first cause, they ignore, because they have not assurance enough to deny Him: modern science is thus agnostic, not atheist. But for Catholic Christianity it was an inherited conception from the first, that visible nature reveals divine truths: Solomon could say, 'A wise man shall hear and be wise he shall understand parables'; so David before him, I will open my mouth in parables: I will utter truths from the beginning'; and the Divine Son of David went so far as to say to His apostles, 'To you it is given to know mysteries, but for the rest by parables.'

Hence, from the Christian standpoint, natural law with its phenomena forms a solid bridge of continuity, whereby the human mind may pass from the visible kingdom of man to the invisible kingdom of God, without losing grip of concrete reality in the transit: for in the loss of that continuity lies the main source of modernism in metaphysics and in religion; if the two kingdoms are viewed as wholly disparate-the kingdom of science and the kingdom of faith-so that an impassable gulf divides the mental from an objective world, or God from His creature, the human thinker gives substantial solidity to what his senses perceive-mistaking solidity for reality-and makes what his mind understands a shadow of uncertain validity. But on the Christian theory of natural law the felt substantiality of the visible guarantees the reality of the invisible unfelt, in view of an essential co-relation between them. St. Thomas could even say that to be led through corporal things of sense to know spiritual and intelligible realities is connatural to man.

At one time it was universally the opinion that terrestrial and celestial motion differed in kind. Newton revolutionized astronomy by showing the two to be the same; so that identifying all motion he brought the heavens down to earth, and for the first time could place astronomy among the physical sciences: in like manner, if natural and eternal laws are fundamentally the same, theology might claim a place among the sciences on that ground. It is, indeed, the queen of all science on many grounds. By Newton's theory our knowledge of the movements of countless, invisible stars and comets participates in the certainty we have of the movement of a railway train, or of falling bodies; without Newton's supposition all was conjecture in the heaven of sun, moon, and stars; without St. Thomas's theory of natural law in relation to the eternal

how feeble our grasp upon the heaven of God's inaccessible dwelling-place? To take another instance, the Council of Trent, in its decrees on original sin and justification, says that Adam's descendants sin, not alone actually by imitation of his conduct, but because by generation his sinful nature has been transmitted to each and every one of them, as properly his or her own; so that if indulged, instead of being renounced at Baptism, it would of its own accord reproduce the sinful parent-type. Original sin is thus propagated by a real transmission of nature; hence, in the decree on justification, the Council teaches that similarly no child of Adam becomes just by mere imitation of the second Adam, Jesus Christ. A regeneration must take place in the Baptismal font; a new nature must be given : the clean heart and right spirit of a new mother and father. Thus the first natural birth and the second spiritual birth in Baptism fall under the same law: the one is as real as the other, and the growth of both are in consequence analogous; so that, if the old nature of Adam is renounced, and the new nature of the Second Adam cultivated, the new nature will, by its own vital force, grow to its type, imitate and reproduce the Christ-life.

The imitation of Christ on this teaching becomes something deeper than mere copying an example, and yet something much easier; because if obstacles are removed we can trust an inherent vital germ to perfect its own growth, till Christ be formed in you' (St. Paul); 'The one end to which, in all living beings, the formative impulse is tending, seems to be to mould the offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the great law of reproduction' (Huxley).

But the keystone of that solid arch of natural law, which spans the chasm between God and the creature, is the Incarnation. Here human and divine met in one person, and that union remains as a present fact by its extension and fruit in the Blessed Eucharist; there, according to Catholic Faith, the God-Man who, nineteen hundred years ago, walked upon the earth in humble, human form is truly and substantially with us still in the Tabernacles of our altars. Yet the reformers of the sixteenth century professed to be shocked and scandalized at a truth universally taught and believed in, hitherto, throughout Christendom. They rejected, accordingly, belief in the Real Presence of God incarnate in the Eucharist, and, in consequence, denial

T

of a victim and Sacrifice, together with adoration of the Host, quickly followed. But by doing so they broke the link that bound earth to heaven; for denying the Real Presence on earth to-day of the God-Man, who came to save all generations, they regarded the Incarnation as a purely historic incident of a bygone time, if it were not even then merely one of the world's many superstitions.

Thus the bridge, so carefully built up by previous wisdom, out of natural law in its relation to eternal truth, fell into ruins, when the keystone-the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation present in the Eucharist-was removed. Our Lord, nevertheless, is still asking us to consider the lilies of the field, not primarily as to beauty of form or flower, but how they grow? How they toil not at all, nor are solicitous for their growth, in spinning their texture, in weaving their leaves or in painting their flower: for not out of their own resources are these things wrought, but by the process of a specific nature, unfolding itself gradually in conformity to type from a primal cell. The Prophet Osee had said already: Israel shall germinate as a lily, and his root shall shoot forth as a cedar of Libanus: his branches shall spread and his glory be as the olive tree' ; nad David: ‘The just man shall be like a tree planted near running water, which shall bring forth its fruit in due

season.

These are parables of nature, transformations in real life, similitudes from seeds changing to fruit-bearing plants and trees, through that inner, self-acting, progressive force, tending to type, which life is. For a seed the first essential step in that transformation is privation: it must surrender its seed-form; it must fall into the earth and die to its seed existence. This death-process of the seed beneath the dark, clinging clods of earth takes a little time, but at last a new form, a slender stalk, raises its delicate head into the upper air. If it be the seed of a lily, it may have been sown by a parent lily in the same garden plot; and if the seedling could see and reflect, it might well doubt, whether by any amount of toiling, spinning, or weaving it could ever reach the beauty of form and purity of flower displayed by its mature type; but if the mother could reply, she might turn the gaze of the neophyte from her own finished perfection to consider how all lily-seeds grow to type by the unfolding of a potential life-force so that the end is but the beginning in full bloom. Life whispers

to us, 'I am the beginning and the end: if you fear to reach the end, take refuge in the beginning, and when you understand the nature of life and its irresistible progressive tendency to grow, lay aside all solicitude on that score, for, however careful, you could not add one cubit to your stature, or stop its growth, if in right conditions, and these are given, too.' The growing lily has but to spread out its roots to the earth; its leaves to light and warmth, the air and rain-things belonging to its environment, in order, through them, to receive nourishment and increase. It is God who creates the power and the conditions, a living creature is an after-creation to utilize energies already prepared for its birth and sustenance.

The seed by which, in so many parables, Our Lord illustrated His teaching, we know to be the 'Word of God,' for He said it; and this being so an application to the Blessed Eucharist, which makes the Incarnation vividly and really a present fact, of the lily and its growth from a seed, sown by a parent-lily, is not altogether fanciful. The Holy Sacrament of the Altar is the fruit of the Incarnation; and the fruit of a plant is a device for carrying and sowing seed, in order to reproduce the parent-type. It is the Word of God, spoken by the priest, that forms the Eucharist to be the fruit and seed also of Mary, the parent-lily. St. Augustine says, 'In manibus sacerdotis Dei Filius incarnatur.' That precious Fruit is the Father's gift to the faithful communicant; so that growth in holiness for a soul, in whom that grace abides, resembles the quiet unfolding of a seed, until a replica of its type is realized, without any solicitude or taking thought for the morrow, by an irresistible process, if in right conditions, of a force in nature, which moves itself to its own perfection, and which we call life. In that process the creature co-operates but subordinately, as the gardener co-operates with the lily, planted in the corrupt earth of a garden border under his charge. I have come,' said Divine Life, 'that you, too, may have life,' and the 'Bread which I will give you is My Flesh for the life of the world.' For this purpose of His coming, He gave up His own life to store it in the Blessed Eucharist, that It might be there a seed-source of life for us, till time should cease.

In the world there are a great variety of living seeds; that which contains a priest's vocation grows like all the rest to its own type of perfection, if the possessor be true

to his own proper environment, remains steadfast where he has been placed, and utilizes the opportunities of his state for God's greater glory and his own more perfect renunciation: then what the chisel is for the sculptor in shaping the rough marble to a statue, so is environment in the hands of God an instrument to form a saint out of a sinner.

But to grow for all living things is to pass through a series of transformations, and the sublimest of all is that whereby a son of man becomes a son of God, and a son of God becomes a priest after the order of Jesus of Nazareth. What fallen sinner is competent to realize it? No wonder the heights to be scaled affright him, and doubting timidity holds him back! To such a one a consideration of the laws of growth, which enable the lily, cedar, and olive tree, in spite of all storm and stress, so easily to array themselves in a typical glory, that Solomon himself in all his glory might envy, is calculated to revive courage and dispel fear.

He who uttered that beautiful passage on the lilies in His Sermon on the Mount, made not only the parable but the lily too. The Inventor is describing His own machine;1 moreover, He who made the lilies made man as well, breathing into his body the breath of life, and then planting in his soul the germ of a still diviner life. Who better than He could draw out the analogies between nature and sanctifying grace?

Indirectly, He bids us look away from the impotency of fallen self to our second birth; to the gift of a new Mother and her immaculate nature in baptismal regeneration, and to a new Father, Christ, whose argument is a fortiori: 'If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven,' how much more gloriously will He clothe man; above all men, a priest, and by a process as sweet and easy. That favoured soul should indeed be consecrated, where dwells the spirit of the priesthood of Jesus, gradually forming therein the Mind and Heart of the divine type of sacerdotal perfection; so that where and as the Master is there will be also the disciple, daily becoming more worthy to bring forth and communicate the Fruit of the Incarnation, bequeathed by the Blessed Mother of the Eucharist for the salvation and transformation of sinful men.

JOSEPH DARLINGTON, S.J.

1 Cf. Drummond's Natural Law.