sees its Maker face to face.
" When He shall appear," says the apostle, l " we shall
be like unto Him, because we shall see Him as He is."
1 1 St John iii, 2.

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For this resemblance to God consists in knowing Him
and loving Him, according to our limited capabilities,
as He knows and loves Himself ; and hence we see at
once that it can only be found in the intellectual part
of our nature, since it is only by means of our intel
lectual powers that we are capable of knowledge and
love. But for the sake of clearness, we may distinguish
in it three grades of intensity. All men are capable of
knowing and loving their Creator, because all possess
the same human nature, made up of a body and a
reasonable soul, and this aptitude or capability consti
tutes the first grade, which St Thomas justly calls the
likeness of " nature." But many souls have more. In
them the divine resemblance deepens into what the
Angelic Doctor calls the likeness of " grace," and this
consists, as we have seen in our former conferences, in
that habitual union with God which supposes and is
based upon the more or less intimate knowledge and
love existing in souls made beautiful by faith, hope and
charity. In this world, however, for many obvious
reasons, it cannot attain its full perfection, and hence
there remains the likeness of " glory," which is to be
the reward of God s servants in the life to come. l We
want to see the full significance of this and the manner
of its accomplishment,

We said that this likeness of the soul to God was
the groundwork of its perfection, and that it was to be
found in the intellectual powers of the soul. This is
equally the case whether we are speaking of the like
ness of nature or the likeness of grace ; and it is a truth
which we learnt in the pages of our Catechism, when we
1 Si Thos. 1-S 93, 4.

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 135

were taught to recognize the divine likeness in our soul in
its triple power of understanding, memory and will. But
because glory, like grace, far from destroying nature,
really and truly perfects it, we must apply the same
teaching to the life of the soul in the world to come, and
we shall find that the ultimate perfection which it there
attains consists in the perfection of these same intel
lectual powers, for there God Himself gives to the under
standing the fulness of light, the fulness of peace to the
will and to the memory the fulness of eternity.

In heaven God will be to the mind the fulness of
light. What do we mean by this ? " While we are in
the body," says St Paul, " we are pilgrims from the
Lord." We are separated from Him who is our last
end, exiles from our Father s house, wanderers in a
foreign land. This is a truth borne in upon us by the
beautiful things of this world which surround us on
every side, no less than by the many sorrows and
miseries of which we were just now speaking. For
when God made the world, He blessed it, because He
saw that it was good ; and though man s sin provoked
His curse and covered the earth with the thorns and
briars of suffering, yet it was not wholly spoiled. It is
not all sorrow and misery. To quote once more the
eloquent writer already referred to, "Who of us can
truly say of our lives that the evil was greater than the
good ? that the gladness was less than the grief ? For
every tear that starts to the eye our lips have worn
a thousand smiles. Love and friendship, and little
children, fields and flowers, sea and sky, sunshine and
starlight, have made life glad and beautiful." a But all
1 Coulson Kernahan, God and the, Ant, p. 28.

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these things are meant to lead us on to God. By their
very beauty, their varied perfections, their attractive
ness, they speak to us of Him who formed and fashioned
them, and gave them to us, the divine, almighty Artist,
the tender Father, whose goodness and beauty they so
faintly shadow forth. Sadness and sorrow and the
many wearinesses of life drive us to God ; the joys and
pleasures of earth are meant to draw us to Him. We
cannot rest in them, even if we try, for we were not
made for them, beautiful as they may be, but for Him
who is reflected in them. Hence St Paul says so justly
that we see God now as in a looking-glass, and that
cannot satisfy us, nor shall we ever be satisfied until
His glory shall appear and we stand face to face with
the Creator of all, for in that clear vision of Him, and
in that alone, can we find perfect happiness. To prove
this same great truth, St Thomas lays down two most
certain principles. " Man," he says, " is never perfectly
happy as long as one unsatisfied desire remains within
his soul, and then, in the next place, the perfection of
every faculty is always in proportion to its attainment
of its object." From these two principles the Angelic
Doctor concludes that man s ultimate and perfect
happiness can be nothing less than the unclouded
vision of God, for, he argues, if our intellect be cognizant
of some effect, without knowing anything of its cause
beyond its mere existence, it must necessarily desire
a fuller knowledge and endeavour to obtain it, since its
perfection depends upon the completeness with which
it apprehends its object. Hence to know the created
things around us, and yet to know nothing of their
Creator save the bare fact of His existence, would make

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 137

real happiness impossible. The mind demands and
necessarily requires a full and perfect knowledge of the
first great cause, and in this knowledge of its Maker
and the union with Him which it implies, finds perfect
happiness. 1 This, and nothing less than this, is the
attainment of its last end, the satisfaction of all its
desires, and therefore theologians call it the " Beatific
Vision," or the sight that makes us happy.

It may seem at first sight that we are no nearer
than when we began, and that we are attempting to
explain what is in reality totally beyond us. We talk
about the " Beatific Vision," but the words hardly con
vey any definite idea to our minds. As far as this life
is concerned, we are met by the words of Holy Writ
assuring us that " no man hath seen God at any time,"
and we cannot forget that most striking scene in the
Book of Exodus, where Moses, the chosen friend and
servant of God, buoyed up by the wonderful con
descensions of his Maker, pleaded and entreated for this
very grace. " If I have favour in Thy sight, shew
me Thy face, shew me Thy glory." And God replied :
" Thou canst not see My face, for no man can see Me
and live. But when My glory shall pass, I will set
thee in a cleft of the rock, and protect thee with My
right hand until I pass, and I will take away My hand,
and thou shalt see My back, but My face thou canst
not see." 51 St Paul too was caught up into what he calls
the third heaven, and he tells us that what he saw may
not be put in words, and that over and above there
was something which eye hath never seen, nor ear
heard, nor heart of man imagined. Truly it would seem

1 St Thos, la 2 ae , 3, 8. 2 Exod. xxxiii,

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that the silence of prayer were more fitted for such
a subject than the heaping together of words, and yet
our faith falters not nor trembles, but contemplates the
revealed truths of God, and shows us clearly and defi
nitely the happiness of our heavenly home.

The "Beatific Vision," then, which makes heaven
what it is, is nothing less than the sight of God face
to face ; that is to say, it is an intellectual act by which
the soul attains its last end, and, having attained it, is
filled with the joy of possessing it ; l and our Blessed
Lord Himself would seem to impress this wonderful
truth upon us when He asserts so solemnly : " This is
eternal life, to know Thee, the true God,"- In this
life we know God by faith ; but in eternity, when
" that which is perfect is come, that which is in part
shall be done away," 3 and "the glory of the Lord shall
be revealed." 4 When we were speaking of faith we
showed that, since all supernatural truth is of its very
nature far beyond the reach of a created mind unless
its natural powers be supplemented by divine assistance,
it was necessary that God should give to the mind that
supernatural help we call the light of faith a light (
because it manifests a light of faith because the truths
so manifested put forward no intrinsic evidence. But
in heaven all is changed. The veils that tried us so
much in this life are drawn aside, the deepest mysteries
are made clear, they flood the mind with the bright
ness of their evidence, and faith is lost in knowledge.
Yet human nature is not changed. Its powers are ever
finite, and God is infinite, and therefore, in the place of

1 St Thos. 1* 2, 3, 4. - St John xvii, 3.

s l Cor. xiii, 10. 4 Rom. viii, 18.

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 139

faith, another supernatural help is given which we call
the light of glory. By this most wonderful gift the
mind of man is lifted up and strengthened, and so en
dowed with power from on high, that the poor trembling
soul may gaze upon the unveiled glory of God, the eternal
fountain of all life and all knowledge, hitherto hidden
in light unapproachable, and man sees God and lives !

But we cannot know God and see His infinite
perfections without instantly cleaving to Him, and pre
ferring Him above all things, and hence the immediate
consequence of the vision of God is an unending act
of love. To see God face to face and not love Him
would be as impossible as to pass in to a glowing furnace
and not feel the heat. In this life it is very different.
By the fall of our first parents, not to speak of our
own repeated falls, our wills have become weakened, and
a sad experience teaches us that though our conscience
may tell us what is right, our poor weak wills may turn
to what is wrong, and as long as life lasts, so long will
this struggle continue, and always shall we lean to sin
and evil, and always shall we shrink from duty and
from good. But the vision of God will change all this,
and God will be to the will the fulness of peace. The
instant that the light of God s countenance is signed
upon us, our wills are made perfect, and forsaking for
ever all that is unworthy of them, they cleave at once
and for ever to the good that is eternal. Our freedom
is not destroyed, but rather made complete and perfect,
and what God wills, as He wills it, and because He wills
it, becomes the delight of the soul. Moreover, in the light
of the Beatific Vision the soul sees the love of God for
His creatures, and the sight and perfect knowledge of

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that love, unutterable and eternal, at once wins back
such a return of love, that her strong immortal life
would break with its intensity, were such a thing
possible, when the vision is even then confirming her in
her immortality. To know God, to love God, to possess
God, her gratitude is summed up and expressed in that
inspired cry of the Psalmist : " Thou art the God of my
heart, and the God that is my portion for ever." 1 For
ever ! God will be to the memory the fulness of eter
nity ! The soul sees that God s love will never change,
that it cannot change. It cannot change, because
such a privation would be a punishment which an
all-just God could never inflict except because of sin,
and sin is impossible to the soul that has once gazed on
the beauty of the all-beautiful God. Its happiness is
therefore eternal. The soul sees that she can never
fall away from God ; she sees that God can never aban
don her, and so her joy is made full and will endure for
ever. Millions and millions of ages will pass in that
beautiful kingdom of light, but they can bring no cloud
to the bright sunshine of that joy. And it is a joy
which never palls, a happiness which never wearies.
The soul is never used to it, never tired of it, never loses
anything of its first unspeakable delight. The rapture
of the first moment endures for all eternity, as long as
God shall be God.

But this is not all ! A day must come when the
body and soul are once more united, and we profess our
firm faith in this truth and our longing hope for it
in the closing words of the Creed : " I believe in the
resurrection of the body, and life everlasting." It was
i Ps. Ixxii, 26,

HEAVEN, THE TKIUMPH OF GRACE. 141

this same faith and hope which supported Job, as we
have already pointed out. " I know that my Eedeemer
livetli, and that at the last day I shall rise out of the
earth and be clothed again with my body, and in my
flesh I shall see my God, this my hope is laid up in
my bosom." The effects of the vision of God on the soul
overflow on the body, and confer upon it also the most
wonderful gifts, so wonderful as to appear almost a new
nature. St Paul describes them to us : " It is sown in
corruption, it shall rise in incorruption ; it is sown in
dishonour, it shall rise in glory ; it is sown in weakness,
it shall rise in power ; it is sown a natural body, it
shall rise a spiritual body." 1 Let us see what these
gifts imply. Whilst we live in this world we are under
the law of suffering, for our bodies are corruptible of
their very nature, and a day must come when the
health and strength of which we are sometimes so
proud must forsake us utterly, and we shall die. " The
dust returns to the earth from whence it came, and the
spirit returns to God who gave it." 2 But when the
time of reunion comes, when the trumpet sounds and
the dead rise again, " we shall be changed. For this
corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal
must put on immortality ; and when this mortal hath
put on immortality then shall come to pass the saying
that is written : Death is swallowed up in victory !
Death, where is thy victory ? Death, where is thy
sting " ? 3 The second gift of which St Paul speaks is
that of brightness or " glory." " It is sown in dis
honour, it shall rise in glory." When our Saviour on

1 1 Cor. xv, 42, 44. 2 Eccles xii, 7.

;; 1 Cor. xv, 52-55.

142 CONFERENCES ON GKACK.

the mountain top allowed the glory which was in His
soul to transfigure His mortal body, we are told that
His face shone like the sun, and His garments became
white as snow, and He Himself has assured us that, in
like manner, the bodies of the just shall " shine as the
sun in the kingdom of their Father." l But brightness
and beauty imply a further gift : " It is sown in weak
ness, it shall rise in power." There may be some few
people in this world whose lines of life have fallen in
pleasant places, and who hardly know the meaning of
incessant hard work and its consequent weariness ; but
for the great majority of our race, the hewers of wood
and drawers of water, whose life from morning till
night is one long round of toil, what comfort and con
solation in this thought ! " It is sown in weakness, it
shall rise in power." To go where we will, to do what
we like, as though we shared in some mysterious way
in God s omnipotence and immensity, and yet never to
feel the burden of fatigue or the lassitude that spoils
the most enthralling pleasure. And then, lastly, " it is
sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body."
When our Lord rose from the dead, there was no need
to roll away the stone that covered the mouth of the
tomb. His glorified body passed through it as the rays
of the sun pass through the clear crystal. So also
when the disciples had closed and barred the doors of
the upper room, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and
stood in the midst of them, and it was His own real
Self and not a mere phantom. " Touch Me, and see,"
He said, " it is I Myself. A spirit hath not flesh and
bones as I have " ; and this gift also is bestowed on
1 St Matt, xiii, 43.

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 143

those who have won for themselves a place in the
kingdom of God.

There are many other thoughts over which we might
linger, for the subject is and ought to be attractive to those
who are looking forward to the coming of this kingdom,
even as home-sick exiles love to think about the beauties
of their fatherland. Tha endowment of the glorified
bodies of the just with these gifts revealed to us by St
Paul, necessarily implies powers of enjoyment which we
can hardly imagine. The pleasures of sense here in
this world are innocent in themselves and in no way
against God s law. But they sometimes seem to be the
means of making us forget God s law, because of their
strange power. They intoxicate the mind and heart,
and even seem to dominate free-will itself. In heaven
they will exist in all their intensity, and to surrender
ourselves to their uttermost delights will be an act of
highest worship and perfection. Then there is the joy
which arises from the company of the blessed. Love is
the best, most perfect, most absorbing of all earthly joys
and at the same time the most God-like, for " God is
love." What must be the bliss of a life an unending
life amongst unnumbered millions of perfect beings,
loving each one of them, and being loved in return
witli a love surpassing all possibilities of earthly love.
Yet we do not love, nor are we loved by all alike The
natural affections of earth are not extinguished by the
happinesss of heaven. On the contrary they are inten
sified in every way, and what a joy to be with those
we loved so dearly when on earth and to realize that
another separation is impossible. The partings of earth
are bitter, and sometimes cast a shadow on the soul which

144 CONFERENCES ON GKACE.

never seems to lift, but the deeper the shadow and the
more complete our Joneliness, the brighter is our glad
ness and our joy when once again we meet those whom
we have lost :

Pouring the might of love from soul to soul
In the untold communion of the blest !

For ever and for ever we shall dwell with them
amongst that multitude that no man can number, now
rejoicing at the dazzling glory of those chosen souls
that follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, now
exulting in the magnificence of the martyrs with their
crimson robes dyed in their own blood, now wondering
at those stars of heaven, the teachers of God s people, of
whom Holy Scripture declares that they shall shine with
the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for all
eternity, because they have instructed many unto
justice.

" Shew us the Father," said the apostle St Philip ;
"Lord, shew us the Father, and it is enough." Shew
us the Father ! Take away the veil that hides from us
the face of God, and then, and not till then the infinite
void in our hearts will be filled ! The world goes on
its way, and the way of the world is evil. False Christs
and false prophets abound everywhere, and they are
ever seeking to turn man away from his true end. They
would try to persuade him that his happiness is in riches,
in pleasures, in an equal distribution of power, in edu
cation, in himself, for there is a fashionable religion
now-a-days which dethrones the all-perfect and eternal
God, for a vague and pitiful deity called " humanity " !
But it is all in vain ; God gave us our nature and our

HEAVEN, THE TRIUMPH OF GRACE. 145

nature cannot change ; and those who listen to these
false teachers only turn away in disappointment, and
wander hither and thither crying out in the bitterness
of an unsatisfied heart : Quis ostendit nobis bona ]
Who will show us any good ? Only the Catholic faith
can give an answer, and its answer is ever the same ;
God made man to know Him, to love Him, to serve
Him in this world and to be happy with Him for ever
in the next. We see the same great truth solemnly
affirmed by the Saviour of the world Himself, when
He had finished His work on earth, and for the last
time gathered around Him His faithful friends and
disciples to hear His words of farewell. " As the
Father hath loved Me," He said to them, " I also have
loved you. Abide in My love. If you keep My com
mandments you shall abide in My love, as I also
have kept My Father s commandments and do abide
in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that
My joy may be in you and your joy may be filled. " 2
And what was this joy of which He spoke and which
He called " His joy," because so utterly beyond all reach
of sorrow ? It was the joy of His soul in the vision of
the Godhead, the joy which He promised them and all
His faithful servants when He said : " I will see you
again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no
man shall take from you. . . . Father, I will, that
where I am, they also whom Thou hast given Me
may be with Me, that they may see My glory which
Thou hast given Me, because Thou hast loved Me -be
fore the creation of the world." 3

1 Ps. iv, 6. a St John xv, 9-11.
3 Ibid, xvi, 22 ; and xvii, 24,

146 CONFERENCES ON GRACE.

A few more words, and we have done. The very
glory of heaven should fill us with fear and trembling.
If the reward were less, it might seem more easy to
deserve, more easy to obtain ! But it is so infinitely
great, and so easy to miss, and if it be missed ? But
it must not be missed ; we must make up our minds to
fight on until the end. The harder the struggle the
more chance of success, if only we fight on bravely and
perseveringly, for we serve a good Master, in whose eyes
effort seems to count for victory. How can this earth
have any real hold upon our hearts when heaven is
placed before us ? How can joys and pleasures, which
at the best endure but for a day, make us risk a happi
ness which is eternal ? As Catholics nay, as reasonable
beings we should be ready to despise all, to risk all, to
sell all in order to buy this pearl of great price, eternal
life in the kingdom of God. Once we have made up
our minds to this, life must be happy because it is the
way to God, and death must be welcome because it
comes to us as His messenger, changing into fruition the
" hope that is laid up in our bosom," and dispelling for
ever the shadows of earth with words that are the
revelation of heaven : " The Master is here, and
calleth thee." 1

1 St John xi, 28.

THE KND.

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Conferences on the life of
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