Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/307

human affairs, it was also necessary that the sin of prevarication should be entirely effaced; for whatever might be the good which God would draw from it, yet, if this sin had not been effaced, the supreme evil would have seemingly remained unvanquished, and existed as it were in defiance of the divine power. On the other hand, nothing was more worthy the infinite goodness of God than to extend a strong and merciful hand to support the invincible weakness of man, that he might raise himself above his miserable condition, and transform the consequences of his sin into the means of his own salvation. To efface sin, and so to strengthen the sinner that he can freely and meritoriously raise himself from the fallen state to which sin has reduced him—such is the great problem which Catholicism must solve, after the solution of all other problems, if it aspire to be anything more than one of those numberless systems, whose labored imperfections attest the profound and radical impotence of human reason.

Catholicism solves these two problems by the highest, the most ineffable, most incomprehensible, and most glorious of all its mysteries; and in this profound mystery all the divine perfections are united. In it is God, with his formidable omnipotence, his perfect wisdom, his marvelous goodness, his terrible justice, his immense mercy, and, above all, with that unutterable love which governs and predominates over all his other perfections. This love imperiously demands of his mercy to be merciful, of his justice to be just, of his goodness to be good, of his wisdom to be wise, and of his omnipotence to be omnipotent; because God is neither omnipotence, wisdom, goodness, justice, nor mercy—God is love, and