Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/311

side, and all created objects on the other, it is evident that here the adjusting synthesis cannot be found outside of these limits, beyond which we cannot conceive of anything as existing, since these limits, being universal and absolute, comprise all things. The synthesis, then, must either be found in the creature or in God, in the antithesis or in the thesis, or in both simultaneously ort successively.

If man had remained in that excellent state and noble condition in which he was first placed by God, diversity would have been merged into unity, and the created antithesis would have united with the creating thesis in a supreme synthesis, by the deification of man. God had prepared man for this future deification when he adorned him with original justice and sanctifying grace. But man was created free, and he made use of his sovereign liberty to deprive himself of that grace and renounce that justice, and by these means he interposed an obstacle to the divine will, and voluntarily rejected his own deification. But while human liberty has sufficient power to impede the accomplishment of the divine will in so far as it is relative, yet it cannot prevent its realization, wherein this will is absolute. The reduction of diversity into unity is what is absolute in the divine will; but this reduction, by means of the deification of man, is only relative and contingent, or, in other words, God wished to establish this end with an absolute will, but the means by which to attain it he wished with a relative will; and in this, as in all things, the ineffable wisdom of God is conspicuous. In effect, if the divine will had been in nothing absolute, God would not have been sovereign; and if this will had been in nothing relative, human liberty would have been impossible. But on