the blister and the burn, the fiery wounds, and long, long punishments of purgatory. Did ever saint do this, but Henry Suso once, and forthwith our Lord put off His gentleness, and rebuked him sharply for thus, not disdainfully, but somewhat lightly esteeming a rod which He had made? Light views of sin, such as are rebuked in those deep words of inspired wisdom, Be not without fear of a forgiven sin, and rash expressions of security of salvation, all are against the exercise of a holy fear. Even when we feel, and as it were cannot help but feel, an undoubting security of our salvation, it should be no boast or joy. It may be a symptom of something sadly amiss within; or at least something so unsafe for us and our attainments, that this very sense of security may be our most fatal insecurity of all. If we try to take humbler and more humbling views of all these things, and if with this we strive to do all our actions slowly, so as not to get into God's way, cross His path, or intercept Him, then by His mercy we shall be forming in ourselves most precious habits of holy and meritorious fear. All this I have said in another shape before; and yet cannot forbear to say again. A volume would hardly contain the spiritual blessings of this fear, if they were named and commented on as fully as might be. But these fruits would at once follow even from the steady effort to acquire this grace. It would lead to reserve in speech, and so dry up an abundant source of sins. It would produce self-contempt, and thus make the prime law of charity easy. It would moderate and sober worldly joy, which otherwise makes us childish, vain, and giddy. As it consists in a deeper and more extensive knowledge of God, it would enable us the better to estimate His dignity and immensity, and the higher our esteem is of

God, the more we desire Him, and the more we trust Him also; for reverence is the very ground of confidence; we cannot help but trust what we revere. Yet none of this mars the depth, the tenderness of our love; for love when deepest, as after long separations, is silent, takes the hand it loves, and weeps most enviable tears.

Such is the Object of our Faith. There is not a movement in the whole Church, not a doctrine, or a rite, or a ceremonial, or an exercise of jurisdiction, not an energy of power and of benevolence, but, rightly interpreted, is an act of worship of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. There is not a Church opened, a Sacrament administered or received, a Sacrifice offered, or a devotion practised, the honour and the glory of which does not reach to the Holy Trinity, and rest there, and in the highest sense rest only there. There is not a day that rises on the earth, feast or ferial, that is not throughout the universal Church a celebration and commemoration of the Holy Trinity. So it is this very day;* what strength in the thought, what consolation in the idea! so it is this very day. The pope in his palace, the episcopate in thousands of cathedrals, the monks and nuns in unnumbered cloisters, the faithful in their parishes, all that are doing good at all are doing this good,-confessing, praising, fearing, loving, adoring the Undivided Trinity. Old consecrated Asia, wise, enlightened, royal Europe, the giant regions of exuberant America, the sandy shores and streamless deserts of mysterious Africa, the young fresh strength of distant Australia, all are sending up to heaven one only voice, not prayer exactly nor

* Written on Trinity Sunday.

praise, but the cry of childlike wonder, O beata Trinitas! See! while we are looking up into the face of this resplendent mystery, we sink and sink in the depths of our own vileness. It seems too much that we are to see God, incredibly too much that we are to possess Him. Is it not an infinite blessing that He does not simply pass us over and ignore us? Sometimes in the stillness of the night, in the hush of prayer, when the soul is suspended it knows not how or in what place, it may so seem as if we might come to die, and He forget us, miss us and take no note of our disappearance; and in the horror of that awful imagination how sweet the undoubting knowledge of that eternal truth, that we are encompassed, girded up, wound round, and clasped to Him, with His everlasting Presence, His universal knowledge, His illimitable power! Sancta Trinitas, Unus Deus, miserere nobis!

SECTION II.

THE CREATOR IN HIS OWN CREATION.

Now supposing we were in some way in possession of this catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and knew nothing more, it will, I think, be obvious that we never could from that knowledge divine in what way God would be pleased to operate externally, if He did so at all. We could only infer negatives, namely, that such and such things He would not do. If we contemplated Him in the glory, bliss and self-sufficiency of His unbeginning eternity, we could not have gathered that He would have created worlds at all,

or produced any external creatures, or ever proceeded out of Himself, or that there would have been any divine operations beyond those two necessary operations, the Generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit, which are co-eternal with the Godhead. On the contrary we should perhaps have inferred the very opposite. Then if His intention to create had been disclosed to us, we could not have advanced one single step further than the disclosure itself. From a view of His inherent perfections we could not have conceived what manner of production His creation would be, whether spiritual, material, or mixed, or any one of these three, or all the three together, or none of the three, but some inconceivable other things, or what any of the three mean, or would be like, or by what process they would be produced. Perhaps we should not even have perceived of ourselves that if the Three Divine Persons act externally at all, They will do so altogether; the whole Trinity will act. The numerical unity of the Godhead is not a self-evident inference from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The whole history of doctrine shows it. Neither when creation had actually taken place, could we have conjectured that God would vouchsafe some day to take part and place in His own creation. Possibly we should have supposed not. But if that gracious design had been revealed to us, still we could have deduced nothing more from it. We must have stopped with the revelation. We could not by any stretch of reason have conceived any intelligible plan by which He would execute this His loving purpose. The probability is that the feeling of lowliness. which belongs to us as creatures would have led us to conjecture, that He would have, as it were, interfered

with His creatures from without, in an occasional, corrective, and legislative way, here and there, as might be wanted, with more or less clearness, and meddling to the least possible degree with the freedom of will which He originally gave us. I say we should probably have conjectured in some such way, because this occasional, corrective, and legislative interference is pretty nearly the whole idea of God which multitudes of men have, and they are irritable when more is attempted to be forced upon them. Thus we should, I think, have been surprised and perplexed at finding angels and men created, not in a state of nature, but in a state of grace. From that we might have deduced much. It would have given us the clue to many things. Then if we had been told further, that God would graciously interfere in a public and visible way, we might have got some idea of Sina and the Law, but we never should have dreamed of an Incarnation. Again, the Incarnation given, we should have expected some such Messiah as was the day-dream of the Jews, triumphant and conquering, visibly restoring the balance of right and wrong, impressing the minds of men, as they are so well calculated to be impressed, by pomps and pageants, worthy of His power, His justice and His magnificence. And in all these things we should have been wrong.

What I want to show is, that we cannot argue from God to His works; but only from His works to Himself; at most, from what He has done once to what He may be graciously pleased to do again: and it is important to bear this distinction in mind. The so-called philosophical literature of the day, subjecting God to the genius and spirit of some of its favorite sciences, without intending to do so or seeing that it actually does so, is