A MAP OF LIFE


F. J. SHEED


SHEED & WARD, NEW YORK, MCMXXXIX

Printed in Great Britain


Nihil Obstat: Innocentius Apap, O.P., S.T.M.
Censor Deputatus

Imprimatur: + Josephus Butt
Vic. Gen.

Westmonasterii, Die IV Octobris, MCMXXXIII



CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I.     THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S PURPOSE

II.    THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S LAWS

III.   HEAVEN

IV.    THE CREATION AND FALL

V.     THE INCARNATION

VI.    THE MYSTICAL BODY

VII.   TRUTH:
      (A.) THE TEACHING CHURCH

VIII.  TRUTH:
      (B.) THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY

IX.    LAW AND SIN

X.     LAW AND SUFFERING

XI.    THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE:
      (A.) HOW IT COMES TO THE SOUL

XII.   THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE:
      (B.) HOW IT WORKS IN THE SOUL

XIII.  HELL

XIV.   PURGATORY: HEAVEN

INDEX



INTRODUCTION

THE traveller through a strange country usually gets vivid
impressions of individual things, but only a confused
impression of the country in its totality. He remembers this
mountain and that stream and the other village; but how one
is related to the other, and the general winding of roads
that he has barely glimpsed, cannot in the nature of things
stand clear in his mind: and a map of the whole country seen
at the end of his travels, may very well be full of
surprises and is, in any case, a totally new view. In very
much the same way a traveller through life gets vivid--
sometimes extremely vivid--impressions of things near at
hand: confused impressions of things seen at a distance or
only heard of: but of the whole plan of life, no idea at
all. In his mind will be a jumble of facts, tossed about in
any order--God, sin, church-going, disease, sacraments,
suffering, the treason of friends, hostilities, death and
the fear of death, money and the loss of it, God-made-man--
and so on without end. But which of these things are big
things and which of them are little, he will not know with
certainty: the things that have come nearest to himself will
seem big things: the remoter things will seem small.

And of the relations of these things one to another--how one
thing agrees with, or conflicts with, another--of all this,
merely by dint of living, he will have only the most
confused and uncertain impression. In fact it may easily
happen that a man who merely lives, and neither reflects nor
is taught, does not even suspect relationships, but thinks
of all things as accidents with no reason in themselves save
that they happened, and no connection with each other save
that one came earlier and one came later. Because of this
confusion, I propose to try to make what may roughly be
called a map of life--a scale map in which the principal
"natural features" will be shown in their right proportions
and the roads between them drawn in. This map will not be of
my own drawing, fruit of my own experience of life. Nor will
it be of any man's drawing. It will be a transcript of what
God, the Author of life, has revealed as to the meaning of
the whole and the relations of the parts.

Nor will it be a demonstration. Maps do not prove, but only
state. There are only two reasons for trusting a map: one is
the authority of the mapmaker: the other is one's own
experience, when one has travelled the road with its
guidance. The second is normally of less practical value. We
need to be assured of a map's trustworthiness at the
beginning of a journey. A map, therefore, must be accepted
or rejected according to the confidence the map-maker
deserves. In this instance, fortunately, the map-maker is
God. In this effort to set out the plan of life, there will
be no attempt anywhere to prove the truth of what is said,
but only to state what, according to the Church He founded,
God has said.



I. THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S PURPOSE

To the detached observer man is something of a curiosity. He
lives in two worlds at once, and this not as a being who
belongs to one world and has simply got tangled up in
another, but as a being who belongs essentially to both of
them. God, who alone exists in His own right, who is all-
knowing and all-powerful, who exists without the shadow of
limitation, made all things. Considering the beings God has
made, we find two broad categories, spirit and matter.

Spirit is being which has the power of knowing and willing.
Matter is being which has not these powers. There is a more
obvious but less important distinction between them: matter
can be perceived by the senses, spirit cannot.

Of God's creatures there are some that are pure spirits--
angels--with no material part. There are some that are
purely material--animals, plants, stones and the rest--with
no spiritual part. Between them is man. In him alone spirit
and matter are united: by his soul he is a spirit as the
angels are: by his body he is part of the material universe.

And, as has already been said, he belongs to both worlds by
his essence. He is not simply a spirit who is for the moment
tied down to, or tied up in, a body. It is of his very
nature to be a union of matter and spirit.

The soul of man is not more essentially a partner in the
human compound than his body: but it is the more important
partner. For in the first place it is the principle of life
in the body: it remains with the body so long as the body is
capable of being animated by it: the body corrupts whereas
the soul continues in existence; and in the second place it
knows and wills: that is, it has the two faculties of
intellect and will by which it can enter into conscious and
determined relationship with all that is.

Such a being, then, is man. It is life as it concerns man
that is the business of this map.

We shall understand the map better if we grasp its universal
necessity. A man may very well say that whether there is or
is not a divine revelation as to the meaning of human life,
it is at any rate only of academic interest, desired by none
save the dwindling number who like things cut and dried and
take comfort in the voice of authority.

For a man who reasons thus we must show that an acceptance
of the revelation of God as to the meaning of life has a
bearing not only upon holy living, but even upon sane
living; that only those who believe in such a revelation can
shape their own lives correctly or help their fellow-men.
Those who do not accept the revelation, even if they have
the best will in the world (which not all men have), can
neither direct their own lives aright nor help other men--
save accidentally and within a very narrow field. From such
men the world has little to hope and an immense amount to
fear. And into their hands the world is tending more and
more to fall.

In one word, the reason for their helplessness, both in
relation to themselves and in relation to others, is that
they do not know what a man is.

You do not truly know what anything is until you know what
it is for. Knowing what a thing is made of, even knowing
whom a thing is made by, these things are but scanty
knowledge, impotent of themselves to lead to fruitful
action. The complete knowledge demands a knowledge of
purpose. A very crude instance may make this sufficiently
obvious truth still more obvious. Suppose a man who has
never shaved: and suppose that he suddenly discovers a
razor. He does not know what it is, but he discovers that it
cuts. Whereupon he uses it for cutting wood. He does not cut
a great deal of wood and he ruins the razor, leaving it fit
only for the scrap-heap. The point is that he has used it
without knowing its purpose; and save by accident such use
must always be misuse. And in the face of the general
proposition that nothing can be used aright until its
purpose is known, the man who uses anything at all without
such knowledge is acting blindly. He may mean well, but
well-meaningness is not a substitute for knowledge of
purpose.

Obviously the perfect way to know the purpose of the thing
is to find out from its maker: any other method leaves too
many loopholes for error.

Apply this principle to man himself: we cannot use ourselves
aright nor help any other man till we know what man is for:
we can meddle with him, tinker with him, mean well to him,
but save in a limited way we cannot help him.

Here we must make a short digression. There are only two
ways in which anything can come to be. Either it is
intentional or accidental: that is, either someone intended
it or it merely chanced. The thing that is intentional has a
purpose: accidents have no purpose. Humanity, like other
things, must be either an accident and so purposeless, or
else have been made with intent. Catholics know that man was
made, and made by an intelligent Being who knew the purpose
of His own action. Further, God who made us and knew what He
made us for, has told us what He made us for. Accepting His
Word, we know the purpose of our existence, and we can
proceed to live intelligently according to it. Short of this
knowledge, intelligent living is not possible for us.

For apart from God's own statement as to what He had in mind
when He made us, we have no way of knowing. We cannot tell
ourselves: the scientist can tell us what we are made of, or
rather what our bodies are made of, but he cannot tell us
what we are made for: and by comparison with this altogether
vital matter, what he has to say, interesting as it is, is
but trivial.

In other words, short of God telling us, we cannot be told;
and short of being told we cannot know. We can of course
theorize--or in plain English, guess. There is one, and only
one, colourable alternative to a revelation from God as a
means of knowing the purpose of man's existence. We might
simply take human nature as it is, study it, come to a full
and accurate knowledge of it: we could then reason from
man's nature as to the particular purpose for which a being
of that nature must have been made: or, avoiding the idea of
purpose altogether, we might reason as to the best use to
which a being of those powers could be put.

This, I say, is a colourable alternative. Indeed, for one
who is unaware of the revelation of God, it is the highest
exercise of the intellect. With this method, had God not
told us what was in His mind, we should have had to rest
content.[1] Yet we may be glad that He did not so leave us,
since it is liable to error in many ways, of which two are
of capital importance:

(1) There may be error in the reading of human nature. Most
of men's efforts to read human nature, and frame a system of
life in accord with it, err by inability to seize the whole.
One part of human nature is isolated, the rest ignored.
Further, as between various uses to which powers might be
put, there can be no deciding which is higher and which is
lower, save in the light of the purpose of the whole being:
those uses which serve the purpose are good, those which
hinder it are bad.

(2) The second objection is far more important and is,
indeed, fundamental to the understanding of the whole of
what is to come. Even if human nature were fully understood
with no shadow of error, the purpose of man's life could be
deduced from it only if the purpose of man's life were
contained in it-that is, if man's purpose simply meant the
highest activity possible to his own nature. But supposing
the purpose of human life is some activity or state higher
than man's nature. Then we cannot find it simply by studying
his nature. And God has in fact taught that He destines us
not for something of which our nature is in itself capable
(and which might, therefore, as I have said, be deduced from
our nature) but for something to which He in His generosity
chose to lift us; and this obviously cannot be deduced from
any study of us: one may deduce the incidence of justice,
but not of generosity.

Given, then, that apart from the revelation of God we cannot
know with certainty what is the purpose of our existence as
man, the only thing left for the one who does not believe in
such a revelation is to choose an object of life: to decide
for himself what he will use his life for. But given the
myriad possibilities before every man, the chances are that
he will choose the wrong one and so spoil his life: and if
he is in a position to control the destinies of others,
whether as a king or a dictator or simply as the father of a
family, the disaster will be very great: and the more
zealous and energetic he is, the greater will the disaster
be. In no case is intelligent living--that is, living
consciously for the true purpose of our being--possible to
us unless we are told by God what the purpose is.

It is, therefore, the very highest act of our intellect thus
to grasp the revelation of God, since this is knowledge that
we must have, and knowledge that we must either be told or
do without. It is foolish to stigmatize this acceptance as a
denial of freedom or a form of intellectual suicide. The
object of thought is truth: if a particular piece of truth
is necessary, can be known with certainty by the teaching of
another, and cannot be known otherwise, then a man is really
acting suicidally in rejecting the truth merely because he
did not find it for himself. He is preferring the exercise
of the means to the attainment of the end. If a man knows
what knowing means, he cannot even think he knows man's true
purpose save through the revelation of God. And so he cannot
direct his own life rightly. Nor can he help others.

Here the philanthropist might say: "I am a practical man
doing the immediate job. Whether there is a God or not, here
is a man suffering, here is a wrong to be righted": but this
is not practical, this dashing at the job without the
necessary preliminary theorizing. For if you do not know
what men are--that is, are for--how do you know what is good
for them? That thing is good for any being which helps it to
achieve the true purpose of its nature. How can you help men
to that, if you do not know what their true purpose is?

Nor should we be misled by the fact that there are certain
obvious things that such a man can do. Principally he can
relieve bodily suffering. But all his aid is "first aid": of
profound, permanent, certain help to man he can do nothing.
In fact the general effort of those who thus would help
their fellow men with no thought of God is almost
exclusively confined to bodily well-being, or the relief of
bodily suffering.

And when they approach such questions as birth-control,
divorce, the killing of the incurable, and a dozen others,
it is beyond their power really to answer the question
raised. For these things are right or wrong according as
they help or hinder a man in the achievement of the purpose
of his being: and it is not so much as possible to express
an intelligent opinion on them save in the slight of a sure
knowledge of what the purpose of life is. When the
philanthropist is not merely unaware of God's revelation,
but definitely convinced that man is only the matter of his
body, his position is easier. If he has to decide upon the
question of divorce, for instance, then for him the only
problem is whether an accidental collection of electrons and
protons--called for convenience a man--will function more
harmoniously with that second collection of electrons and
protons which it is at present living with, or with some
third collection of electrons and protons. Such a question
is simple enough. Simple because it really does not matter.
But if man is more than that--a being with a true purpose in
life--then all that is said in ignorance of his purpose is
quite irrelevant.

On all the moral teaching of those who have not the Catholic
revelation, there lies this mark of superficiality: the only
rule that appears to be of universal application is that
suffering must always be relieved. But even this, one dare
not call a principle, since it is not related to any true
view of life. By good fortune, it is a rule that often works
to the advantage of the sufferer; and in the one who
exercises it, it bears witness to a true virtue: indeed the
relief of suffering is one of the highest rules of the
Christian life. But, apart from a right view of the purpose
of human life, it is a blind rule, and there is no virtue in
blindness. Carried too far, as our age is tending more and
more to carry it, the rule can work immeasurable evil. For
there are things that are worse than suffering.

Two questions, then, are to be asked of any religious or
social teacher who offers some system of life for the
acceptance of men: The first is: What, according to you, is
the purpose of man's life?

The second is: How do you know?

When he answers the second, be very insistent. Unless he
says "God has revealed it," then he is wasting time. If he
says God has revealed it, then he must be prepared to show
that God has done so. To both questions the Catholic Church
has an answer. In this book I am concerned only with the
first and with certain things that flow from it. Life, and
all the things of life, have a meaning in relation to man,
in themselves, in relation to one another. What the meaning
is, God has told us: we need to know it: there is no other
way of knowing. This book is simply an attempt to transcribe
what God has said.



ENDNOTES

1. See Chapter XII.



II. THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S LAWS

THE argument of the first chapter went to show that the very
minimum required for intelligent living--namely, the
knowledge of the purpose of our life--is dependent upon a
revelation from God: that without such a revelation we
cannot know our purpose, and so cannot have any means of
testing the value or the significance of anything that we
do. As I have said, this is a minimum, and reflection on
experience is sufficient to show that something more is
needed from God than a bare revelation of what He made us
for.

Very early in life man becomes aware that he is living in a
world of laws: the series of happenings which lead him to
the conclusion are nearly all unpleasant: but whether he
ever formulates the idea or crystallizes it in a word, or
whether he remains merely the practical man--in the usual
sense of the unreflective man--he acquires the certainty
that there is a whole series of conditions and results in
the world which may fairly well be counted upon. This
certainty becomes part of the very texture of his mind. Thus
he discovers that fire burns, that hunger weakens, that rain
wets, that bodies fall towards the earth and not towards the
sky; and so with a myriad other things. If he reflects at
all upon these laws, he realizes that they are not of his
choosing--in fact that, in many cases, they are the reverse
of what he would have chosen--but that their power is in no
way affected by his disapproval. There is no way in which he
can get free of them. He can act as though they did not
exist, in which case they damage or even destroy him. If he
is a sane man he may dislike them, but he accepts them, and
does his best to live in accordance with them. In any case
there is no such thing as freedom from them: but only
freedom within them. And freedom within them can be attained
only by one who knows them. This knowing them is always a
matter of discovery and not invention: in other words, one
finds out what they are, one cannot in any way make them to
be.

All this is obvious enough as applied to the body. Men,
however, do not always make the application of precisely the
same truths to the soul: yet the parallel is exact. As there
are laws that govern the body so there are laws--in
particular the moral law--which govern the soul. The moral
law is no more made by man, or dependent on the approval of
man, or in any way escapable by man than the material law.
Man can ignore the moral law as he can ignore the material
law, but the result in both cases is his own diminution or
destruction. There is no freedom from the moral law: but as
with the material law there is freedom within it, the only
freedom possible to man. And a condition of this freedom is
the same as in the other case--namely, knowledge of what the
law is.

In the light of all this it is possible to judge the extent
of folly of those who talk of emancipation from the moral
law, or from any particular article of the moral law: and
because this talk has folly at its root, it runs to folly in
every leaf and flower. To take only one instance: one hears
the phrase that the modern man is no longer to be bound by
the two-thousand-year-old law of marriage. It is as though
one were to say that it was beneath the dignity of modern
man to be bound by the even older law of gravity. For the
question is not whether the law is old, but whether it is a
law. A man might very well say that he would not be bound by
the law of gravity: yet he would be well advised to keep his
affirmation within the sphere of words. Let him push it to
act, and he will no longer be a modern man but a corpse,
part of that history which, in his newness, he so heartily
despises.

Another category of this folly is the not uncommon
assumption that this or that human authority may abrogate
the law, even if the individual would be a little reckless
in declaring it not binding upon himself. But the State--to
take the most obvious example of all--cannot in any way
affect the moral law.[1] The State declares that a man may--in
certain circumstances--leave his wife and marry another. But
this is adultery. To assume that therefore adultery is no
longer harmful to the soul is unduly optimistic. State
action can no more make adultery harmless to the soul than
it can make prussic acid harmless to the body. Men have come
into a collision with the law of God: the law of God does
not suffer from the collision.

The conclusion, then, is that we are living in a world of
law, material law and spiritual law, and that successful
living involves obedience to this law which, in its turn,
supposes a knowledge of it. If it is asked how we are to
know what the law is, experience suggests an answer. Since
men were men, they have had their own bodies and the world
of matter under their eyes, and they have been at work
discovering what the laws are that govern matter. Yet on
this most obvious ground, men are constantly changing their
views, learning laws that till yesterday were not so much as
suspected, discarding what all men before them had held to
be laws, certain and irrevocable. So that it is clear enough
that, left to themselves, men will make no more than a
tolerably successful job of this discovering of the laws of
matter. Much more, then, it is evident that left to
themselves, men will fail to discover, with any fixity or
certainty, the laws that govern the soul--since the soul is
so much less obvious to man, so very much more inaccessible
in its essential being. And failure in this sphere is far
more serious than in the other. For disaster to the body is
the lesser evil, and is only an anticipation of the disaster
that awaits all bodies inevitably. But disaster to the soul-
because it is the nobler part of man, because disaster is
not its inevitable destiny, because it is not only the
nobler part but the decisive part--is a thing not to be
faced. And, in fact, given that no one but the law-maker can
know with certainty the text of the laws he has made, there
is immense food for thought in this: that God, the author
alike of the laws that govern matter and the laws that
govern spirit, has left man very largely to discover--with
an endless accompaniment of disaster--the laws that govern
matter, as though the discovery of these were a trivial
thing, not vital; but has revealed to man the laws that
govern spirit because they are essential laws, whose breach
is fraught with eternal catastrophe.

Thus, not only that man may know the purpose of his life,
but also that he may know the nature of the life through
which he must strive to his goal, a teaching from God is
something vitally necessary. It does not follow that even
with this knowledge a man will always act rightly. The will
of man is capable of choosing a course of action contrary to
what he knows to be right. And even if the will is right,
the intellect may err in applying its knowledge of purpose
and law to a particular set of circumstances. Where the law
of God applies explicitly, there is no problem. But in a
situation to which the law has not been applied by God in
express terms and it is a question of men applying a
principle, then they may easily go astray, misled by custom
or environment or inclination. Thus, for example, a Catholic
might, with excellent intentions, support a bad social or
economic or judicial system. But for all that he possesses
the true principles and with these there is always the
possibility of rectification. Without them there is none. So
that right living, though not guaranteed by, is yet totally
dependent upon, knowledge of purpose and law, and therefore
upon God.

It may be well at this point, to say one thing further about
freedom and about the dependence of man upon God. Freedom is
usually defined as the power to do what one likes. Accepting
the definition, one sees instantly that the power to do what
one likes may be the goal, but doing what one likes is not
necessarily the road to the goal. In the bodily order,
eating what one likes, for instance, may very well be the
very solidest hindrance to doing what one likes, and a
certain prelude to suffering what one very much dislikes. It
is only by doing as one ought, that one attains a condition
in which one has true physical freedom, the uttermost
freedom possible to the body. And the same truth applies
exactly to the soul. Freedom, then, is not to be attained by
doing what we like unless by chance we like what we ought:
which brings us back to the true purpose of our being and
the laws by which our being may progress towards it. Apart
from that is only loss.

It is true that this argues a very extreme degree of
dependence upon God, a dependence to which not all men
resign themselves easily. Yet no view of life will work--
because no view of life is intelligent--which does not
accept both the fact of our dependence upon God and the
rightfulness of it--that God has no duty whatever to us, and
we have no rights whatever against God. If a carpenter makes
a chair, the carpenter owes nothing to the chair. The chair
has no rights against him, and he may do as he pleases--sit
upon it or set a match to it. But God made us and He made us
more fully, so to speak, than any carpenter ever makes a
chair. For the carpenter, at any rate, does not make the
wood: and there is always the possibility that his rights
over the chair may, to some extent, be limited by an unpaid
bill for the wood. But God made us, using no material at
all. Therefore we have no more rights against him than the
chair has against the carpenter. Occasionally it seems to us
that the fact that we have intelligence and free will does,
in some way, make a difference, giving us some claim that
the chair has not. But God gave us these gifts too: they are
as much His creatures as we: and, therefore, they give us no
claim against Him. God could not contract a duty towards us
by giving us more. But though God has no duties towards us,
yet He has a duty towards Himself, the duty of acting
intelligently. Intelligent action means action with a
purpose, and God who gave us intelligence and gave us free
will, thereby put Himself under obligation so to speak, to
treat us in accordance with that which He had given us. Our
dependence, therefore, upon God, though total, absolute, and
without any shadow of exception, is not the dependence of
machines upon a mad mechanic or of slaves upon a mad king.
It is the dependence of free men upon an All-Wise and All-
Loving Creator, who knows their being more intimately than
they know it themselves--who knows wherein the fulfilment of
their being lies, and whose will it is that the fulfilment
should actually be achieved. As we shall see, His will for
them is even more than that--a fulfilment immeasurably
beyond anything that the mere powers of their being would
lead men to dare to hope, or even to conceive.



ENDNOTES

1. Nor can the Church. See X. Law and Suffering.



III. HEAVEN

IN this third chapter, we come at last to the map itself, or
rather to a first general outline of it. We must begin at
the end. For this map is the map of a road, and it is only
in the light of its end that any road makes sense. If you
ask why it turns this way or that, the answer will always
lie in a consideration of the place it is going to: till you
know that you cannot even know that it is a road, but only
that it looks like one; still less can you know whether it
is a good road or a bad road. Therefore, if this map is to
be drawn rightly, we must begin at the end.

What is the right end of the life of man? In other words,
what should the road of life lead to? Faced with this
primary question, men have tried various ways of arriving at
the answer. The atheist makes an effort to place the end of
the road at death: the road of every man's life runs
inevitably to earth in a newly opened grave. But atheists,
at any time in the world's history, are exceptional, almost
freakish. And for the generality of men, the question of
what is the end of life, is simply the question of what
comes after death. In this at any rate, the generality of
men are right. But after this initial correctness there is
every variety of error. Some men have decided to work out
for themselves what they think lies on the other side of the
door of death, with the ill-success that must always attend
any effort to arrive theoretically at a true idea of an
unvisited country. Some have decided that whatever lies on
the other side of the door, there is no need to worry about
it, but merely to await death and hope for the best with a
fair certainty that things will turn out well enough. A
small number--even smaller than the number of atheists
perhaps--have, in all ages, tried to find out by consulting
the souls of the dead--which, logically, is at any rate a
far better method than merely theorizing about the life
after death. For all that, the method is fraught with
endless danger of deception, and for all the thousands of
years of its history, the results are so meagre that
spiritualism can hardly be conceived as anything more worthy
than a kind of peeping through the keyhole.

The Catholic has always realized that as to what comes after
death, the only way of finding out is to be told by someone
who has personal knowledge of the other world. No other way
could possibly be right. So far the spiritualist has hold of
a truth. But of all the beings who may have such personal
knowledge, one has it supremely--God. And God, the author of
this life and the next, has told us of the future that He
has prepared for us. The road of life runs through this life
to heaven. Heaven, then, is the end of the road, and we can
only understand the road if we have some knowledge of
heaven, the place to which it leads, and for which it was
made.

At this stage no more will be said of heaven than is
necessary for the mapping of the road. A slightly fuller
treatment of heaven, in its own right and not simply as
something which makes this life on earth comprehensible,
must be reserved for the final chapter.

Outside the Catholic Church, the idea of heaven has suffered
because the only section of Protestants who talk very much
about it--Protestants of the Nonconformist type--having no
theology on the subject, have been forced more and more to
use the imagery of Scripture. For centuries they have
talked, preached and sung of heaven as a place of harps,
hymns, crowns of gold, streets of jasper. These, of course,
are symbols intended to convey a vivid impression of endless
happiness. In themselves they give no notion of the life of
heaven any more than pictures of men with wings give a
notion of the being of angels. As symbols they are made only
as ornaments to a great body of teaching, in which the life
of heaven is expressed in its true relation to the nature of
God and the nature of man. Lacking this true teaching--owing
to its suspicion of "theology"--Protestantism has for
centuries had no food for its mind save the symbols; and
symbols, while an admirable stimulus to the imagination, are
not food for the intellect. The result is that for the
average man heaven, thought of in terms of endless hymn-
singing, is not attractive.

For the moment, then, we must neglect the symbols
altogether. Heaven consists in the knowledge of God and in
the love of God flowing from and proportioned to, that
knowledge. As such, it means perfect happiness. If we
consider what brings happiness to man in this life, we shall
find certain very clear principles. Happiness is always in
the soul: it may be caused by some condition of the body,
but the body as such is neither happy nor unhappy. It is the
soul that knows of the good or ill condition of the body,
and rejoices in the good or suffers in the ill. In that
happiness of the soul which comes from some condition of the
body, the condition always is that the bodily organs are
functioning properly. Let them cease to do so, and the state
of the soul which we call "unhappiness" is nearly certain to
result in some measure: not quite certain, be it noted: the
soul can triumph even over the body's agony. This fact, that
the soul is the seat of happiness, is further shown when we
consider a situation in which the body is functioning
properly, but the soul itself is perturbed. In such a
situation the state of the soul is decisive: the man is
unhappy. A very simple instance is where the man has all,
not only that he needs, but even that he wants to drink and
eat and wear and entertain himself with. The death of a
friend is instantly sufficient to plunge him into the
deepest unhappiness. That being so, it is necessary to
consider in what lies the happiness that comes from the soul
itself.

Like that which comes from the body, it always results from
a proper functioning of a faculty. The intellect knows truth
and is happy in the knowledge: the will loves goodness and
is happy in the love. The soul of man sees and rejoices in
beauty--beauty of sound, beauty of colour, beauty of form,--
above all, beauty of spirit. In heaven all this is carried
to its very highest point. The intellect, whose property it
is to possess the knowledge of truth, now knows God Himself,
who is supreme Truth. The will, whose property it is to love
goodness, is now in immediate contact with God Himself, who
is supreme Goodness. The whole soul is therefore functioning
at its very highest, and happiness is the inevitable result.

Our imagination may find in this statement--that the
happiness of heaven consists in the direct knowledge and
direct love of God--a doctrine that it feels to be deeply
unsatisfying. To the ordinary man, such a description of
heaven seems far too spiritual, too remote from the kind of
happiness that springs to his mind the moment he starts to
think of happiness at all. It is, therefore, well to analyze
just one stage further what happiness involves. In looking
at a sunset or in listening to a piece of music, the soul of
man may be lifted, if only for the moment, to an absolute
ecstasy of happiness. Yet no man can go on endlessly looking
at the same sunset, and an endless repetition of the same
piece of music might very easily lead to madness. Both these
effects, the original joy and the too rapid fatigue, come
from the same source. The beauty that man enjoys in the
sunset and the music, is a beauty that God Himself has
created, and it is to this that the soul of man responds.
But, because God has created it, it is only a shadow or a
reflection of that beauty which, immeasurably, is in God
Himself, or more truly is God Himself. Man, therefore, who
has rejoiced in the beauty that God has placed in the
sunset, will rejoice immeasurably more in God Himself, the
Author and Source of all beauty. And whereas he grew weary
of the sunset--which was not the beauty of God Himself, but
only a created reflection of it-of the infinite beauty of
God Himself he will never grow weary.


THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE

This, then, is some idea of the end of the road: what
bearing has it on the road? To many, the connection is
obscured by a truth which is only one truth, and not the
most important. Heaven is thought of as the reward of a good
life. As such, it has only a kind of accidental connection
with this life. It is better to think of heaven, not only as
a reward, but also as the result of a good life. A simple
comparison may make clear the distinction. If a student
passes an examination he may be rewarded in one of two ways:
he may either get a mere prize--a tennis racquet say, or a
volume of Browning--or he may be admitted to a further
course of study which his success in the examination has
proved him to be fitted for. The tennis racquet has no real
relation to the examination he has passed: but the further
course of study has; it is a true result of it. To an
immense number of people, heaven is rather like the tennis
racquet, and, as such, is not really understood at all. But
think of it as the further course, resulting from a life
well lived, and instantly the connection is seen. This life
is not only a test which a man must pass in order to obtain
the reward of heaven, it is a preparation which man must
successfully undergo in order to live the life of heaven.

From this it follows that whatever is necessary to enable a
man to live the life of heaven must, in some way or other,
be acquired by man in this life: otherwise this life would
not be a preparation for heaven. And this consideration
brings us to the most important point in the whole of
Catholic teaching, the doctrine to which all others
whatsoever are related, an understanding of which is
necessary if Catholicism is to be understood at all. We may
approach it in this way. If we were offered a journey to
another planet, we should be wise to refuse, because the
breathing apparatus which we have by nature, was made for
the atmosphere of this world. In our atmosphere it works: in
a totally different atmosphere it would not work, and we
should die of suffocation. This illustration points the way
to the truth, namely, that the equipment which is adequate
to life in one world, may not be at all adequate to life in
another. And God has told us that our human nature, while
adequate to the ordinary life of this world, is not adequate
to the life of the world to come. If we were to enter heaven
with only the powers of our human nature, we should no more
be able to live there than, in the illustration I have
given, we should be able to live on another planet with no
powers beyond those of our nature.

And just as we should need some extra powers of breathing,
not contained in our nature, to live on another planet, so
we need extra powers in our soul, not contained in our
nature, in order that we may live the life of heaven. These
powers which are not ours by nature, which are necessary in
order that we may live a life totally above our nature, are
what is called in Catholic teaching, the Supernatural Life.[1]

All that has just been said of man applies equally to those
purely spiritual beings, the angels. Heaven consists in such
a relationship with God that no created nature, by its own
powers, could be adequate to it. Just as men must receive
powers above their nature if they are to live the life of
heaven, so must angels. Angels had their testing. Those who
remained in the love of God were granted the powers and
admitted to heaven. Those who rejected God were fixed in
eternal separation from Him.

But as we have already seen that our life upon earth is to
be a preparation for the life of heaven, and that heaven is
to be the logical conclusion of this life, and that,
therefore, whatever is necessary to the life of heaven must
be acquired by us here-because of all these things it
follows that in this life we must obtain from God the
Supernatural Life.

Our life will be a success if, at the moment of death, we
have in our soul the life above our nature, the Supernatural
Life. It will be a failure if, at death, we have not the
Supernatural Life. For if we have it, then we have in our
soul the powers that would enable us to live the life of
heaven; if we have it not, we lack these powers and
therefore will be totally unable to live the life of heaven.

The road of our life, then, will lead us to heaven only if
on it we have acquired the Supernatural Life, and at the end
of it, have retained the Supernatural Life.

This, then, is the first general outline of our map. There
is a road which leads man to that ineffable intimacy with
God which we call heaven. The condition of walking the road
aright, is the Supernatural Life. It will be seen how every
single thing that happens to man has its bearing on this
Supernatural Life, and is a good thing or a bad thing
according as it helps it or hinders it. Every single
doctrine of the Catholic Church is bound up with this, and
every single practice of the Catholic Church is concerned
with this and with nothing else, and apart from this, has no
meaning.



ENDNOTES

1. Not, be it noted the spiritual life, though in Scripture
this term is often used for the Supernatural Life. It seems
better here to keep the terms distinct. Man's soul is by
nature spiritual. The Supernatural Life is something that
elevates spirit.



IV. THE CREATION AND FALL

WE have now seen the right road in its simplest elements.
Our entry into life is at one end: heaven is at the other:
death lies between. To understand the map we need a
knowledge of the purpose of life and a knowledge of the laws
to be obeyed; to put our understanding to fruitful use--that
is, to attain the end for which we are made--we need the
Supernatural Life.

These three things would be necessary, given a supernatural
destiny, in any condition of the human race. And all of them
must come as a free gift of God or not at all. For us, then,
the question simply is: How does God give these gifts--the
Life and the twofold Truth--to man here and now? The answer
to this question is the actual road of to-day--life as it
must actually be lived by ourselves. But we cannot
understand the strange, winding, arduous, almost
incomprehensible road of to-day unless we realize that it is
not the first road God laid down for us: that in the
beginning there was a simpler, less puzzling road; and that
by sin man dynamited it; or from another point of view man
so damaged himself by sin that he could no longer walk it. A
study of the first road and its ruin will make the road of
to-day considerably more comprehensible.

From the first man, Adam, we all are sprung; in him the
whole human race was incorporated, since there is no one of
us that does not come from him; he was the whole human race
when God made him. He gave him, along with many other gifts,
the three things necessary. He gave him the twofold Truth-
the knowledge, that is, of the purpose of the human race and
of the laws by which it must be governed if it is to avoid
disaster. He gave him the Supernatural Life. Adam, then, had
the natural life that made him man--the union of spiritual
soul and material body which constituted his nature as man,
without which he would not have been man: and this natural
life he had in a state of perfection, all his powers and
faculties rightly ordered, body subordinate to soul, soul
ruled by reason. He also had the Supernatural Life--the life
above nature--that whereby he would be able to live the life
of Heaven hereafter, whereby even in this life his whole
soul was "supernaturalized," capable of a relationship with
God altogether higher and holier than anything that could
take its rise in man's merely natural endowments. The
highest and holiest point of this relationship and the very
condition of the Supernatural Life was for Adam, as it is
for all men, the union of the soul to God by love. And while
he had the Supernatural Life, God also exempted his nature
from the law of death--from the separation of soul and body
which is the natural termination of man's life on this
earth.

Now Adam is not to be thought of simply as an individual: he
was the human race. God, then--in the very beginning, and,
so to speak, as a matter of course--had conferred upon the
human race the three gifts necessary. For Adam the simplest
elements of the road of human life were two, not three--his
entry into life was at one end and Heaven was at the other:
death did not lie in between. That, simply and directly, was
God's scheme: man had knowledge of the end of his existence,
knowledge of the laws by which he might attain the end, the
Supernatural Life which put the end within his power. And
man wrecked the scheme. Adam sinned, rebelled against God;
and thereby lost the Supernatural Life, for this life cannot
exist where the love of God is not, and love of God cannot
exist where there is rebellion against Him.

Scripture represents the sinful action as the eating of the
fruit of the forbidden tree. There is some mystery here. But
two things about it we know. The first is that it was a sin
of disobedience to God. The second is that the devil played
a part in it. It has already been said that among the
creatures of God were certain purely spiritual beings, the
angels; and that these angels had the same purpose as man--
to attain to Heaven--and like man they had a period of
testing. Some succeeded and are now in Heaven. Some failed
in the test, chose their own will rather than God's, and so
lost Heaven eternally. In the affairs of the human race
angels good and bad are mysteriously concerned. The good
angels exercise a certain guardianship over men: the fallen
angels--devils--are concerned to lead men into sin and so
cause them to fail to reach Heaven. The devil, then, tempted
man to commit his first sin.

It is important to understand Adam's new condition. He had
lost the Supernatural Life: he retained the natural life or
the union of body and soul; the soul retained the natural
powers of intellect and will. Supernaturally he was dead,
for the loss of life is death; naturally he still lived. But
even his nature did not emerge from the disaster unimpaired:
it lost the privilege of exemption from death; henceforth
man must pass through the gateway of death to reach his
eternal destiny. More serious still was that man's nature
lost its direction. Adam had sinned because he had chosen
his own will instead of God's--he had swung his nature out
of its true Godward direction, and had introduced war into
the very inmost part of his nature, into the union of body
and spirit--body warring against spirit, spirit torn by war
in its own powers.

Thus then stood Adam, the individual man--the Supernatural
Life lost, the natural life impaired because given a wrong
direction; but still knowing the purpose of his being and
the laws set by God for the governance of his life. But Adam
was also, by God's dispensation, the representative man, and
the effect of this original catastrophe upon the whole human
race is measureless. As a mere physical consequence the
nature he had to hand on to his descendants was an impaired
nature, strongly attracted to sin. Worse than that: the
right relationship between God and the human race was broken
and Heaven was closed to men.

In him the race lost the Supernatural Life: so that men
thereafter (with one glorious exception) entered this world
with the natural life of soul and body (so much was
necessary that they should be of the human race), but
without the Supernatural Life, which but for Adam's fall
they would have had. This is what we call Original Sin:
which is thus to be thought of not as a wrong done by us
personally, not as corruption of the soul in its essence,
but as the absence of that Life which makes us sons of God
and will hereafter open Heaven to us.[1]

Thus then through the spoiling of God's plan one of the
three elementary things was lost--and lost instantly.

The other two were not lost so quickly. Adam we may assume,
passed on his knowledge of God's purpose and God's laws to
his children and they to their children. But as the slow
centuries passed and men became farther removed in time and
space from the first revelation, that happened to it which
must always happen to a tradition of men unguarded by God:
error crept into it, passion distorted it violently and
self-interest less violently, but no less certainly; mere
forgetfulness was deadlier than all. The nature of man still
bore witness to God's purpose and God's law--but a witness
that grew ever fainter; the fragments remained of the first
revelation--but ever more broken and shapeless; the little
company of the Chosen People clung to certain fundamental
truths--the oneness of God, for instance, and the certainty
of a Saviour to come--but only under pressure of endless
reminders from God and with heaven knows how much weariness
and backsliding. And there came a time when the whole of the
threefold gift almost seemed to have perished from the
earth. The Life man had lost in one great catastrophe; the
Truth man had frittered away. Men were born into the world
without the Supernatural Life: with a nature hopelessly at
war within itself. They could still, from the universe about
them, reason to the existence of God. But even in this their
reasoning was accompanied by a horde of errors, and they
could have no certain knowledge of God's purpose or God's
law. Chaos was upon them: their foot was upon a road whose
end they did not know--a road which could only be travelled
with aids which they did not possess and could not for
themselves obtain. And, be it repeated, Heaven was closed to
man. This is something different from having lost the
Supernatural Life. For an individual might, by God's grace,
regain the Supernatural Life: and yet because he was a
member of a fallen race, he could not enter Heaven. Man is
not simply an individual, he is a member of a community. And
while the only great human community in existence was Fallen
Humanity--to which as a race Heaven was closed-the
individual, however holy, was debarred from Heaven. Not till
the right relation between God and the Human Race was re-
established (as God had promised Adam it would one day be)
could the individual member of the race enter Heaven. There
was no question of course of a holy man being eternally
debarred from Heaven. But till Heaven was re-opened he must
be in a place of waiting.[2]

At last God did for man what man could not do for himself:
He made the threefold restoration and so built a new road
for the human race; but consider what man had by his own act
become, and it will be small wonder if the new road lacks
some of the simplicity of the old. The first road had been
planned for man as he came, all perfect from the hand of
God; the second had to be planned for man as he was, with
the wounds and stains that were upon him after countless
ages of bearing the assaults of the world, the temptations
of the devil, the warfare within himself. For the first road
God had made man; for the building of the second road God
became man.



ENDNOTES

1. The exception referred to earlier in the paragraph was
Mary, the Mother of Christ. From the first moment of her
existence in her mother's womb, her soul possessed the
Supernatural Life. This is called technically her Immaculate
Conception.

2. This place is referred to in various terms. Our Lord
spoke of it as "Abraham's bosom" (in the parable of Dives
and Lazarus), and "Paradise" (in His promise to the Good
Thief). St. Peter calls it "prison" (1. Pet. iii., 19),
theologians "Limbo," and in the English version of the
Apostles' Creed it is called "hell."



V. THE INCARNATION

THE human race then had broken its right relation of
friendship with God: men had lost the way because they had
lost the life (without which the way cannot be followed) and
the truth without which the way cannot even be known. To
such a world Christ, who had come to make all things new,
said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." In those three
words--way, truth, life--Christ related Himself quite
precisely to what man had lost: as precisely as a key fits a
lock. In the precision of that threefold relation, we are
apt to overlook the strangest word in the phrase--the word
"am."

Men needed truth and life: what they might have expected was
one who would say "I have the truth and the life": what they
found was one who said "I am the truth and the life." This
strange word forces us to a new mode of approach. If a man
claims to have what we want, we must study what he has. If a
man claims to be what we want, we must study what he is.
With any other teacher the truth he has is our primary
concern--the teacher himself is of no importance save as the
bearer of truth, and his work is done when he has given it.
With Christ, the teacher is primary: He cannot simply give
us the truth and the life, and then have done with us. He
can only give us Himself, for He is both. This point must be
insisted on, not as a figure of speech, but as a strict
fact. It is a map we are making, not a poem; and what is now
being said, mysterious as it is, is strictly and literally
true. Our study of the road of life has brought us to an
examination of truth and life: we cannot understand the road
if we do not understand them. But if Christ is the truth,
then we must understand Him: if He is the life, then He must
live in us.

Obviously, then, our map-making cannot progress till we are
clear about Who and what Christ is, because the road we are
to travel depends even more on what He is than on what He
did.


THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST

Christ is God-made-man: that is He is truly God and He is
truly man. He is God--with the nature of God: He took to
Himself and made His own a complete human nature--a real
human body and a real human soul. He is, then, one person--
God--with two natures--divine and human. Nor is all this
mere abstract matter, of no real concern to us. Everything
in our life is bound up with the one person and the two
natures of Christ. We must grasp this central luminous fact,
or everything remains in darkness.

The distinction between person and nature is not some deep
and hidden thing to which philosophy only comes after
centuries of study. It is, on the contrary, a distinction so
obvious that the smallest child who can talk at all makes it
automatically. If in the half-light he sees a vague outline
that might be anything, he asks "What is that?" If, on the
other hand, he can see that it is a human being, but cannot
distinguish or does not recognize the features, he asks "Who
is that?" The distinction between what and who is the
distinction between nature and person. Of every man the two
questions--what is he? and who is he?--can be answered.
Every man, in other words, is both a nature and a person.
Into my every action, nature and person enter. For instance
I speak. I, the person, speak. But I am able to speak only
because I am a man, because it is of my nature to speak. I
discover that there are all sorts of things I can do: and
all sorts of things I cannot do. My nature decides. I can
think, speak, walk: these actions go with the nature of man,
which I have. I cannot fly, for this goes with the nature of
a bird, which I have not.

My nature, then, decides what I can do: it may be thought of
as settling the sphere of action possible to me. According
to my nature, I can act: apart from it, I cannot. But my
nature does not do these things--I, the person, do them. It
is not my nature that speaks, walks, thinks: it is I, the
person.

A man may then be thought of as a person--who acts--and a
nature--which decides the field in which he acts. In man
there is simply one nature to one person. In Christ there
are two natures to one person: and our minds used to the
one-nature-to-one-person state of man tend to cry out that
there is a contradiction in the idea of two natures to one
person.

But once it has been grasped that "person" and "nature" are
not identical in meaning: once it has been grasped that the
person acts and the nature is that principle in him which
decides his sphere of action, then we see that mysterious as
Our Lord's person and nature may be, there is no
contradiction. God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed
Trinity,[1] assumed--took to Himself--a human nature: made it
His own: not simply as something which He could use as a
convenient sphere to act in, but really as His own: just as
our nature is our own. In us the relation of person and
nature is such that not merely do we say "I have a human
nature" (as we might say "I have an umbrella") but person
and nature are so fused in one concrete reality that we say
"I am a man." So God the Son can say not only "I am God with
a human nature to act in" but in the most absolute fullness
of meaning He can say "I am man." He does not simply act as
man: He is man--as truly man as we.

This one person has two spheres of action: Christ our Lord
could act either in His nature as God or in His nature as
man. Remember the principle stated a few paragraphs back,
that it is not the nature that acts, but the person.
Therefore, whether He was acting in His divine nature or in
His human nature, it was always the person who acted: and
there was only the one person--God.

Then this is the position. Christ is God: therefore whatever
Christ did, God did. When Christ acted in His divine nature
(as when He raised the dead to life) it was God who did it:
when Christ acted in His human nature (as when He was born,
suffered and died) it was God who did it: God was born, God
suffered, God died. For it is the person who acts: and
Christ is God.


THE ATONEMENT

The next paragraph must be read with the closest attention
or the map will not be properly understood.

Because Christ was God and Man, He was able to effect the
reconciliation of God and man. The human race had broken the
first relationship of oneness by sin: and of itself the
human race with all its imperfections on it could make no
offering to God in reparation for its sin. Literally the
human race could not make reparation. Yet for the human act
of rebellion, a human act of atonement was required: for the
sin of human nature, only an act of human nature could
satisfy--yet this act of human nature man could not perform.
Christ was God and Man. The acts He performs in His human
nature were truly human acts: yet because every action is of
the person, they were acts of God, whose every act is of
infinite value: Christ could make the necessary reparation.
That particular action of His human nature which Christ
chose as an offering-in-reparation--a sacrifice--was His
death: at the age of thirty-three He was crucified upon
Calvary.

This was the atonement. By it the breach between God and the
human race was closed. The race was redeemed from that
condition of separation from God into which the sin of Adam,
the representative man, had plunged it. Heaven, the final
and eternal union of God and man, was once more possible to
man. For even the holiest man of the time between Adam's
fall and Christ's death was still a member of the human
race, a member of the race that had lost oneness with God,
and as such debarred from heaven. But, by this re-making of
the oneness, not only was Life--the Supernatural Life--set
flowing with new richness for the elevation of man's soul:
but that Life could now in heaven receive the full and
complete flowering which before Calvary was impossible to
it.

Christ had come "to save His people from their sins": He had
come that man "might have life and have it more abundantly."
These two purposes are in reality the same purpose--the
effect of sin is the destruction of the Supernatural Life: a
soul in sin is a soul that lacks the Supernatural Life: sin
is removed by the pouring into the soul of that life-as
darkness is removed by the turning on of the light. So far,
then, for the first part of Christ's mission: He had
reconciled the human race to God: He had brought back the
rich store of Supernatural Life.


CHRIST AS TEACHER

There remains to be considered the other need of man--Truth.
As we have seen this involves as a minimum that man shall be
taught the purpose of his existence and the laws by which he
must live. Christ taught this necessary minimum-and much
more. The laws will be discussed in detail in Chapters IX
and X: here notice only two things:

(a) He took the ten commandments given to the chosen people
of Israel by God some fifteen hundred years before--most of
them beginning with "Thou shalt not" and summed them up into
two, both beginning "Thou shalt": for the first three
commandments, which set out our duty to God, He expressed
concisely as "Thou shalt love God"; and the remaining seven,
which set out our duty to our neighbour, He expressed
equally concisely as "Thou shalt love thy neighbour." In
other words, all the commandments lie implicit in this
twofold love;

(b) Just as the commandments are summarized and made
positive, so they are traced back from external conduct to
the internal root of conduct, from actions (commanded or
prohibited) to love--a state of the soul: and sins of the
mind--or heart-or intention become as serious as sins of the
exterior action: the yielding of the mind to lust not only
is as bad as adultery, it is adultery; the yielding of the
mind to murder not only is as bad as murder, it is murder.
The essence of sin is now clear--it is the soul of man
twisting itself out of the right relation to God. That is
sin. Nothing else is. And the laws which express the right
relation are all forms of love.

So much, for the moment, for the laws to be obeyed. On the
truths to be believed--including the minimum requirement of
the purpose of man's existence, of what was in the mind of
God when He made man--Christ is equally revealing and
equally fundamental. The purpose of man's existence is to
come to God. This includes a multitude of things, but
principally, because man is an intelligent being, it
involves some revelation of the nature of God: the more man
knows of his goal, the more likely he is to make for it
effectively. Thus He revealed to man that in the divine
nature are three persons--God the Father, God the Son, God
the Holy Ghost: that He Himself was the Second Person, God
the Son. Of this supreme mystery of the Trinity and of
mystery in general something will be said in Chapter VIII.
Here we must consider not the revelation of God that our
Lord gave by teaching, but the revelation of God that Our
Lord gave simply by being.

Mankind has never been without means of acquiring some
knowledge of God: in the Universe we have God's work before
our eyes and by examining any work we can learn something of
the workman. But, in practical fact, not much. We can learn
more about a boilermaker by five minutes' face-to-face
conversation with him than by five years' examination of the
boiler he has made. Similarly, though we learn many things
about God from contemplating the Universe He has made, there
is something a little remote and shadowy about such
knowledge. And this for the further reason that we can know
nothing of what is involved in making a universe. But if we
could see God--not making a universe--but obeying His
mother, feeling hunger, paying taxes, receiving insult: then
instantly we should be on our own ground. For all these
things we have done ourselves. Now because Christ was God,
all these things are there for men to see. God did obey His
mother, suffer hunger, pay taxes, receive insult. Christ,
then, in a sense, is God translating Himself into our
nature. And the difference between God acting in His own
nature and God acting in ours is as great as the difference
between a man talking in his own language and the same man
talking in ours. For in the first case such a man can convey
some things to us--but rather by signs than speech--and we
catch what he has to say haltingly and uncertainly: in the
second case he really speaks to us and we know what he wants
to communicate.

Thus the fact that Christ is God takes on a new
significance. As we first used it, it was as a fact about
Christ: now we see it as an even more revealing fact about
God. Christ--acting in our nature, which He had made His--we
can study and make our own: to realize that the knowledge
thus acquired of Christ is true of God is altogether
revolutionary. For only by learning that Christ is Love have
men learnt that God is love: and that is almost the greatest
gift of Christianity to the world.

Our Lord's life upon earth seems to have been especially
devised with the purpose of bringing man into the closest
possible intimacy with God. The general outline of His life
is sufficiently well known. He was born of a virgin, the
wife of a carpenter of Nazareth, during the reign of the
Roman Emperor, Augustus. Then, with the exception of one
strange incident when he was aged twelve, there is silence
till he reached the age of thirty. Then came three years of
teaching and the working of miracles. The leaders of the
Jewish people turned against Him and more or less forced the
Roman Governor to have Him executed. He was nailed to a
cross and after three hours He died. On the third day He
rose again from the dead, and after forty days He ascended
into the heavens and vanished from the eyes of men. Within
this framework there are two rich streams of human contact,
a greater and a less. The greater, naturally enough, was
through His mother. From her He had drawn His human body: if
man may call Him brother, it is solely through her. She
lived with Him throughout the years before His public life
began: to please her He worked a miracle at Cana and began
His public ministry sooner than He had meant. When He died,
He committed her to the care of John, the follower that He
loved best: and this apostle, who became as a son to her,
later wrote a gospel, in which from the beginning men have
found a deeper insight into Our Lord than in any other. It
would have been strange had it been otherwise--if any man
could have lived in such intimacy with the mother of Christ
and had no richness to show for it.

The second stream was through His apostles--the men He
gathered round Him, and prepared with especial care as the
instruments for the spread of His kingdom among men. It is
important to grasp here the mode of Christ's revelation of
His own Godhead. Obviously had He begun with the statement
that He was God, the road would have been closed. Some would
have disbelieved Him: those who believed would have been far
too overcome with terror at the majesty of God and their own
sinfulness to make any progress in human intimacy with Him.
What actually happened was that these men came to know Him
as men can only know one in whose company they constantly
are, in every variety of circumstance. Gradually--or rather
with sudden bursts forward followed by fallings away--they
came to the feeling that He must be God and ultimately to
the full knowledge that He was. But before that time they
had come to know Him: to know Him as a friend and not only
as a master: from men who had companioned with Christ for
three years, even the discovery that He was God could not
take away the certainty that He was love: so that God, too,
must be love. The fruit of our Lady's thirty years with
Christ and the apostles' three years with Him, enshrined in
part in the gospels, is the very essence of the Christian
tradition, woven into the very fabric of the Christian mind.

If we compare the attitude to God of the most pious pagans
with that of the Christian the gulf is enormous. In the
Christian attitude there is a warm personal devotion not to
be found elsewhere. For other men have seen the Works of
God, but Christians have seen God.

These two truths, God is love and Law is love, are the two
specifically Christian truths, unknown outside the Christian
revelation. It is difficult to say which idea would have
come upon the world with a greater shock. For outside
Christianity, God has seemed to be a master or even a
tyrant, but never love: and as a consequence law has seemed
to be force, or even cruelty, but never love. And even
inside Christianity it is hard to hold, continuous and never
dimmed, the idea of God and law as love: for there come
moments when another face seems to be presented to us;
feeling or no feeling, we know. And we know because Christ
was God.

Here then in outline is God's answer to man's need. The
human race needed first to be reunited to God (that Heaven
might once more be open to it), and second it needed the
Life and the Truth by which it might attain Heaven once
salvation became a possibility. Christ our Lord--God-made-
man-made the act of reparation that reunited the human race
with God and so made Heaven a possibility, brought back for
man the rich profusion of the Supernatural Life, and
revealed to man not only the necessary truths of purpose and
law but a great store of truth besides. The next question is
how man was to obtain what Christ had brought.



ENDNOTES

1. Something will be said of the doctrine of the Trinity in
Chapter VIII.



VI. THE MYSTICAL BODY OF CHRIST

So far we have seen that for the intelligent living of life,
men need to know the purpose of their being and the laws by
which they should govern their lives: and it has been
established that man is totally incapable of finding these
out for himself and can know them only if God reveals them.
Further, we have seen that for the achievement of his
purpose-namely, to live the life of Heaven--the natural life
of man is not sufficient: that men need certain further
powers-in the soul, that these flow from the Supernatural
Life, that men must acquire this Supernatural Life here upon
earth; and again that they cannot acquire it for themselves,
but can have it only if God gives it.

These three things--truth, law, life--we have seen, would
have been necessary in any condition of the human race. But
the first man--Adam--complicated the position by breaking
the friendship of the human race with God and so closing
heaven to the race. Heaven then had to be made once more a
possibility, after which the three original requirements
would still be in force. Christ came to offer Himself as
sacrifice to God in atonement for the sin of the race, and
so opened Heaven once more to man; and He brought the gifts
man needed of truth, law and life. On the question how men
were to obtain these gifts from Him the last chapter closed.

Now to this question there is a very simple and satisfying
answer. While He was upon this earth, Christ gathered a
small band of followers, the disciples. Of these He selected
twelve--the Apostles, of whom one, Peter, was singled out
from the others--took them about with Him, taught them, and
when He was about to leave the earth gave them a commission
to teach the truths and the laws He wished men to know: to
administer the sacraments by which His life might flow to
the souls of men. Thus, when He left the world, He left His
followers as a body among whom were officials, with Peter at
their head, who could transmit the truth, law, life men
needed: by joining this body, then, men could receive from
its officials what all men need. Christ extended their
commission to all nations: that it might survive the ages,
He extended it to the end of the world: that the teaching
and the life might never fail, He promised to be with them
in the work He had given them to do. Thus, then, you have
His arrangement. His followers, still united with the
successor of Peter, the visible point of unity, were to be
one body till the end of time: and in that body they should
receive teaching which is infallible, because Christ is with
it, and sacraments which are channels of true life, because
Christ is with them.

The Church, thus understood, is a great thing: a thing
immeasurably beyond man's deserts, and fulfilling the three
primary needs. But that is not all. He who sees only that is
missing the depth of it.

For observe that, as stated, it leaves two questions
unsettled. The first is this: the work of God among men is a
close-knit, deeply-intertwined thing without loose ends. Why
then should men share in the benefits of Christ's atonement?
He offered a redeeming sacrifice--but where do men come in?
How can they share in His act?

And the second is this: Christ said: "I am the Way, and
Truth and the Life." The description of the Church set out
above would be perfect if He had said have: but He said am.
What has become of that mysterious word?


"I AM THE LIFE"

Let us consider the second question first: Christ is the
life, the life that must live in us if we are to be capable
of Heaven. Christ then must live in us. How? How can one
being live in another? Here we must follow very closely. We
dare not abandon the phrase with a vague feeling that its
general meaning is obvious and edifying, but that it will
not bear too close inspection. For He comes back to this
idea of His living in men again and again, literally scores
of times. Like every word of Christ, this one demands the
closest scrutiny. No words were ever weighed as His were,
and if by chance we should forget that, St. Paul shocks us
back to attention: "I live, yet now not I, but Christ liveth
in me."

At the same time Our Lord constantly speaks of our living in
Him. There is then a twofold in. He must live in us. We must
live in Him.

In our own natures we find the clue to the answer. Our
bodies are composed of countless cells, living cells. The
cells, we say, are living in the body. It would be truer to
the order of real values to say that the body is living in
the cells. That is the right order of thought. The cells
live not with their own life, but with the life of the body.
There is one life of the whole man and by it the cells of
his body live. Somehow then we must be in Christ as the
cells are in our body: then Christ will live in us as we
live in our bodily cells. Here again thought might falter:
but St. Paul works it out very clearly. Christ, living on
this earth, had a human body, in which He worked among men.
He taught with His lips, healed with His hands, converted
sinners with the look of His eyes, gave Supernatural Life
with His breath, made atonement with the suffering of His
body. And all this, done through His body, was done by
Himself, God. He has left the earth: He is eternally in
Heaven at the right-hand of the Father: but He still works
among men in His body, no longer in His natural body, the
body that was brought into being in the womb of Mary by the
power of the Holy Ghost, but in His mystical body, the
Church, the body that was brought into being in the Upper
Room after His ascension by the power of the Holy Ghost. The
Church, then, is His body, linked to Him really,
organically, inseparably, as a body to its head: His life
flows through the Church as my life flows through my body.
My body has cells: and so has His. And as I live in the
individual cells of my body, so He lives in the individual
cells of His body. Membership of His Church then means more
than joining up with a useful organization from which many
spiritual benefits may be derived. His Church is--
mysteriously but really--His body. Joining it means being
built into His body--that is to say incorporated with Him.
Once we are thus incorporated with Him, we are cells in His
body, He can live in us.

That is the Church--the living body of Christ. Because of
this, Christ could say to Saul when he was persecuting the
Church--"Why persecutest thou Me?" So, Christ's own words:
"I am with you all days even to the end of the world," have
a more immense depth of meaning than we at first knew. So we
see the meaning of that strange word am--"I am the Way, the
Truth and the Life." To be in the way we must be in Him: to
possess the truth we must possess Him: to have the life in
us, He must live in us.


REDEEMED HUMANITY

To this idea of the Church we have come, following up the
second of the two questions left unsolved: it will now be
seen that we have found the answer to the first as well--how
can Christ's atonement be shared in by us? It is easy enough
to see how we are involved in Adam's loss: for Adam is the
representative man, the ancestor of all men. In him, by
nature all men were incorporated. But men may be
incorporated in Christ too, not by nature but by super-
nature, not by birth but by baptism, the first of the
sacraments (treated more fully in Chapter XI). That is the
immense importance of baptism,[1] repeated again and again by
St. Paul: "Being baptized in Christ we have put on Christ."
Incorporated with Adam by birth, which makes us men, we
share in his loss: incorporated with Christ by baptism,
which makes us Christians, we share in His act of
redemption. Both Adam and Christ are representative men:
Adam because he is the first man, Christ because He is the
perfect man. Adam was the head of the human race: Christ is
the head of redeemed humanity. We come from Adam: we come to
Christ.

In this view of the Church we see how all our needs are met.
Incorporated, built into the mystical body of Christ, we
share in the benefits of His atonement, we are reconciled
with God, and to us, as members of redeemed humanity, Heaven
is once more open. From that Church, which is thus united
with Christ, we receive Christ's teaching--so that we may
know the truths bearing on the meaning and purpose of our
lives, and the laws by which we may live rightly. In that
Church we are so united to Christ that the Supernatural Life
pours into our souls. The whole of man's needs are thus met,
those needs which have been kept constantly in mind from the
beginning of this book.

But there is a wider horizon yet. This mystical body of
Christ is the Church. But the Church is not only a thing of
this world. It contains not only its members still in this
life, but also all who have died with the Supernatural Life
in their souls--whether having attained their goal they are
in heaven, or in final preparation for Heaven they are in
Purgatory.

The mystical body is a growing body. All who die with the
Supernatural Life are in it for ever: each new member is a
new cell. There will come a point, St. Paul tells us, when
the mystical body will have grown to its perfect stature, in
some such way as a natural body reaches its fullest
development. When that time comes, the human race will have
achieved its purpose and the world will come to an end. For
there is a purpose for the whole race as well as for the
individual man, and the end of the world will be not simply
a decision by God that the world has gone on long enough,
but will definitely mean that the race has achieved its
purpose.

But the end of the world is not yet. And meanwhile the
Church is in the world, acting upon its members, acting upon
the world at large. Not all its members here below are fully
receptive of the life of Christ: some, as we shall see in a
moment, while remaining members, have totally shut off from
their souls the stream of Christ's life. Thus the Church,
the actual visible Church here below, presents itself under
a double aspect. In so far as it is Christ Himself living in
men--for the teaching of truth, for the promulgation of the
moral law, for the life-giving work of the sacraments--it is
perfect. In so far as it is considered in its human members
(even its officials) vivified in their varying degrees or
not vivified at all by the life of the Body, it is always
short of perfection, sometimes very far short. But perfect
it is one day to be.


THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

Meanwhile see how the map of life grows in the light of this
fact of the Church. We have to live our lives not as
isolated units, but as members of a living thing, united
organically with Christ and with all men, living and dead,
who are in the love of God. This is the full force of the
Communion of Saints--the oneness of all men in Christ.

Because we are members of Christ's Body we are one with Him:
and also we are one with one another. In a body, one member
can help another: if the foot be hurt the hand can tend it.
So in the mystical body: one man can help another, by prayer
and teaching and sacrifice. Here upon earth our prayers for
one another are thus fruitful: we can pray for the souls in
Purgatory: the souls in Heaven can pray for us. It has to
some been a difficulty that death should be no barrier to
this stream of prayer. That one living Christian should pray
for another, or ask another to pray for him, has always
seemed obviously right. But within the Body of Christ, death
makes no difference. The soul of one who has left this world
is not less a member of the same body as we, but is living
more intensely with the life of Christ which we also share.
If we should have asked him to pray for us during his life,
we do so now more than ever. One striking characteristic of
the Catholic Church is that real friendships do exist
between her children still upon earth and one or other of
the saints in heaven. Sin is a barrier between souls: death
is not. There is this constant flow of prayer throughout the
whole body: for we are not members simply of one society, we
are members of one thing--a living thing.


LIFE IN THE BODY

It is necessary now to see what all this comes to in
practical effect upon us. We are cells in the body of
Christ, so that He lives in us and we have one life in
common with all men, in this world and the next, who are in
the love of God. But observe that all this refers to the
Supernatural Life--the life by which man is to be able to
live the life of heaven. Supernaturally we, the cells, live
with the life of Christ. But our natural life is not
destroyed: and naturally we live with our own lives. Now it
is part of our nature that we have free will, and part of
our natural life to exercise it. We can do so in one of
three ways: we can yield our wills wholly to God: or we can
yield them to God, but not wholly: or we can reject God. And
according to the use we thus make will be our state in the
mystical body. If we yield ourselves wholly to the
Supernatural Life, the life of the mystical body, then we
are living supernaturally at the fullest intensity. If our
wills are not wholly yielded to God, then we hinder the flow
of the Supernatural Life in us and though we are living
supernaturally, though we are still sharing the life of the
body so that Christ really lives in us, yet that life is not
present in its fullest intensity.

And if, being once incorporated--that is, built into the
body of Christ--our wills turn against God and reject Him
for self--then we shut off the stream of life altogether and
though we remain in the body we are dead cells[2]--retaining
our natural life, which is of no avail for salvation--but
without the Supernatural Life. While we are still in this
world, Supernatural Life may be set flowing again, as we
shall see. But if at the moment of our earthly death we are
thus dead cells in the body, we are cut out from the body
and eternally lost.

Sufficient has been said to show how our position in the
Church lays open to us life and the knowledge of truth and
law. It remains now to examine the truth, the law and the
life in detail. Two chapters will be devoted to each of
these.



ENDNOTES

1. This book is concerned with God's plan for mankind in
what may be called its mormal working. There is no
discussion here of the position of those who are not
baptized or of baptized non-Catholics.

2. For a more detailed discussion of the state of those who
have lost the Supernatural Life, see Chapter XXII. The
Supernatural Life.




VII. TRUTH: (A) THE TEACHING CHURCH

WE have seen that man, by membership of Christ's Church,
receives the three things necessary--truth, law, life. The
next step is to examine each of these three in more detail.
This chapter and the next will be concerned with Truth.

Christ gave to His Church, in the person of its first
officials, the apostles, a mass of truth concerning God and
man: concerning the nature of God, His threefold
personality, His attributes, His purpose in making man, the
means by which His purpose was to be achieved. This
teaching, given by Christ to the apostles, was by them
passed on to others, who in their turn passed it on. Some of
it was, by the inspiration of God, written down. The part
written down, what we now call the New Testament, was small
in relation to the whole mass of teaching, but of priceless
value.


THE SCRIPTURES

In thus inspiring men to write God was continuing in the
Church what He had begun with His chosen people. This fact
of Inspiration marks off certain books from all other
writings in the world. It involves a special relation of God
to the human author and to the thing written, not to be
found elsewhere. God so acted upon the mind and will of the
author that what was written was what God wanted written.
The inspired writing of the Jews--collected together in the
Old Testament--were in sum a record of the Creation and Fall
of Man, God's dealing with fallen humanity and the
preparation for the coming of a Saviour. The New Testament
shows the Saviour actually in the world, doing the work he
came to do, and arranging for its continuation to the end of
time. It falls roughly into three divisions: (1) The Four
Gospels (already touched upon in Chapter V) are records of
Christ's life upon earth; (2) The Acts of the Apostles and a
handful of letters--written mainly by St. Paul--show the
Church facing its first disciplinary and doctrinal problems;
(3) The Apocalypse is a series of visions concerned mainly
with the universal conflict of good and evil and its
ultimate issue.


DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE

The Church then, by the time the last apostle died, had all
the mass of truth the apostles had taught, the whole of it
by word of mouth, a part of it in writing. She might have
simply gone on, through the nineteen centuries since,
repeating what had been taught, reading what had been
written. In this case she would have been a preserver of
truth--but scarcely a teacher. She would have been a piece
of human machinery, but not a living thing, not the Mystical
Body of Christ. In fact, she not only repeated what the
apostles had been taught: she thought about it, meditated on
it, prayed by it, lived it. And, doing all this, the Church
came to see further and further depths of truth in it. And,
seeing these, she taught these too. Everything was contained
in what Christ had given the apostles to give the Church:
but though everything was there, it was not all seen
explicitly--not all at once. A rough comparison may make the
position clear: a man brought into a dark room begins by
distinguishing little: then he sees certain patches of
shadow blacker than the rest: bit by bit he sees these as a
table and chairs: then, as his eyes grow accustomed to the
obscurity, he sees things smaller still--pictures, books,
ash trays--and so on to the smallest detail. Nothing has
been added to the contents of the room: but there has been
an immense growth in his knowledge of the contents. So with
the Church. She has, generation by generation, seen deeper
and deeper. This development in the Church's understanding
of what has been committed to her is not like anything else
in the world. Science, for instance, progresses, but its
progress consists to a large extent in discovering and
discarding its own errors. The teaching of the Church
develops by seeing further truths. At every stage the Church
adds something: but not at the cost of discarding anything.
At every stage all she teaches is true: at no stage does she
teach all that is contained in the Truth.

This development--which we find in theology and nowhere
else--combines two things: the work of men's minds, the
over-ruling protection of God. In theology, as in science,
progress comes by the minds of men working on what they have
been taught: but left to themselves, men may simply make
further mistakes. In science they do so. In the teaching of
the Church they do not: and the reason is that God
intervenes, to prevent the teaching of error by His Church.
God's actions--whether revelation or sacrament or miracle--
are never labour-saving devices: God does not do them to
save men the trouble of doing what they can very well do for
themselves. In revelation, for instance, God teaches men
what they could not (at any rate could not with absolute
sureness) find out for themselves: but having given them
that, He leaves it to them to meditate upon it and arrive at
a clearer understanding of it. He does not do their thinking
for them.


THE TEACHING CHURCH

But if we are to say that in the teaching of the Church
there are no mistakes, it is necessary to look a little more
closely at what we mean by the phrase "the Teaching Church."
The first teachers in the Church were the apostles: their
successors are the bishops. The bishops are the teaching
body of the Church. Therefore, since God will not have His
Church taught error as to His doctrine, He will not allow
the bishops to teach error. This or that bishop or group of
bishops may give wrong teaching in theology. But what is
taught by the bishops as a body cannot be wrong. On some
given subject it might be difficult to know what the bishops
as a body do teach: in that case they might be gathered
together in a General Council where they could state their
teaching and so place it beyond doubt. But however we come
by the knowledge, once we do know what the bishops as a body
teach, we know the certain truth, for their teaching is
guaranteed by God. And that is the ordinary way in which the
Catholic does learn God's truth--from the teachers appointed
by his bishop. But there is another way--an extraordinary
way. The bishops as a body are not allowed by God to teach
what is wrong on matters of faith or morals revealed by Him:
this is what we mean when we say they are infallible. But
one of them, the Head, Christ's representative on Earth, the
Bishop of Rome, whom we call the Pope, is infallible,[1]
independently of the other bishops. And in case of doubt as
to what bishops teach, a definition by the Pope himself is
sufficient to inform us of the truth.

But if the body of bishops, with the Pope at their head, are
the sole infallible teachers of doctrine, they are not the
only people in the Church who are studying doctrine. Every
Catholic does it to some extent: theologians give their
lives to it. Throughout the ages there has never ceased to
be a stream of solid thinking on theology. Now this thinking
is the thinking of men: the result of their thinking may be
the emergence of some truth not previously so clearly seen;
but likewise the result of their thinking may be error. How
shall men know which it is? It is for the bishops to decide.
If it is true, then they adopt it and teach it. If it is
false, God does not allow them to adopt it and teach it. An
erroneous view might become current, even widely current.
Sooner or later the teaching authority acts and the
erroneous view is declared to be erroneous. A theologian who
has fallen into error may persist in his error-become a
heretic. The very task of refuting him leads to a closer
examination and thus to a better understanding of the
doctrine at issue.

But the decision of the bishops as a body--or of the Bishop
of Rome as head--is final. And that, as we have seen, is
watched by God: He does not allow them to teach His Church
what is wrong. He does not add new teaching or fill their
minds with new doctrine: for that they must use their minds
in the ordinary way of man. But he prevents falsehood from
being taught by them.

To put this matter in a nutshell. The ordinary man has three
courses open to him--he may say what is right, he may say
what is wrong, or he may be silent. The infallible man has
only two. He is prevented by God from saying what is wrong.
He may therefore say what is right, or he may be silent. As
to which of these alternatives he shall pursue in a
particular case, what is to decide? As between teaching what
is right and remaining silent, his infallibility will not
help. It prevents him from teaching what is wrong. It can do
no more for him. What, then, is to decide whether he shall
teach right or remain silent? He can say what is right only
if he knows what is right--if, that is, he has made the
fullest possible use of all the means of acquiring
knowledge. If he does not know the right answer, he must
remain silent: and this might very well happen. A Pope does
not necessarily by some miracle know the whole of Catholic
doctrine, the answer to every doctrinal question that could
be raised. The Church, of course, is over-ruled by the
providence of God, and if some teaching were at a given
moment essential for the Church's well-being, God would see
that we had it. But I am concerned here with the human
machinery, so to speak, of infallibility. And it remains
true that what he does not know he cannot teach. But in no
case can he teach what is wrong: for God will not let him,
lest we, the members of the Church, be led into error.

One further thing remains to be said. We believe what the
Church teaches because the Church is the Mystical Body of
Christ, because, therefore, her teaching is the voice of
Christ Himself. Among the mass of the things she teaches and
the moral laws she propounds, some are, as it were, easy for
the human mind, some difficult. For some we seem to see a
score of reasons, for some we see no reason at all, some
actually might seem to us against reason. But all alike we
accept on the one secure ground-that the Church teaches
them. We do not accept the easy ones because we can see why,
and the others only by an act of Faith. We accept the easy
ones--because the Church teaches them; and we accept the
difficult ones--because the Church teaches them. When a
doctrine or a moral law is presented to us we may ask what
are the reasons for it, but only that we may the better
comprehend it, not that we may decide whether or not to obey
it. For that we only ask does the Church teach it. For it is
thus that Christ would have us know the Truths by which our
lives are to be lived.



ENDNOTES

1. This book is concerned with Catholic doctrine from a
special point of view, the view of a map-maker.
Infallibility, therefore, is treated only as it bears upon
the Catholic's need to learn the truth. It may be useful to
consider it for a moment in its effect upon the man who has
it. It has no necessary effect at all. His infallibility
exists, not for his own sake, but for ours. It is of no more
benefit to him than it is to us. It does not make virtue
easier for him or sin less attractive. It does not,
therefore, make the salvation of his soul any easier. It is
simply a way in which God uses him for the preservation of
truth. And as it does not affect his character, so it does
not arise from it. If by chance a bad man is Pope, it is
just as necessary for us that he should be prevented from
teaching error and just as easy for God to prevent him!



VIII. TRUTH: (B) THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY

THUS then we are in a position to learn from the Church the
truths Christ entrusted to her, and these truths cover not
only the bare minimum of necessary things--purpose and law--
but also much besides for the further enrichment of man's
mind and man's life. All that is set forth in these articles
is simply the general outline of it. It contains the great
mysteries of the Trinity, the Creation, Grace, the
Redemption, the Mystical Body, the Sacraments, Hell and
Heaven. Some of these have already been looked at, at least
in part: the others will be looked at in later chapters.
Here I wish to speak only of mystery in general and of the
greatest of all mysteries, the Trinity.


MYSTERY

First of mystery. As used by theologians the word does not
mean a truth of which we cannot know anything: it means a
truth of which we cannot know everything. Mystery there must
be once we touch the nature of God. He is the Infinite, the
Immeasurable, the Limitless. We are finite, measured,
limited on all sides. It is impossible that we should
totally contain God in our minds so as totally to comprehend
Him. But by His loving kindness we are endowed with a nature
that can know something of Him-some little by its own
powers, vastly more by what He tells us of Himself in the
mysteries He has revealed.

But a mystery is not merely a truth about God which we
cannot discover for ourselves and can know only if God
reveals it. If it were only that, the subject would present
no difficulties. There is the further fact already
suggested: that, even when God has revealed it to us, it
remains a truth about an infinite being and is therefore not
fully comprehensible by us. And the trouble is that it first
presents itself to the mind as an apparent contradiction in
terms. Thus the mystery of the Trinity appears as a
statement that there are three Persons, each of them God,
yet not three Gods. Transubstantiation appears as a
statement that what, by every test known to man, is bread is
yet the Body of Christ. And so with the others. Now
contradiction is the enemy of thought. If any article of
belief presented for the mind's acceptance appears to
contain a contradiction within itself, then the mind cannot
be at ease with it. So that a mystery of religion presents
itself first to the mind rather as a burden than as a light.

Now in some cases the sense of contradiction arises from a
sheer misunderstanding of the doctrine and can be removed
instantly by a correct statement. But in others it arises
from a defect in the mind-the defect of superficiality.

Two statements appear to be at variance. The mind
scrutinizes them more closely and still cannot see how they
are to be reconciled. Now the fact that the mind cannot
reconcile the two statements may originate either in the
statements or in the mind: either the statements may be in
fact irreconcilable, or the reconciliation may be at a depth
to which the mind cannot pierce. This double possibility
will always be obvious to a mind which has realized that the
surface of a thing is not the whole of it.

For the mind to proceed from the affirmation that it cannot
reconcile two statements to the affirmation that they are in
contradiction is legitimate only on one condition: that both
are fully understood. If two statements are fully
comprehended and yet cannot be reconciled, then there is
real contradiction and one of them must be false. But in
these mysteries of religion, it soon becomes clear that the
truths concerned plunge rapidly into depths where the mind
cannot follow them. It still cannot see how they are to be
reconciled: but realizing how immeasurably more there is in
them than it can comprehend, will not assume that one of
them must be false.

The result is that though it may still find them
irreconcilable, this ceases to be a burden to it. The sense
of contradiction, the one burden the mind finds intolerable,
has vanished. The discovery of its own limitation does not
thus trouble it. And the discovery that there are depths
beyond depths of truth is the strongest possible stimulus to
the mind.

For to call a doctrine a mystery is not to warn men's minds
off it, as though it were something on which thought cannot
profitably be employed. It is not to be conceived as a blank
wall barring further progress: it is to be thought of rather
as an endless gallery, into which we can advance ever
deeper, to the great enrichment of our minds, but to the end
of which we shall never come. Or better still think of it as
an inexhaustible well of truth--a well from which for all
eternity we can drink our fill yet which in all eternity we
shall never drink to the last drop--so that we shall never
know thirst. This infiniteness of truth is the most splendid
assurance we can have of eternal happiness: for it means
that the mind can for ever progress, that it will for ever
be enriched by new draughts of truth, yet that it will never
reach the end of truth. This inexhaustibility of truth is
our guarantee against stagnation of the mind: it guarantees
to our minds the possibility of progress through all
eternity.

Mystery then is not the prohibition of thinking, but
actually an invitation to think. The mysteries revealed by
God are revealed as food for the mind, not as dangerous
things that should be left alone. Every mystery contains a
central nucleus of truth that is comprehended, surrounded on
all sides by things that we do not comprehend. Think of it
as a globe of light surrounded by darkness. The man who
rejects mystery is rejecting the central globe of light and
accepting the impenetrable darkness. Whereas for the man who
accepts it, the light grows and expands, sending longer and
longer rays into the darkness around.


THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

Thus the doctrine of the Trinity, at first seen only as a
sheer challenge to Faith grows steadily more luminous to the
mind which accepts it and comes humbly to the study of what
the Church has seen in it. This truth that the Godhead is
absolutely one essence, one single concrete Something: yet
that there are three Persons owning the one Nature--the one
self-same identical Nature: this truth not only grows more
luminous as the ideas of Person and Nature are studied, as
the relation of Father and Son and the Spirit proceeding
from both is meditated on; but throws a flood of light on
the whole of our understanding of life.

The doctrine that in the unity of the Godhead there are
three Persons truly distinct is the Supreme mystery revealed
by Christ. Beyond it is no further mystery, for it deals
with the innermost life of God. In a sense, man need never
have been taught it apart from the Incarnation: for it is
God in His unity who acts in relation to created beings, the
threefold Personality being a fact of His own inner life, of
His own internal activity, of that activity which remains
within His own nature and does not directly affect the
beings He has created. But it is a property of love that it
wants not only to know but also to be known by the person
loved. God loving us, wants us to know Him in His deepest
and most secret life, and so gives us here upon earth a
glimpse of that truth which it is man's proper destiny to
spend eternity in contemplating. And, apart from that desire
of God's to be known by man, the distinction of Persons has
in fact a direct bearing on man's life since it was the
Second Person, and not God in His threefold Personality, who
became man for our salvation.

It is the supreme mystery in a double sense: it deals with
the highest truth: and it is most inaccessible to the
created mind. Yet certain elements of it can be grasped by
us.

In the first place it states that in the one Divine nature
there are three Persons. The distinction between nature and
person has already been discussed in Chapter V, and the
reader might very well return to it before proceeding here.
Summarizing what is there said: Nature and Person are both
principles of action but in different senses--the Person
being that which acts, the Nature being that by which he
acts. In man, nature and person coalesce in one concrete
living being: but the attempt to analyse these two
principles which in us are fused into one has two results:
(1) it makes clear that we are far from reaching down into
the depths of either principle: their deepest depths escape
us and it would be a bold man who would dogmatise as to
their uttermost possibilities; (2) it at least suggests to
us that the total expression of one nature in one person
which is in us is not the only possibility. Person may be
seen as the "centre of attribution in a rational nature"--
that to which the actions of a rational nature are
attributed. In an infinite nature, might there not be more
than one such centre of attribution? Is the idea of one
single mind and one single will three times focused totally
self-contradictory?

No one dare affirm that there is any such contradiction. The
mind of man may say, "I cannot see the possibility": it dare
not say, "I see the contradiction." To the mind thus
faltering comes the revelation of God that it is so: and
contained within the revelation are certain truths which
help the mind to progress in it. God has not simply revealed
to us a handful of words.

The Three Persons--the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost--each
possess the one Divine nature: they do not share it: they
each possess it in its totality. It is important to grasp
exactly what this means. Men, we say, have one nature, in
the sense that they all are human and human nature is one
thing. But though Brown and I are of one nature, I cannot
think with Brown's mind nor love with Brown's will. I must
think with my own mind and love with my own will. So that,
although in a general sense human nature is one, in the
concrete each man has his own nature and acts in it. With
the Three Persons of the Trinity this is not so. There is
but one Divine nature, one Divine mind, one Divine will. The
three Persons each use the one mind to know with, the one
will to love with. For there is but the one absolute Divine
nature. Thus there are not three Gods, but one God. The
Christian revelation cannot allow the faintest derogation
from pure monotheism. The three Persons, then, are not
separate. But they are distinct. The Father is God, the Son
is God, the Holy Ghost is God. But the Father is not the
Son, nor the Son the Holy Ghost, nor the Holy Ghost the
Father.

What distinction can there be in three Persons who each
possess the totality of one and the same nature? A
distinction of Relations.[1]

What then are these relations?

For the relation between the First and Second Persons, the
Gospels use two terms. The Second Person is the Son: and He
is the Word. Both, by different approaches, bring us to the
same Truth.

A son proceeds from his father by generation. One of the
enormous difficulties in all discussion about God is that we
are forced to use human language. Having been built up by
the mind of man for the expression of man's experience,
human language is necessarily inadequate for the expression
of the Divine. Yet it is the best we have. No higher is
within our power. And provided the inadequacy is remembered,
there is no harm done. But, in addition to the sheer
inadequacy of speech, for which there is no remedy, there is
another way in which language can mislead: and this can be
remedied by taking thought. Ideas which are in themselves
quite simple get tied up in our minds with other ideas,
because in human experience the two things are always found
together. Thus the moment we think of the words "father" and
"son" we think of the father as older than the son, as
existing before the son. But in applying words to the
understanding of God, we must get at the essence of the word
and take away from it whatever ideas belong merely to the
condition of human life.

The relation of "paternity" in the Godhead is not modelled
upon human paternity: on the contrary human paternity is a
shadow of the absolute fatherhood of the First Person of the
Trinity. Thus a very slight examination of the idea of
generation as such shows that the time-element does not
belong to it. Generation means simply the origin of a living
thing from another living thing, by communication of
substance, unto similitude of nature. Wherever in the origin
of a being these two conditions are fulfilled--communication
of substance, similitude of nature--then there is sonship.
The time element proceeds not from the nature of sonship,
but from the finite nature of man: he must reach a certain
point of development before he can generate a son. But in an
infinite being, to whom time is not, there is no such
requirement. God the Father eternally generates God the Son,
who is thus co-eternal and, as a consequence of likeness in
nature where the nature is infinite, co-equal.

The term Word--the Word of the Mind, which is Thought--
brings us to the same truth and in a way to a greater point
of understanding. The First Person, as thinker, thinks. Now
that which is produced by the act of thinking, what we call
the "term" of the act, is a thought. With men, the thought
is more or less adequate to the object they are thinking
about. But with God, whose intelligence is infinite, the
thought is absolutely adequate to the object. In this
instance God's thought is of Himself, and since it is
absolutely adequate, it is the Perfect Image of Himself, and
so living, co-eternal, equal in all perfections: a Person.
Thus, even more clearly than Sonship, this notion of the
Word shows the Second Person as the perfect image of the
First: shows also how there is no new nature produced, for
there is no more complete oneness of nature than that which
exists between the Thinker and the Thought.

Thus we have the First Person and the Second proceeding from
the First by way of generation. But between Father and Son
(or between Thinker and Thought) there is Love. Here we must
proceed with the greatest care. In our human experience the
term of an act of thinking is a thought, something that
remains within the being of the thinker; and it is this
thought and not the act of thinking which we conceive as the
Second Person. Can we say that love likewise produces a
"term" within the lover? St. Thomas tells us that we can.
Though love tends towards a being outside itself, yet the
act of loving arouses a state of warmth in the soul by which
the being that is loved is present to the affections. This
state is not the act of loving, but is produced in the soul
by the act of loving, is what we have called a "term" of the
act. And so it is in the love with which God loves Himself--
that is, with which the Father loves the Son and the Son the
Father. The "term" of that act-of love (like the earlier
term of the act of thinking) is subsistent, is a Person--the
Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Ghost.

On this matter of the "procession"[2] of the Holy Ghost as
breathed forth by God in an act of love, we cannot claim
revelation. It is St. Augustine's magnificent contribution
to the theology of that which we do know by revelation--that
the Holy Ghost is the Third Person of the Trinity, co-
eternal and co-equal with the Father and the Son.

I have said that God acts upon creatures in His Unity,
rather than in His Trinity. Yet we have His own warrant for
associating certain of these actions with one or other of
the Three Persons. The Father we say creates, the Son
redeems, the Holy Ghost sanctifies. The principle of this
"appropriation" is quite clear: the external operations of
God can be particularly attributed to one Divine Person
rather than another if they are especially bound up with the
Relation of that Person within the Godhead; that is the
Persons may be spoken of as having relations to mankind
similar to their relations within the Godhead. Thus, because
the Son is brought forth by an act of the Divine Intellect,
the works of wisdom are especially attributed to Him.
Because the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Divine Will, the
works of Holiness are attributed to Him (since holiness is
of the will as wisdom is of the intellect) and so also are
God's gifts to men (since the Holy Ghost is Love, and gifts
are the expression of love). The operation of the Holy Ghost
within the Mystical Body will be treated later.

In thus setting down some of the elements of what God has
revealed to us of His own innermost life, it is clear that
the mystery remains, but it is mystery in the sense
indicated earlier in this chapter--the reconciliation
remains invisible to us, but it is rather the invisibility
that comes from too much light than from sheer darkness.
Thus it is an invitation to the mind. Already, the mind is
freed by it from the awful weight of God conceived as
solitary in infinity, with no adequate object of His
infinite love. And new richness comes into our contemplation
of human nature: thus human fatherhood is an immeasurably
greater thing as a shadow of the Divine Fatherhood than it
could ever be in its own right: the human soul is only the
more like to God for its faculties of intellect and will,
since in God Thought and Love not only exist, but. subsist
as Persons: and the Unity of the Church takes on a new
immensity when Christ proposes as its model the Unity of the
Triune God.



ENDNOTES

1. These relations, as we shall see, are subsistent and not,
as relations are in created beings. mere accidents.

2. The act by which the Holy Ghost subsists is not
"generation"--this we know by revelation, God the Son is
"the only begotten of the Father." The Holy Ghost, says the
Athanasian Creed is "from the Father and the Son, neither
made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding." What is
the difference between the generation of the Son and the
"spiration" or breathing forth of the Holy Ghost? Many
answers are suggested. St. Thomas finds the difference in
this: an act of the intellect has as its precise object the
production of a term in the likeness of the thing conceived,
and likeness is an essential of sonship: whereas though the
Holy Ghost is in fact like in nature to the Father and Son,
yet likeness is not the primary object of an act of the
will.



IX. LAW AND SIN

CHRIST summarized the duty of man in the two phrases--"Love
God," "Love thy neighbour as thyself." We cannot have the
Supernatural Life if we do not love God and our neighbour.
But love must express itself in act, and Our Lord left us
not only the summarization, but also a great body of
detailed rules concerning things to be done as an expression
of the twofold love and things to be avoided as contrary to
it. These, then, are the laws established by God for the
guidance of man's actions. The means by which men can learn
what the laws are, and certain practical problems to which
they give rise, will be examined in the next two chapters.


CONSCIENCE

Now many will think that this is precisely what conscience
is for. And it is absolutely true that a man must in all
circumstances follow his conscience. But an investigation of
conscience will show that by itself it is not sufficient--
that man has not within himself an infallible teacher as to
what is right and what is wrong. Conscience is not a faculty
or permanent part of man. It is loose speaking to say "I
have something on my conscience." It would be more accurate
to say "I have something on my soul." There is the same
difference between conscience and soul as there is between a
punch and a fist. The punch is an action of the fist, a
thing the fist does. Similarly the conscience is an action
of the soul, a thing the soul does. Precisely defined,
conscience is the practical moral judgment of the intellect-
-the intellect being simply the soul itself considered in
its activity of knowing things.

Whenever I am asked a question, the answer is a judgment of
my intellect. Now the intellect makes many judgments, and
conscience only differs from the others by its special
scope. If I answer the question "Did Richard III murder the
princes in the Tower?" my answer is a judgment of my
intellect; but it is purely a historical judgment, not a
moral one; therefore it is not my conscience. If the
question is changed to "Ought Richard III to have murdered
the princes?"--my answer is again a judgment of my
intellect, and this time it is a moral judgment, a judgment
on right and wrong. But it is not my conscience, for it is
not a practical moral judgment, that is to say it is not
concerned with what it would be right for me to do here and
now. But if the question is again changed to "Ought I to
murder the man next door whose manners are so maddening?"--
the answer is not only a judgment of my intellect and a
moral one, but also a practical one.

In other words, conscience is the answer given by my soul
when I am faced with a question "What ought I to do, what
would it be right for me to do, in this particular matter?"

Yet, you say, is that not a sufficient guide? Unfortunately
no. For conscience is a judgment of my intellect and
therefore like any other such judgment it can be wrong.
Conscience is not universally infallible. It is often firm
and definite in its answer: but an answer may be firm and
definite, and yet wrong. By what does the soul judge, if it
has no teacher outside itself? By what standard does it
decide what is right? The answer is that the law of God is
imprinted on man's nature and by that he judges. In other
words, God's laws for men are not something totally outside
his nature: they correspond to something God has already
placed in his nature. But in the course of ages, man's
nature has grown distorted in all sorts of ways and any
distortion in man's nature will mean a distortion in the
thing imprinted on it. The moon, falling on a perfectly
still lake, will give a perfect image of itself; but let the
lake be ever so little ruffled, and the image will be broken
up into small pieces: let the lake be really ruffled, and
the image will be no more than broken sparkles of light
scattered here and there. It is still from the moon that
these sparkles come, but no one looking at them could form a
picture of the lovely luminous globe of the moon itself.
Thus, even where the distortion is greatest, no man's nature
is without some trace of God's law still imprinted; but it
is not always easy to read. If we could take the general
consensus of the conscience of the race as a whole, it would
probably be found to be in accord with the greater part of
the natural moral law. But the individual conscience, though
probably also in major accord, is apt to show startling
variations, from country to country and from man to man.

Thus, even on matters which simply concern the right use of
man's nature, conscience, lacking information from without,
can give contradictory answers. But on the most important
questions of all--those which are concerned with man's
Supernatural Destiny--the unaided conscience gives no answer
at all. On the question "Ought I to divorce my wife?"--
conscience, apart from God's teaching, gives different men
different answers. But on the question "Ought I to be
baptized?"--conscience, apart from God's teaching, gives no
man any answer.

If, then, there is no teacher capable of giving us God's
law, we are left with nothing but this internal judgment of
our own, which on the most obvious questions is capable of
being wrong and on the most important questions can only be
silent. A man must follow his conscience, the judgment of
his intellect as to what is right and wrong. But the very
supremacy of conscience renders it vital that conscience
should be instructed.

Consider man's position. There is in him no internal faculty
that tells him with either certainty or completeness, in
every situation that can arise, what things are right and
what wrong. Yet without such knowledge how can he so act as
to reach his goal? The task of achieving the end for which
one is created is like any other task: it must be done in
the right way. Certain actions will help the achievement,
certain will hinder it. We can only know if we are told. God
who made us has told us: His Church which enunciates His
truths likewise enunciates His laws. Nor is conscience
thereby annulled: conscience is the practical moral judgment
of the intellect. Now the intellect which knows that the
Church is giving God's law will naturally judge that it is
right. The Catholic who unquestioningly accepts the moral
law as taught by the Church is following his conscience
unswervingly.


SIN

The Catholic therefore knows the law of right action. But
knowledge is not enough. A man may know and yet disobey.
Such disobedience is sin. Sin is, quite simply, breaking
God's law. And in that lies its enormity.

The breach of God's law may be a small thing or a great. It
may be a failing in a comparatively trifle--silly and
weakening to the soul; or it may be a definite rejection of
God. The first sort--venial sin--is still sin, yet it will
not break the friendship that exists between the soul and
God: it will not therefore damn a man's soul. The second
sort we call mortal: having committed such a sin, to die
without repentance means eternal damnation.[1] We shall return
to that.

The essence of sin's gravity, as I have said, lies simply in
its breaking of God's law. It is blank ingratitude to God;
to whom all men owe so much--to whom Christians know that
they owe so immeasurably more than the rest of man.

It is incredible stupidity: rebellion against God is one of
the most ludicrous things in the world. For whether we are
obedient or rebellious we are at every moment totally in the
hands of God. He made us of nothing; by His almighty power
He keeps us above the surface of our native nothingness.
Without His concurrence, we could not act at all, we could
not even defy Him. The sinner, as it were, stands up in the
hand of God, sustained in being by that all-powerful hand,
defying God, but in his very defiance using the power which
God has lent him and which God could at any moment withdraw
from him


LAW AND FREEDOM

This fact that the essence of sin is offence against the law
of God sometimes--in fact most often--misleads the sinner as
to the true nature of sin. He imagines himself in a small
field, bounded by a fence put there to prevent him from
breaking out of the field to sample the rich possibilities
of life outside. Here, he says, am I: a being full of the
possibilities of development, yet my development is checked
at every turn by some absurd law. This view arises from a
failure to understand the nature of God's laws. His laws are
no mere whims, like the laws of some stupid despot. They
are, on the contrary, the expression by God of His own
knowledge of man's nature and destiny. He knows the kind of
being man is, for He made him. And for the same reason He
knows what man is made for. God's laws, then, are a precise
statement of how this particular kind of being may avoid
destruction and reach his particular goal. The man who makes
an engine is not limiting your freedom when he tells you not
to run it beyond a certain speed. He knows that if you do
you will smash the engine. And if you should plead that your
nature demands more speed, that you feel stifled by such
slow running--he may very well grow impatient. He knows what
speed is right for the engine, for he made it.

God's laws then are best thought of as "maker's
instructions," directions for the right use of ourselves.
His prohibitions warn us of wrong ways of using ourselves or
our neighbours. Earlier I used the simile of a razor to
illustrate the point that to misuse a thing was to destroy
it. Emancipate the razor from its old humdrum task of
removing hair from the face--defy the maker's statement that
razors are only meant for shaving--use your razor for
chopping wood and you will have a piece of twisted metal,
fit only for the scrap-heap. God's law is not something
altogether apart from us: the knowledge of it may have to
come from outside, but the law itself is, in a special
sense, inside us. For it is a statement of the way we are
made. And any action against it is therefore an action
against our own nature and is consequently destructive.

The act of running counter to God's law is sometimes
justified on the ground of "self-expression." It certainly
is not an expression of the self, for God, who made the
self, has declared that such action is contrary to its
nature. And a man who commits sin--any sin--is to that
extent less of a man, just as a motor car, whose engine has
been used in violation of its maker's instructions, is less
of a motor car. To return to the argument of an earlier
chapter--freedom results only from doing what one ought. The
connection between law and freedom is absolute.

Yet we sin. Our will is so made that it can choose only what
appears to us as good. But two different and contradictory
things may both appear to us as good from different points
of view: to abstain from meat on Friday is good because
God's Church demands it: to eat meat on Friday is good
because our body is very fond of meat. Between these two
goods the will can choose. Its tendency, since the Fall, is
to choose the more immediate, what we may call the nearer
good--the one we like! To take a matter of more importance.
If a married man falls in love with a woman who is not his
wife, then two mutually exclusive courses of action will
both seem to him, from different angles, good. To remain
faithful to his own wife will seem good because God has
forbidden adultery: to be faithless to her will seem good
because his lower nature would find pleasure in the sin.
Again the will must choose. And its tendency, against which
it must struggle, is likely to be in the direction of the
lower pleasure. Temptation--however tremendous--is not sin.
It is not even venial sin. But for the will to yield to it,
to choose the sin--even if it never proceeds to action--that
is sin--as offence against God and a contradiction of one's
own nature.


VOCATION

What has been said so far in this chapter concerns law as an
expression of God's general will for all men equally. But
there is likewise a will of God for each individual, what is
called his vocation. Shall a man be a priest or a layman? If
a priest, shall he be a secular priest or a member of a
religious community? These questions are momentous. Within
the priesthood there is almost every variety of way of
serving God, opening for every type of character to proceed
to its fullest development. If he is to be a layman, in
which of the various ways of life open to him will he best
serve God's purpose for him? To take one crucial question--
shall he marry or not? Marriage, God teaches, is a high and
holy state: normally men and women are called to it, for it
is the race's duty to carry itself on. But though it is the
race's duty, it is not the duty of every individual.
Celibacy, chosen for God's sake (not mere celibacy, be it
noted, but a celibacy definitely dedicated to God) is a
higher and holier state still. It is part of the rule of
life for priests. But, exceptionally, it may be God's will
for a particular man or woman living in the world.

Now there is no organ in the Church for the expression of
this vocation, no official to whom one may go for an
official answer. It is the most intimate of matters between
God and each soul. Nor is there any one way in which God
guides all souls. In some cases, circumstances arise when
the sense of vocation seems to point one way and
circumstances another. In all such matters, there is
possibility of self-deception, and the individual prays for
clear guidance and takes the advice of experienced men.

In every case, of course, the individual vocation must be
completely in accord with God's law for all men, and the
existence of this general moral law is a strong aid to the
clear perception of God's will for the individual.



ENDNOTES

1. The distinction between mortal and venial sin is very
important. Between two breaches of law there may not only be
a difference of degree, but actually a difference of kind.
Consider the law of the land. A man may break it by not
taking out a dog-licence. Or he may break it by fighting
against his country in war. It is not simply that one breach
of the law is more serious than the other. The two breaches
are totally different in their nature. So with the law of
God. There are breaches of His law which do not involve
rejection and rebellion, others which do.



X. LAW AND SUFFERING

THE resistance to sin nearly always involves some degree of
suffering: in some cases it involves terrible suffering. And
there are those who would relax the moral law when the
suffering caused by obedience to it appears to be extreme.

Now, no one can alter God's law. Even the Church cannot do
that: within the framework of His law she may make what we
call by-laws, binding upon her members, but these must be in
accord with God's law, which she cannot change.

This point is not always grasped. The Church has received
from God the power to make laws binding upon her members.
But this power, as I have said, is subordinate to the laws
stated by God Himself as binding upon men. The distinction
may be illustrated in the case of marriage. The Church
cannot grant any of her children a divorce because when they
make the contract of marriage (that is to say, agree to take
each other as husband and wife for life) God brings into
being a new relationship. Now, by God's act consequent upon
their contract, they are man and wife. This new
relationship, though it follows upon their contract, is not
created by their contract, but by God. The Church can no
more make them cease to be husband and wife than it could
make a father and son cease to be father and son. But within
the law laid down by God, the Church can legislate. It can,
for instance, decree that for the marriage of a Catholic,
the presence of a priest as witness is necessary. These laws
being its own the Church can alter. But she cannot alter the
laws given to her by God to be taught to men. Nor does she
want to.

First, and most obviously, because of the nature of the law,
as already set out. As it stands, God's law is a statement
by man's maker of the right way for men to act. It is an
expression of God's knowledge, and for human knowledge to
try and change it would be absurd. Human institutions may
try to alter the law out of pity for suffering men: but the
law they are trying to alter is the law given by one who is
Infinite Love.

But even if God's law were a lesser thing than that, the
effort of men to make it easier would still be futile. No
one but the lawmaker can alter the law. If anyone else
claims to, it is of no avail. For at the end of life it is
the lawmaker who is to judge us, and He will judge us
according to His laws as He made them, not according to the
modifications introduced into His laws by men. It is as
though one were doing an examination paper and some kindly
soul, entering the room and discovering that we were ill
difficulties, altered the questions to make them easier for
us. His act would undoubtedly make the writing of our paper
easier: but it might make the reading of the examination
results less pleasant.

But there is something worse than mere futility in this
altering the moral law to reduce suffering. To make clear
what it is we must look a little more closely into the
nature of suffering.

Suffering is not necessarily an evil. As we have seen, a
thing is evil if it hinders a being in the attainment of the
purpose for which the being exists. In the fullest sense,
therefore, a thing is evil for man only if it makes it more
difficult for him to save his soul. Now suffering does not
necessarily do so. Only sin is always and necessarily an
evil.

Ordinary observation of life shows that suffering may work
in two ways. First it may be good for the sufferer: we know
that a man who has never known suffering is soft and
undeveloped. His character lacks substance. Immaturity
clings about him. And not only do we find that this minimum
of suffering is apparently necessary for man's proper
development: we also find that really great suffering, if it
had been dominated, has the power of enriching the character
of the man or woman who has suffered. Suffering, if it ruins
some characters, enriches others. It is not necessarily an
evil, but may be an immense factor for good. Which it is to
be depends, for every man, on the way he accepts it. It lies
in him to dominate it or to be dominated by it.

Life is a period of testing: the suffering that arises in it
is part of that test. Suffering may be either curable or
incurable. If it is physically incurable, a man must put up
with it: he has no choice. If it is curable, but only by a
breach of the moral law, a man need not put up with it, he
has a choice; yet he is morally bound to put up with it.
These two sorts of suffering--the sort that cannot be
avoided at all and the sort that cannot be avoided without
sin-represent the test that God allows every man to go
through. Every man has not the same test: some men have more
suffering than others: but no man is allowed by God to have
more than he can, with the aid of God's grace, bear. Part of
the Christian law is love of neighbour, and the relief of
suffering is one of the noblest expressions of this love.
But it must be within the limits of God's law.

Thus the effort of men to relax the moral law so that others
shall not suffer unduly is aimed at altering the test
devised by God Himself. And there is another thing. Life is
not only a testing to see if a man is fit, it is likewise a,
preparation to make him fit. Suffering, as we have seen, can
immensely enrich the soul. And the whole of life represents
God's means of bringing a soul to its highest point of
development. It is for God to measure the amount of
suffering necessary for a man's perfection. And anyone who
tries to modify God's law in order to reduce the suffering
is ensuring that the soul shall not become as fine a thing
as it might. Steel is a beautiful thing: but it has taken an
immense heat to bring it to its right perfection. Anyone
who, as it were in kindness, cut down the heat to half,
would prevent the metal from ever being more than a useless
mess. Some suffering is necessary: God knows how much each
man needs: and it is by the suffering that cannot be
legitimately avoided that God shows the measure of what is
necessary.

The essence of the conquest of suffering is that it should
be voluntary. Now the suffering that one could avoid by
committing sin is obviously, in the strictest sense,
voluntary. One has exercised a choice. But the suffering
that one cannot avoid at all may equally be made voluntary:
a man can accept it as coming from God's hands, thank God
for it as the means by which God is choosing to fit his soul
for its eternal destiny, and offer it to God for his own
sins and the sins of other men.

When man has thus voluntarily accepted suffering, he has
made one of the greatest of human conquests. For men
naturally flee from suffering in fear of it. By an act of
one's will to, accept what all men flee from is in itself a
triumph. But to go further--as the saints have done and many
who are less than saints--and inflict suffering upon
oneself--that is the supreme triumph over human weakness:
for it is a positive going out to seek what other men flee
from.

This infliction of suffering is not, of course, a mere
aimless love of suffering. Nor does it arise, as some
asceticisms have arisen, from hatred of the body or any
feeling of the body's worthlessness. It has the immediate
practical end of helping to bring the body into proper
subordination to the soul--for a body not subordinate can
ruin the whole being, and fail to achieve its proper freedom
as a body. But mortification has another significance which
can be no more than touched on here. As there was a
suffering of Christ's natural body, so there is a suffering
of His mystical body. The human member can unite his
suffering with Christ's, and offer them for the whole body.
"I fill up in my flesh," says St. Paul, "what is wanting to
the suffering of Christ for His body which is the church."

Human life, then, we may see as the preparing for the life
of Heaven. It means, on the one hand, complete self-
conquest. The soul must conquer the body and bring it into
full obedience to God's law: and the soul must itself come
into full submission to God. It has, from God's Church, the
truths it needs to know about God and man and its own
destiny: from the same source it has the law which will
govern it in the right use of itself and in the right
relation of love and duty to others. But, as has been seen,
given that man is to live a life above his nature, he needs
those gifts above his nature which we call the Supernatural
Life. In the next two chapters I shall discuss the Life.



XI. THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE


(A) HOW IT COMES TO THE SOUL

THE ground of the map is now sketched in. The end of the
road of life is Heaven, and death is a gateway on the road.
God has given us means of knowing all that mass of Truth by
which we know what God and man are, what life and death
mean, what conduct will bring man to heaven. Yet truth and
law by themselves do not say all. Man's destiny is above his
nature and therefore nothing in his nature will fit him for
it. Something must be added to his nature to elevate it.
Since what he has to do is to live the life of heaven--a
life which his nature as such does not possess the power to
live--he must receive the necessary powers from outside.
And, as we have seen, he must receive them in this life.
These powers, which enable the soul to live a life above its
nature, flow from the possession of the Supernatural Life.
In this chapter and the next, the Supernatural Life will be
discussed. In this, the main question will be the way in
which the soul receives it: in the next, the question will
be what its effects are in the soul.

First, then, as to the way the soul receives it. In an
earlier chapter, our Lord's phrase "I am the Life" was
worked out fully. Here I shall repeat the main points very
briefly. If Christ is the Life, then He must live in us: and
that He really does so, St. Paul bears witness when He says
"I live, yet now not I, but Christ liveth in me." The idea
of one being living in another is already familiar to us in
the case of the cells of the body: here the cells are living
cells: yet they live not with some independent life of their
own but with the life of the whole body. The cells of my
body live with my life: it is I that live in them. This is
shown to be more than a suggestive comparison by St. Paul's
clear working out of the idea of the Church as Christ's
body. The Church is a body, a living thing, united to Christ
as really as His natural body was upon this earth. He is the
Head, the directing principle, union with which is a
condition of life in the Body: and every member of the
Church is a cell in the body and, as such, lives with the
life of Christ, whose Body the Church is. This membership of
Christ's Body--what we call incorporation with Christ--is
the condition on which He can live in us. Only if we are
members of a Church thus vitally united with Him does His
life flow through us.

We are incorporated--built into the Mystical Body--by
baptism. We speak of baptism as a re-birth, a being born
again. And rightly. Birth means entry into life. By birth we
enter into the life of man. By re-birth we enter into the
life of Christ: equally the life of Christ enters into us.
Thus Our Lord Himself says of baptism: "Unless a man be born
again of water and the Holy Ghost, he shall not enter into
the Kingdom of Heaven."


PRAYER

Now the very first condition of human life, whether in the
Body or out of it, is prayer. Prayer is simply the directing
of life to God. Of prayer, thus understood, the most direct
form is the turning of the soul to God that it may speak to
Him. This is not, as is sometimes thought, the whole of
prayer, since every action of a life directed to God is a
prayer. The proportion between this more direct form of
prayer which consists in speaking to God and the less direct
form which consists in work done for God's glory, is
different for different men according to God's special will
for each. At one end is the contemplative life, which is
almost wholly direct prayer: at the other end is the active
life, but this can and should be prayer also. In any case,
if direct speaking to God is not the whole of prayer, it is
prayer at its highest, and just underlie all the rest. What
have men to say to God? Endless things. But they may be
grouped under four headings.

There is first adoration. It is of the nature of an
intelligent being to honour excellence. God is supreme
excellence and man's intellect is therefore false to itself
if it denies Him its homage. Second, there is thanksgiving:
we owe all things whatsoever to God and the failure to
acknowledge it is literally fraudulent. Third, there is
sorrow for sin. Fourth, there is petition--asking for
things--spiritual and material, for ourselves and others.
Mere petition, without the other three elements, is a poor
shadow of prayer. With them it is an act of real enrichment
to the soul: since it expresses not only a right relation of
man to God, but a right relation of our wishes to God's
will: man is sufficiently certain of God's love to ask for
what he wants: sufficiently certain, also, to be assured
that God will not grant him what he wants if it would be
against his truest interests.

Prayer, thus understood in its fourfold subject matter, may
also be considered with regard to its mode. It must
primarily be in the soul: if it is not an act of the
knowledge and love of man's soul, then it is of no value at
all. But, thus rooted and grounded in the soul, it will make
a twofold use of the body. First, the body affects the soul;
second, the soul expresses itself through the body. As an
example of the body affecting the soul, a crucifix seen by
the eye may help to fix the soul in meditation upon Calvary.
As an example of the soul expressing itself through the
body, a man meditating upon Calvary and so coming to see the
horror of his own sinfulness in the light of the love of
God, may find relief to the power of his soul's sorrow by
falling on his knees or striking his breast. In a full life
of prayer, then, the body will not be excluded. But there is
a third thing. Man is not an isolated unit, but a being
linked by his very nature to other men. He owes his coming
into existence to a man and a woman: he owes his continuance
in existence, the development of his powers of mind and
body, the full life of his emotions, to a certain co-
operation with others. If prayer is to be a directing of his
life to God, this necessary social element in his nature
must not be excluded: otherwise there would be a whole side
of his nature not consecrated to God. Therefore not only
must he pray for his fellow-men, he must from time to time
join with them in the worship of God. The man who never goes
to church is not merely dispensing with a particular piece
of ceremonial. He is refusing to join his fellows in God's
worship.

This rough analysis of prayer--into the four kinds of things
to be said to God and the three ways of saying them--does,
as has already been noted, apply to all men, whether in the
Church or out of it, whether aware or unaware of any
revelation of God to man. It is an analysis based upon the
very nature of God and man and is therefore of universal
application. But it has special application to the Catholic.
For his knowledge of God in Christ our Lord gives him all
the more reason for adoration and thanksgiving and sorrow,
all the more confidence in petition; and in every part of
his prayer, a true ground of intimacy and personal contact.
The use of the soul in prayer is the same for him as for all
men; the use of the body is greater since he knows that God
took to Himself not only a human soul but a human body too;
and the social element in prayer is inevitably stronger with
men who realize that they are not only in a loose sense
members of the human race, but in a strict sense cells of
one living body, and so joined, not only to Christ but to
all others, living and dead, who are likewise cells of the
Mystical Body of Christ.

There is not only a prayer of the individual cell but a
prayer of the whole body. And if for its own individual
prayer the cell uses the life of the whole body, equally it
joins in the prayer of the whole body and so makes it its
own.


THE MASS

What, then, is this prayer of the whole body? Obviously it
must be the prayer of the Head, of Him whose body it is:
that is, it must be the prayer of Christ. Here again we come
to something of quite vital importance for the understanding
of the Catholic scheme of life. There is a powerful phrase
in the Epistle to the Hebrews which may serve as a starting
point for thought, "Christ ever liveth to make intercession
for us." This involves several things: (1) Christ is in
Heaven, at the right hand of the Father. (2) His
intercession for us is not a thing done upon Calvary once
and for all, but a continuous thing, a thing that never
ceases. In other words, Christ in Heaven is unceasingly
making intercession for us. (3) But the basis of Our Lord's
intercession is Calvary. That is what He is offering to His
Father on our behalf. Therefore, Christ in Heaven is
continuously offering His own death upon Calvary to His
Father on our behalf. That is the prayer of Christ Himself.

The prayer of His Body is an earthly participation in that.
The smallest individual prayer of every member of the Body
is joined with, flows into, Our Lord's continuous offering
of Calvary: that, indeed, is the meaning of the phrase
"through Jesus Christ our Lord," which is affixed in so many
words to some of our prayers and belongs in idea to all of
them. As with the individual prayer of the members, so with
the prayer of the whole Body: it is a joining up with the
continuous offering of Christ.

That being so, it is not surprising that it should find its
highest point in the Mass, which is the exact projection
here upon earth of the continuous offering in heaven. This
truth is worth stating with some precision. In heaven, as we
have seen, Our Lord unceasingly offers Himself, the Victim
slain upon Calvary, for all men. In the Mass Our Lord offers
Himself, the Victim slain upon Calvary, for all men.

First, it is Our Lord that makes the offering. He is acting
through His Mystical Body as though through His natural
body: it is therefore His offering, the Body simply being
the instrument He uses: thus every member of the Church is
joined in the offering: but certain special members, the
priests, have been given

by God special powers enabling them to act for the Body.
They are, in a sense, the immediate instrument. Thus three
truths must be kept in mind: (1) Christ is the chief priest,
offering Himself by His own power; (2) the priest offers for
the people by power granted him by Christ; (3) the people
offer Christ's sacrifice through the priest.

Second. It is Himself that Our Lord is offering at Mass. On
the night before His death, Our Lord, at supper with His
apostles, took bread and consecrated it so that, while
retaining the appearance of bread, it ceased to be bread and
became His body, His real body, the body in which He walked
the earth and was nailed upon the Cross. Likewise, He took
wine and consecrated it so that, while retaining the
appearance of wine, it ceased to be wine, and became His
blood. He gave His body to the apostles to eat and His blood
to drink. And all that He had done, He empowered them to do.
The apostles passed on the power, and to this day, in the
Mass, the priests of the Church consecrate bread and wine so
that they become the body and blood of Christ. And because
the body is the body of the living Christ, where the body
is, there is the living Christ in his totality--Man and God.
And equally, where the blood is, there is the living Christ
in His totality. At Mass the priest (acting as an instrument
in the hands of Christ) offers Christ thus totally present.
In other words, at the altar Christ is offering Himself, the
Victim slain upon Calvary, but now ever living: just as in
Heaven He continuously offers Himself, the Victim slain upon
Calvary, but now ever living. The Mass is really Heaven as
it were breaking through to earth to be seen of men.

But the priest does not only consecrate: he consumes: he
receives Our Lord, whole and living, into his body just as
the apostles did. And the congregation likewise may receive
Him. This is Communion, the Blessed Eucharist, receiveth
Christ Himself into ourselves. "He that eateth Me, the same
shall live by Me." The members of Christ's Mystical Body
have as their proper food nothing less than Christ Himself--
"the Life." Other food gives life: this food is life.

Our situation as Catholics may be seen in its simplest
elements. By baptism we are built into the Body of Christ,
and as cells in the Body we are able to live with the life
of the Body. The condition of all life in God is prayer: our
prayer in the Body culminates in the supreme prayer of the
Mass: and from the Mass we receive Christ Himself to be the
food of our life in the Body. Communion, then, is God's
supreme gift to us upon earth. Everything in our life is
vitalized by it. Baptism leads up to it, everything else
flows from it.


THE SACRAMENTS

But there are other ways in which the life of Christ flows
to the individual cell. Beside Baptism and the Blessed
Eucharist Our Lord instituted five other sacraments.

First a word as to sacraments. These are material things
which are by God's power made to convey grace--or life--to
the soul. We say of them that they are symbols, differing
from other symbols in that they actually effect what they
symbolize. Thus baptism--with its pouring of water on the
body--is a symbol of cleansing, and it does cleanse the
soul. The other five sacraments are Confirmation, Penance,
Holy Orders, Matrimony and Extreme Unction.

A very brief word of these individually: Confirmation and
Holy Orders are linked with Baptism in that they can only be
received once, because, as it is phrased, they confer a
character on the soul; which means that they confer some
share in the priesthood of Our Lord. Baptism makes a man a
member of Christ: Confirmation gives him the right and the
duty to defend the Mystical Body of Christ: Holy Orders
makes him a priest, confers upon him among other things the
power to offer the sacrifice of the Mass, and to absolve
from sin. The fullness of the priesthood is in the bishop,
who has certain further powers, including those of
confirming and ordaining. But whether priest or bishop, the
point to be held firmly is that the man is not acting of
himself, but of his own will gives himself to be used as an
instrument by Christ. What is done through him, Christ does
and no other: so that his moral character, whatever effect
it may have on his own salvation, has no effect at all on
the sacramental work Christ uses him to do. To hold
otherwise would actually be to place a man between us and
God. If his moral character could affect the grace we
receive, then it would be in some way derived from the
priest and not wholly from God.[1]

Of the others, Penance is the sacrament of the forgiveness
of sins. A man receives the Supernatural Life at Baptism, he
can lose it only by a deliberate act of rebellion against
God what is called a mortal sin: mortal because it brings
death: for death is the loss of life and by mortal sin the
soul loses the Supernatural Life. The life thus lost is
regained when we receive the sacrament of Penance, when,
that is, with true sorrow for having offended God, we
confess our sins to His priest, and from the priest, as
God's instrument, receive God's forgiveness and the return
of the Supernatural Life to the soul.

Matrimony is the sacrament of the entry upon the married
state. When two people marry, they take each other as
husband and wife for life--this, whether they are baptized
or not. If they are baptized, then their marriage is a
sacrament--a means whereby God's grace flows to their souls
to give them the aids they need for the sanctification of
their life together and the overcoming of such difficulties
as may arise in it. It is to be noted that the priest does
not administer this sacrament to the parties, they
administer it to each other.

Extreme Unction, the Last Anointing, is the sacrament for
grievous illness and the danger of death.

But all these other Sacraments draw their efficacy from
their relation to the central sacrament, the Blessed
Eucharist. And this is not a mere chance. Prayer and the
sacraments are both means of life. In prayer man approaches
God. In the sacraments God approaches man. But both
culminate in the same point. For the highest prayer is the
Mass, and the highest sacrament is the Eucharist. Thus at
the point where man's approach to God reaches its uttermost
intensity, God's response is at its most measureless
richness.

It is to be noted in the sacramental system how closely God
has followed the lines of human life. First, observe that
the very nature of the sacrament is a representation of the
nature of man: man is the union of a body and soul, that is,
of matter and spirit: God chooses to act upon him by means
which are likewise a union of matter and spirit.

Second, observe that the sacraments bear the same relation
to life as a glove to the hand--they are made to fit it. The
natural life of man has certain fixed points: he is born,
grows to manhood, marries or becomes a priest, dies. Roughly
corresponding to these five points are five sacraments:
Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony or Holy Orders, Extreme
Unction. Beyond these five points there are two things to be
considered: man sins, and for that there is the sacrament of
Penance: and running through all is daily life--and for that
there is the appropriate food, the Blessed Eucharist. Thus
provision is made for man's sanctification not only in his
individual life, but also in his relation to the community--
on its social side by Matrimony, on its religious side by
Holy Orders.

Third, observe that the sacraments are built upon the
natural life in still another way: they make use of four
everyday things--bread, water, wine, oil--and two everyday
situations--the exercise of authority and marriage. Now to
these four common things and two common situations, the
natural life might be reduced in its simplest elements.

Throughout, then, the sacramental system is a reminder of
two things: (1) that matter and spirit are not eternally at
enmity, but that matter may be the vehicle of spirit--a
truth taught at its very highest in the fact of the
Incarnation itself, when God took to Himself a human body
and made it as His own;[2] (2) that the Supernatural Life does
not abolish the natural life and take its place, but enters
into the natural life and supernaturalizes it.

Here then is man: a member of Christ's Mystical Body by
baptism, open to the inpouring of the Supernatural Life.


THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY GHOST

But there is another great truth about man's membership of
the Mystical Body. Our Lord, while constantly speaking of
Himself, as the Life, also speaks of the Holy Ghost whom He
is to send, and associates Him most intimately with the
continuing work of man's salvation. St. Paul speaks almost
interchangeably of life in Christ and life in the Holy
Spirit. When Christ promised to live in us, something more
was involved than our sharing the life of His human nature.
For He was God. And, therefore, since we are united
organically with Christ as Head, we are indwelt by the
Blessed Trinity. But we have already seen the principle of
appropriation by which the works of sanctification are
especially associated with the Holy Ghost. It is by the
power of the Holy Ghost that God became man in His mother's
womb: and it is by the power of the Holy Ghost that man is
re-born into the Mystical Body--"unless a man be born again
of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the
Kingdom of Heaven." When He was giving his apostles the
power to forgive sins, He breathed upon them and said:
"Receive ye the Holy Ghost": the Holy Ghost came upon the
Apostles in the Upper Room and sent them forth for the
conversion of the world: by Christ's own word, the Holy
Ghost, the Comforter was to abide with His Church.
Everything the Church does for the sanctification of its
individual member, every step that a member takes in
supernatural development, is attributed to the Third Person
of the Blessed Trinity.



ENDNOTES

1. There are two truths that must be seen in proper
relation: (1) the priest is simply an instrument in the
hands of Christ: yet (2) as minister of the sacrament he
must have the right intention. According to the first, the
sacrament does not flow from the priest but from Christ and
the sacrament is not affected in the faintest way by the
priest's character--neither gaining from his holiness nor
suffering loss from his sins. According to the second, the
priest simply withholding his intention, can prevent the
sacrament from taking place. The priest's character cannot
affect the sacrament yet his intention can. At first sight
this may seem a contradiction. But it is not so. The priest
is an instrument: that is, he gives certain of his human
acts, and these are used by God as channels of grace. But
for a complete human act, intention is necessary. The act a
man does not intend cannot be called his act at all.
Therefore if a priest has the true intention, God uses him--
as an instrument, God doing the work. But if the priest
withholds his intention, God cannot use him as a sacramental
instrument, and nothing happens at all.

The question "How can a bad priest administer a sacrament?"
misses the point. In this sense there is no such thing as a
bad priest. There are priests who are bad men, just as there
are doctors who are bad men. But as one only calls a man a
bad doctor if he practises medicine badly, so one can only
call a man a bad priest if he does his work badly. But, in
the case in point, priestly work consists simply in giving
certain of his acts which can be used by God sacramentally.
Provided he does this, he does all that the holiest man can
do. If he does not do this, there is no sacrament at all.

2. This consecration of matter, seen in the Incarnation and
in the Church's Sacraments, is carried to its furthest
conclusion in the Church's practice with regard to what is
called Sacramentals. These, unlike the Sacraments, are not
instituted by Our Lord, but by the Church. Yet they follow
from Our Lord's own practice. As He blessed bread before He
ate it, so the Church blesses the material things man uses
in his daily life: and further attaches her blessing to
material things (as in Holy Water) and material actions (as
in the sign of the Cross) which man may use in his prayer.
In all these cases material things are brought into the full
stream of the Church's prayer and so into a special
relationship with God.



XII. THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE


(B) HOW IT WORKS IN THE SOUL

IN the last chapter the channels by which the Supernatural
Life comes to the soul were dealt with. In this we must
consider the life itself and its effects upon the soul. It
is to be observed how careful Scripture is to make clear
that grace--the gift of the Supernatural Life--does not
destroy Nature, but elevates it. "I make all things new,"
says Christ: not "I make all new things." What He said of
the law of Moses--"I come not to destroy but to fulfil"--He
might have said of human nature. He took human nature and
into it poured a new thing, thus renewing it, making it new.
He did not give new faculties to the soul, but He gave the
existing faculties of intellect and will new powers of
action, powers to act above their natural level. Here again
we must follow very closely if we are to grasp the real
nature of our road.

Man by nature is a union of body and soul. The soul has two
faculties--the intellect and the will. Now every faculty of
man has first its own proper action; and second its own
proper object. Thus the eye has its action--namely, to see:
and its object-namely, coloured surface. So the intellect
has its action which is to know or be aware of: and its
object which is truth. Likewise the will has its action
which is to love and its object which is goodness. In other
words, the intellect knows things in so far as they appear
to the soul true: and the will loves things in so far as
they appear to the soul good. Now the supreme truth is .God:
so that the intellect's highest task is to know God. And the
supreme goodness is God, so that the will's highest task is
to love God. The natural life of man's soul might be set out
as follows:

                                            SUPREME
         FACULTY      ACTION      OBJECT      OBJECT
Soul      Intellect    to know     truth        God
         Will         to love     goodness     God

Thus if we had no revelation from God as to His purpose in
creating man, we might deduce from the study of man's nature
that he was meant to know and to love God. And this answer
would be, as a mere matter of words, correct. But it would
be wrong in fact: for it would not rise above the knowing
and loving proper to our nature, and God has revealed to us
that our destiny is to know him directly, face to face, and
to love Him according to that knowledge. For this, as we
have seen, we need new powers, and God gives us these by
grace.

When grace comes in, intellect and will are
supernaturalized--that is, their nature is not destroyed but
given the power of higher ACTION. The intellect retains its
objects, namely, truth, but its action is elevated: in other
words, it can get at truth in a higher way: it can now
believe upon the word of God, that is, it has the
supernatural virtue of faith. The will likewise retains its
object--namely, goodness--but its action is elevated from
love in the natural order to supernatural love, that is, it
has the supernatural virtue of charity, by which it loves
God and makes the love of God the root of all its other
loves and therefore of all its other actions. And the will
is rendered capable of another supernatural action--the
action of hope: that is, of aspiring to God in reliance upon
His power and His goodness. The Supernatural Life of man's
soul might then be set out as follows:


        FACULTY       VIRTUE     ACTION        OBJECT[1]
SOUL     Intellect     Faith      to believe       God
         Will         Hope       to hope          God
                      Charity    to love          God

Yet the full activity of the Supernatural Life is not in
this world. Its completion is in the next. The intellect
will then see God direct: it will know him face to face.
This direct seeing of God is by a double title supernatural.
No created being--man or angel--could by his own powers have
direct vision of God, the gulf between Creator and creature
being measureless. And man cannot by his own powers have
direct vision of anything at all. For man knows things by
means of ideas: when I claim to know another person, I mean
that a certain idea and image of him is present in my mind
and not the man himself. It is by means of this idea and
image that I know him. But in heaven we shall know God
direct, not by means of an idea in the mind. So that faith
will disappear and direct knowledge will take its place. For
the intellect of man there are three levels of action, all
having truth as their object: first, natural knowledge:
second (for the man in a state of grace here below), faith:
third (for the soul in heaven), direct knowledge. To this we
shall return in the final chapter of this book. Here simply
note that in heaven faith will be no more, for vision will
be unclouded: hope will have yielded to possession: only
charity will remain-the love binding man to God. But, since
love and knowledge are closely connected, charity in heaven
will have a newness of intensity proportioned to the new
direct knowledge.

To return to this world: the soul in a state of grace that
is, possessed of the Supernatural Life-has the three virtues
of faith, hope and charity. But, as has already been said,
it can lose the Supernatural Life. It does so by mortal sin-
-that is, by a deliberate and wilful rejection of God. It
has to be remembered that man's nature is a damaged nature.
The sin of Adam did not render human nature totally evil.
But it did leave it with a tendency or bias towards evil--a
tendency to seek its own interest rather than God's will,
and a tendency to judge of its own interest by the vivid
picturing of the imagination and not by the judgment of the
reason. Grace does not of itself remove this unhappy bias.
Man's nature is by grace given powers to act above its own
level: yet it retains that uneasy pull towards self-interest
and the too-dominant imagination. Grace helps it,
principally, because these three new modes of action bring
God closer and clearer. But the bias in the nature is cured
only by steady striving to work with grace towards the will
of God. And the striving may be marred by many a yielding--
the lesser yielding of venial sin, the graver yielding of
deliberate rejection of God for self. By such an act, the
bond of love is broken, for one cannot at the same time love
God and be in rebellion against Him: in technical language
the soul loses the virtue of charity. The soul in mortal sin
thus necessary loses charity: it may retain hope and faith,[2]
but without charity hope and faith are not supernaturally
alive and cannot sanctify the soul. The Supernatural Life
and the virtue of charity are inseparable: the one cannot be
without the other.

Thus the first result of the possession of the Supernatural
Life is that in this life we have access to God by these
three paths--faith, hope, charity--all of them totally above
the natural powers of our soul.

A second result is that man is enabled to perform actions
which will merit a supernatural reward. The life of heaven,
be it remembered, is a life above our nature. Therefore we
could never merit it by our own natural powers. Natural
action could obviously never merit a supernatural reward.
Only if we are supernaturalized and thus made capable of
acting above our nature can we merit a reward above our
nature. For a soul in a state of grace, this is simple
enough. What of a soul which lacks the Supernatural Life,
either having lost it or never having had it? Such a soul
has only the natural life and as such can make no step
supernaturally. If it is to be enabled so to act as to gain-
-or regain--the Supernatural Life, it must receive a special
"impulse" from God. Such an "impulse" is called Actual
Grace. This must be distinguished from the Sanctifying
Grace--or Supernatural Life--we have been treating of so
far. Sanctifying Grace is really a quality given to the
soul, elevating it from within, abiding with the soul till
it is lost by sin. Actual grace does not abide with the
soul, does not sanctify it. It is God moving the soul,
giving it a kind of impetus, enabling it to perform some
supernatural act--of faith, or trust, or fear--which by its
own nature it could not perform. If the soul responds to
actual grace and makes the appropriate supernatural act, it
receives Sanctifying Grace. To put it in another way, if the
soul responds to Supernatural Impulse it receives
Supernatural Life.

A third result is, as has already been stated many times,
that man's soul is fitted for the life of heaven.

A fourth result is that men by grace become sons of God. By
birth we are creatures of God, servants of God, but not
sons. Once we receive the Supernatural Life we have received
that which will one day enable us to know Him directly. But
it is proper to God's own Nature--and to no other--to know
God directly. Thus, by a gift of God, we are enabled to do
something which belongs to God's own Nature, hence there is
a real similitude of nature which is rightly expressed by
the word "Sons." This is what St. Peter means when he says
that we shall be made partakers of the Divine Nature: and
the Church expresses the same truth when she says that grace
is a "created participation in the life of God."

Any man possessed of the Supernatural Life is of necessity
possessed also of faith, hope and charity. There is no limit
to the degree of intensity of the life. By baptism we
receive it. If by mortal sin we lose it, then by the
Sacrament of Penance we regain it. By the Blessed Eucharist
principally, it receives addition. By prayer and by
meritorious action of every kind man obtains from God
increase of the Supernatural Life. And the whole purpose of
man's life upon earth might be stated as the obtaining,
preserving and increasing of this life of Grace in his soul.

We are now at last in a position to take stock of the life
of the member of Christ's Church. The primary fact about him
is that he is not an isolated unit, pursuing his own
solitary path to his own private goal. He is a cell in a
living Body, the Body of Christ. As such he has a special
relation to Christ: for Christ's life flows through every
cell in Christ's Mystical Body. The cell--that is to say,
the individual Catholic--may yield his will wholly to
Christ, or partially, or not at all: and, according to which
of these he chooses to do, he will have the Life flowing
through him in plenitude, or less fully or not at all: for a
man can be a dead cell in the Body, retaining faith, but not
vivified by charity. But in so far as his will is right,
then Christ lives in him; and because Christ, then the Holy
Ghost likewise: the Spirit of God, proceeding from the
Father and the Son, in His own adorable essence the bond of
love between Father and Son and so ever known by the Church
as the Giver of Life: for the Supernatural Life is
inseparable from the virtue of charity, which is love. Thus
the member of the Church, living supernaturally, is indwelt
by the Holy Ghost, organically united to Christ who is God
the Son, and by Him brought to the Father.

The relation of all the redeemed to Christ involves a
relation of all to each other. The one life flows through
them all: all are sharing in the divine life that pours out
from the Head. So that whether in Heaven or in Purgatory or
upon earth, all members of Christ are members one of
another. And as in a body one part can help another because
of the life it has, so in the Church one person can help
another because of the life that flows to him from the Head.
Thus when our Lady obtains graces for us by her prayers, she
is acting not by her own power, but by virtue of the life
that is in her from Christ--a life which is also in us,
though in her the life is a thousandfold more intense
because of the greater perfection of her love of God here
upon earth.

This life in the Body is the first thing to be noted. Every
member of the Body who is not in rebellion against God
possesses it, as it were, automatically. Normally, also,
though not automatically, he possesses two other things,
only less important than the life: for, as a member of the
Church, he has the means of knowing the laws God has made
for right conduct: and all the truths which will enable him
to understand the meaning and purpose of his life. Thus he
knows all that mass of truth concerning God (who made him
and who rules him and to whom he must come) which have
already been indicated: and principally he knows that God is
love--a piece of knowledge which is a most powerful stimulus
to right action of every kind and which, as has been seen,
marks the supreme difference between Christianity and all
other religions whatsoever. He knows, further, all sorts of
truths about himself: including the damage wrought in his
nature by the sin of the first man, which makes of every
man, be he never so great a saint, a kind of convalescent--
one, that is, on the road to health but weakened in
constitution and not secure from relapse until he enters
heaven. He knows how the original weakness of his nature
(which he cannot help) and the damage caused by his own sins
(which he can help) may be repaired. He knows the meaning of
sin--both in its attraction for himself and in its ugliness
before God. He knows something of the meaning of suffering,
and knows, therefore, how it may be used for the eternal
enrichment of his own soul and offered to God for the souls
of others. He knows that in a world over-ruled by the
providence of God nothing is of necessity evil, save only
sin.

In the mere detail of his life, he has the supreme advantage
of possessing a standard by which all things can be judged.
His own career in life, his love of his neighbour, his
duties to his neighbour, the entangled claims upon him of
family, nation, humanity at large: in judging of all these
he can apply principles, where other men can only be puzzled
by a crowd of instincts or emotions. For in a tremendous
number of instances, the law of God is quite explicit, so
that no discussion arises: and where he cannot clearly hear
the law of God, he knows what man is made for and can at any
rate make the effort to judge by that: is this or that
condition of things helpful to the saving of men's souls, or
a hindrance? Once this primary matter is settled, other
considerations--as to his own and his neighbour's temporal
well-being--must receive attention. But urgent as such
questions may be, they can never be his first concern.

For every man, the one really vital thing is that he should
have the Supernatural Life in his soul, for one day he will
die.



ENDNOTES

1. It will be noted that God is not here shown as the
Supreme Object of Faith, Hope and Charity, but as their
Object. He is their Sole Object; they have no other. Hence
their name--Theological Virtues.

2. Faith, hope and charity being habits are only destroyed
by actions contrary to them. Mortal sin--being rejection of
God--is contrary to love of God and therefore means the loss
of Charity. But it is not necessarily contrary to Faith and
Hope. Hope will be lost as a result of a mortal sin directly
contrary to it--e.g., despair-and Faith likewise by a mortal
sin directly contrary to it--e.g., unbelief.



XIII. HELL

MAN, we say, is a union of spirit and matter. The soul
animates the body. But there comes a time when the body is
no longer capable of responding to the soul's animating
power. The soul is as powerful as ever, but the body has
deteriorated--whether by the sudden destruction of some
essential part or by the gradual wearing down of age. When
that moment comes, the body ceases to be vivified by the
soul, and falls away into corruption. The soul, being a
spirit, does not cease. It ceases to animate the body, but
its other powers--of knowledge and will--are still in
action. The soul lives on, awaiting the moment when, by
God's act, the body is to be reunited to it and man thereby
reconstituted in his complete humanity for all eternity.

Death is not at the end of life. Yet there is a finality
about death. It closes the first period of man's life, and
this period, though not in itself permanent, is decisive of
all that is to come. It is not the end of life. But it is
the end of the road. After it man has arrived, and there is
no further journeying for him. This life upon earth is a
period of preparation. At the end of it, man has become
something: the something he has become he will eternally
remain.

The decisive factor is his will. From the beginning of his
life upon earth God is the supreme object of the love of
man's will when this is rightly directed. Yet during life
upon earth there is in most men a good deal of fluctuation,
and in all men at least the possibility of fluctuating. At
one moment the will is set towards God. Then comes mortal
sin and the will is set towards self and away from God. With
repentance and true sorrow, the will is turned again to God.
And so it goes on. But with death the fluctuations of the
will are over: it has chosen finally, and will not change.
This power of the will to make a final choice which it will
not change--a power which makes possible not only the
eternity of hell but also the eternity of heaven--anyone
might at least suspect from reflection upon the experiences
of this life. Character tends to set into a mould, the way
of life to become settled as the years go by. We might, as I
say, suspect that at death the will has made final choice of
its direction. From God's teaching we know that it has done
so. It is either fixed towards God or fixed away from God:
that is to say man either loves God with a love that will
abide forever or hates God with a hatred equally abiding. In
the one case he will spend eternity with God. In the other
case he will spend eternity apart from God.

It is easy to see how all this applies to the Catholic. By
baptism he is incorporated with Christ--that is to say, he
becomes a living cell in Christ's Mystical Body. As such he
is living with the Supernatural Life of Christ, just as in
every man the cells of his body live with his life. But
membership of Christ does not automatically mean living with
the life of Christ. While the will of the individual remains
united with the will of God, the life of Christ pours into
his soul, and he remains supernaturally alive. But if the
individual sets his will against God, he cuts off the flow
of the life of Christ. He remains (during his life upon
earth) a member of the Body: but he is not sharing in the
life of the Body. He lives with his natural life as a man:
but supernaturally he is not alive.

The ending of our life upon earth will then find us either
with the Supernatural Life, with our wills united to God: or
without the Supernatural Life, with our wills set away from
God. The one state means heaven, the other hell.

It is necessary to be very clear about hell. I have said
that if a man dies hating God, then he must be separated
from God. But it may be urged that hatred of God is rare.
Explicit hatred of God may be rare, but there is a form of
self-love which is equivalent to it. Thus a man might go
through life ignoring God--and therefore not hating Him--but
building up such a love of self that he has only to be
confronted with God to hate him. After death, God cannot be
ignored: and then love of self will bring to the surface
that hate of God which has always been implicit in it, and
of which the only possible consequence is separation from
God.

This separation is everlasting. Enough has already been said
to show why: it is everlasting because the state of will
that produces it is everlasting. A man goes on through all
eternity hating God. Therefore, through all eternity he
remains separated from God. There is only one barrier
between himself and God--his own hatred of God: but that
barrier he will not tear down. Thus since his will is fixed
in hatred of God, there is nothing to be done. Obviously he
cannot be united to God, whom he hates: he must therefore
remain separated.

Here, then, is a man with his will fixed irrevocably against
God. What follows? In the first place he has sinned and has
not repented: justice demands--then that he be punished. In
hell he receives punishment from God: that there is
punishment, and that it is great, we know: but how great and
whether or not it is unrelaxing, we do not know.

But there is a second, more terrible consideration. He is,
as we have seen, eternally separated from God. But he needs
God, his nature was made for God. Whenever we are deprived
of something that our nature needs, we suffer. From that
rule there is no escape. If we are deprived of food, we
suffer the agonies of hunger. If we are deprived of drink,
we suffer the far worse agonies of thirst. But our whole
nature needs God far more than our bodies need food and
drink. If, then, a man is deprived of God,

he must, inescapably, suffer, and this with the greatest
suffering possible to man. And whereas death comes to end
the agonies of hunger and thirst, the man in hell cannot
die. He is deprived for all eternity of what his nature
needs, and deprived by the inflexible choice of his own
will. If any soul in hell would turn to God and ask for
mercy, God would grant his prayer. But the souls in hell
will not ask. They hate their suffering: but they hate God
more. With their love of evil and their hatred of God,
heaven would be a fiercer torment than hell. It is the
tragedy of final impenitence that it puts the sinner beyond
the reach of help. There is nothing that can be done for
him. He has perverted his own nature and there is therefore
no possible condition of happiness for him. Hell is bad.
Heaven would be worse. What keeps him in hell is not the
insatiable vengeance of God, but the unchanging direction of
his own will towards evil. The will of man is free to make
its choice: God does not interfere with that freedom. Those
who have hoped that the souls in hell might one day be saved
have assumed that those souls would one day turn from evil
to good. We know, because God has told us, that they will
never do so. They have become something--their will has
fixed itself, for ever, in the hatred of God. Given the
purpose of man's life, these men have failed.

It is worth noting that Our Lord is very insistent upon the
reality of hell. In the best-known passage of all He
describes Himself as saying to sinners at the Last Day:
"Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire that
was prepared for the devil and his angels." In this passage
are contained the three truths about hell which have already
been set down: that it involves separation from God ("Depart
from me"): that it involves punishment ("fire"): that it is
everlasting fire. And there is the further assertion that
the souls of the damned in hell will be in the company of
those angels who, like them, fixed their wills in eternal
enmity with God.

Apart from this passage, however, Our Lord is constantly
referring to it. In the Sermon on the Mount, for instance,
He reminds sinners of Hell six separate times. And this fact
is worth weighing by those who would dismiss the doctrine as
contradicting the Divine love. For no one would question
Christ's love for men: yet the doctrine is undoubtedly His.
There is, it is true, a mystery in the fact of Hell: but it
is not a mystery of God's cruelty: it is a mystery of the
human will with its possibility of fixing itself in evil.



XIV. PURGATORY: HEAVEN

THOSE who thus die with their wills fixed against God find
their eternal abiding-place instantly. What of those whose
wills are united to Him? It will be remembered that here a
distinction must be made. The Life of Christ does not vivify
every living cell in His Body with equal intensity. A living
Member of the Mystical Body may have his will either totally
united or partially united with God's will. In the first
case, he is totally living with the life of Christ, totally
possessed by Him and at death passes instantly into heaven.
In the second, there still remains something of self
unsubjected to God. He loves God and his soul is indwelt by
His Spirit. Yet imperfections remain. God holds the centre
of the soul, but there are, as it were, outlying regions
still not completely subject to Him. Upon such a man sin
still has a certain hold: and this usually in one of two
ways: either there is venial sin not repented of: or there
is mortal sin, repented of yet not sufficiently.

Venial sin, of course, does not destroy the Supernatural
Life of the soul, and therefore does not send a soul to
hell: yet it remains a breach of God's law. As such, justice
demands that it shall be punished like any other breach of
God's law. Repentance of course would wipe out the debt of
punishment. But venial sin is often slight enough, does not
stir the soul, is forgotten almost at once: so that
frequently there is no repentance, and at death the debt of
justice stands.

The second condition is more delicate. When a man commits a
mortal sin, he loses the Supernatural Life: when he is truly
contrite he regains it. Now contrition is to be measured in
two different ways. As to its motive, and as to the degree
of its intensity. If a man is truly contrite (that is,
sorry, for the right motive) and sufficiently contrite) that
is, as sorry as the gravity of the sin demands) then all is
forgiven, guilt and punishment alike. But what of a man
whose sorrow, while true and sincere, falls short of the
necessary degree of intensity? The guilt of his sin is
forgiven: the Supernatural Life is restored to his soul, and
God allows him to make up by suffering for what is lacking
in his sorrow: in other words, some punishment still
remains, even after the guilt is forgiven.

If a man die in either of these states--with venial sin not
repented of, or mortal sin repented of but not sufficiently-
-there is still the debt of justice to be satisfied and the
soul brought altogether to freedom from sin, and union with
God: and in Purgatory, by God's mercy, this cleansing and
compensating suffering is undergone. The souls in purgatory
suffer: but the strife is over. They know that heaven is
theirs.

It now only remains to consider the state of those who enter
heaven: whether they enter it immediately upon death or
after a space in Purgatory.


HEAVEN

Of heaven there is no need to speak at great length here,
because heaven is the end of the road and was therefore
treated in some fullness at the beginning of the map--in the
third chapter. Scripture tells us three things very clearly:
(1) The happiness of heaven is perfect--broken by no present
sorrow and no fear of future ceasing. It is happiness of the
whole being, the soul's every power acting at its very
highest. (2) The happiness of heaven is indescribable and
unimaginable. "Eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, nor
hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath
prepared for them that love Him." The language made by man
from his experiences of this life has no power to convey the
experiences of the next. The pictures of joy built by our
imagination, fed upon the joys of this life, are poor
shadows of the joy of heaven.

(3) But if by imagination we can take no grip on heaven's
happiness, by the higher faculty of intellect--acting upon
the revelation of God--we can know something of it. In
heaven we shall see God "face to face": we shall "know as we
are known": so says Scripture. Which means that we shall
know God, not, as we know things here below, by an idea in
the mind, but direct, God Himself present in our very soul
and realized by us as present, realized at the very highest
point of intensity. This is what theology calls the Beatific
Vision. "We shall be made like to Him," said St. John, "for
we shall see Him as He is."

Our soul, then, will have laid hold on God. God is supreme
truth, so that our intellect, with no barrier between itself
and its supreme object, will be eternally enriched in
eternal activity, for God is infinite and our intellect will
never exhaust the truth which is its supreme beatitude. But
God, too, is supreme goodness: so that our will equally will
find no barrier between itself and its supreme object, and
will come to rest in eternal love. Not all souls will be
equal in heaven. The soul grows naturally by development of
intellect and will. Supernaturally--which is what matters
here--it grows by the possession of the Supernatural Life.
But this it must receive upon earth, for after death it
cannot merit. Therefore, souls united with God have not all
reached the same degree of development when they come to
die. But, greater or smaller, all souls are functioning in
heaven with intellect and will at their highest intensity
upon their highest object: therefore every soul will know
perfect happiness. To summarize what has been said earlier:
those very various qualities in the things of earth which
cause us happiness are all caused by God, the creator of all
things: they are therefore already present in Him, not in
the shadowy and imperfect way in which we find them in
created things, but complete and perfect in their highest
form. Finding Him, then, we find at an infinitely higher
level all things whatsoever which have caused us happiness
upon earth.

So much for the essential of heaven--the direct apprehension
of the Blessed Trinity. Bound up with that is a fellowship
with all the other citizens of Heaven: fellowship with
Christ our Lord--the second Person of the Trinity made man--
with His mother, with the angels and saints. So that Heaven
is not only our relationship with God come to maturity, but
also our relationship with all the lovers of God--with all
created beings, that is, who have achieved the purpose for
which God made them.

Here then, in the very briefest space, we have seen
something of the world into which death ushers us. Yet if
death ushers us into the next life, it does not choose our
place: that is decided by the state of our soul in relation
to God. That is what we call the "particular judgment"--the
decision made at each man's death of the place to which each
belongs. Till the world ends, we shall live in heaven simply
as souls, separated from the bodies which once were ours. In
Heaven Christ our Lord is bodily present, that the whole of
human nature (not soul only, but the union of soul and body)
in its perfection should be present at the right hand of the
Father. His body is His natural body, yet glorified: without
suffering, or deformity, no longer a cloak to the soul, but
as it were translucent, so that the soul is only the
brighter for the body it indwells. And similarly our Lady is
bodily present too--so says the doctrine of the Assumption.
But in the normal course of God's providence, the souls in
Heaven must wait for the Last Day to be reunited to their
bodies.

For there is a Last Day. As there is an end to every man's
term upon earth, so there will one day be an end to the term
upon earth of the human race. When the Mystical Body of
Christ shall have grown to its full stature--"unto a perfect
man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ"--
the human race will have achieved its purpose as a race. All
the men who are to be incorporated with Christ--built into
His body--will have been thus incorporated, and all will be
completely at one with Him. Then will come the end of the
world and the General Judgment. Christ will judge the whole
world--all men will be in their place for all men to see--
and the whole immense plan of God will be seen as a thing
perfectly achieved. The bodies of men--glorified, as
Christ's is--will be reunited with their souls: and every
man--body and soul--will be for ever established in joy or
woe.


                *                  *                   *
*

There roughly is the map. If it is a good map, a well-drawn
map, then one should be able to find one's bearings by it--
to find where one stands in relation to all other things, to
find the end of the road and the way to it. So much a good
map can do. The best map cannot do more. A map is concerned
with the surface and cannot tell you in detail of the
treasures that lie beneath. On the field here mapped, there
is no point at which one may not dig with immeasurable
profit: or to abandon the metaphor, every single truth
mentioned is but a single name for a whole world of truth.
The Blessed Trinity will yield truth for our meditation for
all eternity, and even here below we shall not exhaust what
here below may be known. Or if, leaving the intricacies of
the map we concentrate on any one point of it--the
excellence of our Lady, for instance, or the life of prayer-
-we shall come upon a mine of truth by comparison with which
the bare outlines of a map may seem poor colourless things.
But even for the appreciation of any one doctrine, the map
is necessary. No truth is merely itself: something pours
into it from all other truth: and for a study of any one
point of revealed truth there is no better equipment than a
general view of the whole.



INDEX

ADAM
    his immortality
    the representative Man
Adultery
Angels
    guardian
Apostles
Appropriation
Asceticism
Assumption Of Our Lady
Atheist
Atonement

BAPTISM
Beatific Vision
Bible, Inspiration Of
    New Testament
    Old Testament
Bishops
Body, its use in Prayer

CALVARY
Celibacy
Character (sacramental)
Charity (see also Love)
Christ
    life on earth
    as Teacher
    founded a Church
    living in men
    in the Mass
    as judge
    on Hell
Church (see also Mystical Body).
    can legislate
    teaching body
    cannot alter God's Law
    Divine and human side
Commandments, the Ten
Communion (see Eucharist).
Communion of Saints
Confirmation
Conscience
Consecration
Contrition
Creation

DEATH
Development of Doctrine
Devil
Divorce

END Of the World
Eucharist, the Blessed
Externals
Extreme Unction

FAITH
Fall, the
Freedom

GENERAL Judgment
Generation
Glorified Body
God (see also Trinity
    His absoluteness
    is Love
    revealed in Christ
Godhead of Christ, revealed to Apostles
Gospels
Grace (see also Supernatural Life)
    actual
    sanctifying

HAPPINESS
Hatred of God
Heaven
    Protestant View
Hell
Heretic
Holy Ghost
    and Mystical Body
Holy Orders
Hope
Human Nature
    damaged by the Fall
    as evidence of purpose

IMMACULATE Conception, the
Incarnation, the
Incorporation, with Adam
    with Christ
Indifference
Infallibility
Inspiration
Intellect
Intellectual Suicide
Intention

JEWS
John, St.

LAST Day
Last Supper
Law, Material
    Moral
    and Freedom
    and Suffering
Life, natural (see also Human Nature)
    Supernatural (see Supernatural Life), in the Body
Limbo
Love

MASS, the
Materialist
Matrimony
    sacrament of
Matter
Merit
Mysteries
Mystical Body
    Holy Ghost and

ORIGINAL Sin
Our Lady
    Immaculate Conception
    Assumption

PAIN of loss
Pain of sense
Particular Judgment
Penance
Person and Nature
Peter, St.
Pope
Prayer
    soul and body
    in common
    objects of
    to saints
Priest
Priesthood
    of Christ
    of the laity
Purgatory
Purpose
Purpose, as deduced from nature

REDEMPTION (see Atonement) Relations (in the Trinity)
Resurrection of the Body
Revelation, necessity of
    fact of

SACRAMENTAL System
    relation to natural life
Sacramentals
Sacraments
Saints
Sin
    Mortal
    Venial
Son (of God)
Sons of God
Soul (see also Intellect, Will)
    laws governing
    faculties of
    at death
Spiration
Spirit
    Holy (see Holy Ghost).
Spiritualism
State, the, and the Moral Law
Suffering
    Relief of
Supernatural Life, the
    and Charity
    relation to the natural
    how we receive
    results
Symbolism, as substitute for theology

THEOLOGIANS
Theological Virtues
Trinity, the
Truth (see also Development)

VOCATION
Voluntary suffering

WILL
Word (of the Father)

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