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the life which is his, having been given to him, because he is an effect.

It is the same with his intellectual faculties. He can atrophy them through wilful ignorance, or he can develop them by constant effort. His life and his mental faculties are talents to be put out to usury, or to be buried in the earth; but they are not given man to bury, but to make the most of, and in this consists his duty.

He has the

It is the same with his emotional powers. capacity of loving God and loving man. He may concentrate all that love on himself; and destroy its very nature; by so doing he ceases to be religious and social, and thus snaps those cords which would draw him onward to perfection.

Grace is to the moral force what the principle of life is to the living force. Just as man has not the principle of life in himself, is not the cause of life, so he has not in himself the principle of morality, he is not the cause of moral force.

If he is effect in one, he is effect in the other. If he be not the principle of vital force, he is not the principle of moral force. The law is one. God is in all things cause, man in all things is effect.

In science, man is not cause. He does not lay down the laws of nature. He makes his theories, and has to adapt and readapt them as his experience enlarges. There is a law of nature, and towards that law he feels his way; that law may be discovered, but it cannot be imposed by him.

Grace is the relation of God to man's moral nature, as truth is His relation to man's mental nature, and life is His relation to man's animal nature.

In all these relations man is free, free to interrupt and

destroy the connexion; to cut off the relation to his animal nature by suicide; to his intellectual nature by persistent ignorance; to his moral nature by rejection of grace.

And just as man may accept and abuse one relation, so he may accept and abuse the other relations.

He may accept his life, but refuse to accept intelligence and morality; then he lives merely as an animal.

He may accept his life and his reason and refuse grace; and then he lives merely as an intelligent man.

He may accept his life and grace and refuse reason; and then he lives as a mystic.

He may accept his life, his reason, and grace; and then he lives his perfect life—as a Christian.

There is no constraint; he is perfectly free. The Absolute, in all his relations with man, is an incessant appeal to life, to science, and to good; and man is the voluntary reponse to good, to science, and to life.

Thus, man is free by and in the Absolute; and grace, far from being the destruction of the liberty of man, is the cause of his liberty; for, just as he has life only because there is a Principle of life, and has intelligence, only because there is a Principle of intelligence, so he has a moral life, only because there is a Principle of goodness.

The liberty of the human conscience is thus solidly established, since it is necessitated by the very relation man stands in to God, by the nature of man, and by the nature of God.

Deism suspends the communication of the life of the absolute to the contingent, from the moment of the birth. of the latter; Pantheism destroys the link between the absolute and the contingent by fusing them into one mass; Anthropotheism by placing in man a factitious absolute, and thus denying the real absolute.

It is the link between the intellect of man and the mind of God.

So with the heart. The faculty of loving is given man at his birth, but the objects on which it can beam, and from which it can recover its warmth, are around him. Place a man in a desert island, and he will look about him for some object which he may love, a parrot or a goat. Enclose him within stone walls, and he will expend his affection on the mice and spiders; even, it may be, on the cold cell itself. The Incarnation is the carrying out of the analogy. Man, if he must love men or other creatures, must also love God; and that he may love God, God must materialize Himself. He has materialized His life in the elements of consumption to nourish the life of man; He has materialized His intelligence in the works of Nature to educate the reason of man; He has materialized His love in Christ to draw out and to nourish the charity of man.

But as Christ in His material presence was only for thirty-three years on earth, and men live, generation after generation, with the same want, the sacraments are, according to Catholic theory, a prolongation of the Incarnation, a materializing of grace, to bring it within the compass of man's affections. On this point I shall speak in another chapter. I wish here simply to insist on the materializing of grace being according to analogy. Everything has its outward and visible form and its inward and spiritual grace, the bread we eat, the flowers we study, the objects we love, and the sacraments we use.

Vital force might be conveyed to us without a gross medium, but, as a fact, it is not. If there be angels they will draw their life from the source of life without its having passed first into matter, and become as it were incarnate. They may know without any creation, which is a manifesta

tion of the thoughts of the Creator, His ideas written on the world He has called into being; to them no Incarnation is necessary, for they can love directly, without need of an exteriorization of that love; but to us it is not so, double in our nature, being composed of body and soul, and these compounds being so united that lesion of one wounds the other, God operates upon us through a medium. He gives vital force through food, intellectual force through the study of His works, spiritual force through sacraments.

Everything may become a sacrament of good, as everything may be made a sacrament of evil. As the trail of the serpent is over all the flowers of earth, so has the shadow of the ascended Christ fallen over them all and sanctified them. The mountain peak glowing with the last evening light, the pine reflected in the still green lake, the dew dripping flowers at morning and the high-soaring lark, are all sacraments, or may be sacraments to us-sacraments of the beauty and goodness of the Creator. But there are other sacraments conferring moral force; sacraments which make the Incarnation not a mere history of the past, but an ever-present, living, earnest reality to the Catholic.

As the life man has to preserve requires constant nourishing, as the mind requires a constant supply of intellectual nutriment through observation, reading, or listening,-and what is literature but the materialized thoughts of the writers, and what are words but embodied ideas?-so the moral life requires constant moral nutriment, that is grace. And as the moral life is exposed to various dangers, and to times of sickness, and fits of exhaustion, it needs a variety of means of grace to sustain and stimulate it at all times. This is what the Church provides in all her sacraments and pious rites. There is a constant overflow of divine grace through material channels.

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It is the link between the intellect of man and the mind of God.

So with the heart. The faculty of loving is given man at his birth, but the objects on which it can beam, and from which it can recover its warmth, are around him. Place a man in a desert island, and he will look about him for some object which he may love, a parrot or a goat. Enclose him within stone walls, and he will expend his affection on the mice and spiders; even, it may be, on the cold cell itself. The Incarnation is the carrying out of the analogy. Man, if he must love men or other creatures, must also love God; and that he may love God, God must materialize Himself. He has materialized His life in the elements of consumption to nourish the life of man; He has materialized His intelligence in the works of Nature to educate the reason of man; He has materialized His love in Christ to draw out and to nourish the charity of man.

But as Christ in His material presence was only for thirty-three years on earth, and men live, generation after generation, with the same want, the sacraments are, according to Catholic theory, a prolongation of the Incarnation, a materializing of grace, to bring it within the compass of man's affections. On this point I shall speak in another chapter. I wish here simply to insist on the materializing of grace being according to analogy. Everything has its outward and visible form and its inward and spiritual grace, the bread we eat, the flowers we study, the objects we love, and the sacraments we use.

Vital force might be conveyed to us without a gross medium, but, as a fact, it is not. If there be angels they will draw their life from the source of life without its having passed first into matter, and become as it were incarnate. They may know without any creation, which is a manifesta

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