Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/335

tribulations with joy, and have courageously toiled onward in the thorny paths of penance.

Among all the wonders of creation the most admirable is the soul that lives in charity, not only because its condition is the most sublime and the most excellent that we can here below conceive, but likewise because it affords so striking a proof of the divine love. This love was not only of sufficient efficacy to blot out our sins, and with it disorder and the cause of all disorder, but it also has the power to cause us freely to desire that same deification which we before rejected, and to enable us to attain the object of our desire, by accepting the assistance of the grace which we merited in our Lord and through our Lord when he shed his blood for us on Calvary. All these things are declared to us in those memorable words, which Jesus Christ pronounced in expiring, when he said, It is consummated, that is to say, I accomplish by my love what I could not gain by my justice, nor by my mercy, nor my wisdom, nor my omnipotence, because I efface sin, which obscures the divine majesty and dishonors the beauty of humanity, and I retrieve humanity from its shameful captivity, and give to man the power, which he had lost through sin, of saving himself. Now my soul can stoop to fortify man, to embellish him, to deify him, because I have drawn him unto me, and I have united him to me by the all-powerful and endearing bond of love.

When this memorable word was pronounced by the Son of God expiring on the cross, all things became marvelously and perfectly established.

Each one of the dogmas explained in this and the preceding book is a law of the moral world, and each one of these laws is in itself unchangeable and per-