over the face of the earth, have all but one creed, one altar, one voice, the reformed Churches with their thousand creeds and thousand discordant voices, and of whom according to Tertullian, schism constitutes the unity; then, with your hand upon your heart, ask yourself, on which side are found the children of truth and love, and on which side the victims of error and pride.

I think it has been sufficiently demonstrated, that the Catholic system, reconciling the respective claims of divine and human reason, is the only one which can unite our thought to the thought of God, and place us in the situation to render to the supreme intelligence the homage of a faith immoveable in its foundation, and enlightened and rational in its motives.

Let us now see if this system so adapted to give stability to the understanding has equal power to warm and elevate the heart.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

CHRISTIAN DEIFICATION OF MAN.-GRACE.-ITS DEFINITION, ITS NECESSITY.-SACRAMENTS.

THE aim proposed to man by Jesus Christ, is indeed placed at an alarming elevation. Be you, therefore, perfect as also your heavenly Father is perfect.†

This is progress, without doubt, upon the most gigantic scale; but it is also the evident tendency of humanity. When the father of lies said to Eve: You shall be as

* Quibus schisma unitas est. De Præscript., § 42.

Matth. v. 48.

Gods, he only touched the strongest fibre of the human heart.

Man having left God desires to return to God; and if he is ignorant of the true means of deifying himself he will overthrow the political and intellectual world to exalt himself into a divinity. Behold, here, the haughty conqueror who says to a hundred subject people: "Adore me, for I am God."† There, see the proud philosopher who, not being able to arrogate divine honors exclusively to himself, deifies humanity in the mass, and exclaims: We are all God.

The Divine restorer of fallen man must then open to us the true road which leads from the degradation of the carnal life to the height of the spiritual and divine life; but how are we to be induced to walk in it?

If it is easy for the mind to ascend to God on the wings of faith, it is not so with the heart, that weak and low and languid portion of the human being. Who can lift it to heaven, the heart, which never rises above the earth except to soar into space upon the capricious breath of pride! To inflame the heart with Divine love, to regulate its affections and desires according to the affections and good pleasure of God, is the achievement of grace.

* Genes. iii. 5.

Napoleon, who sometimes forgot in the intoxication of power, as he afterward avowed, that he was a Christian, often appeared to regret the time when princes had absolute power over the mind and body. He said one day to the grand-master of the University: "I was not born in my right time, Monsieur de Fontanes: see Alexander the Great; he could call himself the son of Jupiter, without contradiction. As for me, in this age I find a priest more powerful than I, for he reigns over souls, and I reign only over matter."-(Histoire de Pie VII., by M. Arland, ch. xxix.) In this the reflective man finds an excellent demonstration of the following truth: Without one sole head, invested with the supreme spiritual power, and independent of political power, Europe would still be Pagan, or would at onee infallibly become so.

But what is grace? will the man ask, who has never availed himself of it. Let us speak to this son of earth in a language which he can understand. "Have you never experienced," I would say to him, "the inexplicable but very real power of the graces of this world? Has your heart never pursued the enchanting vision of glory through the field of battle, or the difficult parts of science? Has it never taken wing to follow some earthly beauty? And is it not true that while you have been under the spell, the labors of Hercules have seemed to you less fabulous? In this, behold what the Christian soul experiences, only in a higher degree, when rising by reflection and prayer above the sphere of the body, a ray of infinite beauty appears to him and enkindles in his heart the flame of love; when contemplating the magnificent crowns and the eternal triumph of the conquerors of hell, of the flesh and the world, he feels the beating of his heart and cries with a noble ambition: And I also, I wish to become a hero of eternity, a saint! Is it possible that the infinite centre of all beauty, of all greatness, should be without its influence over the human heart, when we see this heart so often yielding to the attractions of inferior charms and more empty greatness."

Divine grace, then, is the attraction which the sublime realities of the invisible world exercise over the mind and will of man; an attraction no more mysterious and no less real than that which wheels the planets around their centre, with this difference that the one is involuntary and the other free.

Grace is, if I may so express it, the accompaniment of revelation. The latter is the action of God upon the understanding, enlightening it, and teaching it what we should believe and practise: the former is the action of God upon the heart to quicken it and accustom it to the practice of

virtue.

If revelation is the voice of our Heavenly Father who

stoops to our ear and says to us: "What are you doing on the earth, my children? behold this beautiful Heaven where I have prepared you a throne!" Grace is the paternal hand of the Father which grasps ours while he says to us: "Courage, my children! if the path to heaven is rough, I will sustain your steps."

Now, as the Divine thought, in order to penetrate our intellect, which is veiled in a gross body, must assume the sensible form of external speech, so grace in order to reach the heart must, in some way, incarnate itself. Hence the sacraments, which are according to the Catholic doctrine, the sensible and productive signs of grace.

It is into this christian method of cure, by which the heavenly physician has prepared divine cordials for the soul, that we are about to enter.

CHAPTER XXXV.

FOUNDATION OF THE CATHOLIC THEORY OF JUSTIFICATION. FALL OF MAN.-REDEMPTION.-HOW IT IS APPLIED TO US.

To form a just idea of the Catholic theory concerning the sacraments and the justification of man, we must go back to the great principles of christian philosophy of which this theory is only the application.

God, because He is He who is, and by whom all things are,* can love nothing except in Himself and by relation to Himself. All being, all perfection existing in Him and by Him, what could He love beyond Himself and His works? Nothing has nothing worthy of love.

God loves himself infinitely in his Word, in which he sees

Exod. iii. 14.

the perfect and substantial image of his own perfections; it is also in his Word that he contemplates with love his creatures, for it is by it that he has drawn from nothing all that is in Heaven and on the earth, things visible and invisible, &c.; but he only loves these beings in proportion to the resemblance which they bear to himself, that is, through their conformity to the Word. None among them will find favor in his sight and will enter into his glory, except the Heavenly Father sees in him the image of the beloved Son in whom alone he is well pleased. It is in this sense that the Word, although it be the only and eternal Son of the Father, is so often called the first born of all creatures, the representative, the archetype, the head of the vast family of creatures.

Wo, then, to the creature, who, abusing his liberty, wanders from the way traced out for him by the Word, in which to complete the divine image! This did the rebel angel. This did also man, at the instigation of the fallen angel.

Adam, by his rebellion, threw off the divine character of the child of God, and became justly the slave of the rebel, whose will he obeyed, in contempt of the divine will. He transmitted to his children the human nature which he frightfully degraded; he transmitted it to his children; and these are all born children of wrath. Why? Because they are all flesh; because crime has changed the noble instincts which God gave to innocent man, into the vile and brutal

* Qui cùm sit splendor gloriæ, et figura substantiæ ejus, portansque omnia verbo virtutis suæ. (Hebr. i. 3.) Qui est imago Dei invisibilis, &c. (Coloss. i. 15.)

Ques præscivit et prædestinavit conformes fieri imaginis Filii sui, &c. (Rom. viii. 29.)

Primogenitus omnis creaturæ . . . Ipse est ante omnes, et omnia in ipso constant, &c. (Coloss. i. 16, et seq.)

§ Ephes. ii. 3.-See 1st Problem, ch. xxii.

Genes. vi. 3.