A MAP OF LIFE


F. J. SHEED


SHEED & WARD, NEW YORK, MCMXXXIX

Printed in Great Britain


Nihil Obstat: Innocentius Apap, O.P., S.T.M.
Censor Deputatus 

Imprimatur: + Josephus Butt
Vic. Gen. 

Westmonasterii, Die IV Octobris, MCMXXXIII



CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I.     THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S PURPOSE

II.    THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S LAWS

III.   HEAVEN

IV.    THE CREATION AND FALL

V.     THE INCARNATION

VI.    THE MYSTICAL BODY

VII.   TRUTH: 
       (A.) THE TEACHING CHURCH

VIII.  TRUTH: 
       (B.) THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY

IX.    LAW AND SIN

X.     LAW AND SUFFERING

XI.    THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE:
       (A.) HOW IT COMES TO THE SOUL

XII.   THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE:
       (B.) HOW IT WORKS IN THE SOUL

XIII.  HELL

XIV.   PURGATORY: HEAVEN

INDEX



INTRODUCTION

THE traveller through a strange country usually gets vivid 
impressions of individual things, but only a confused 
impression of the country in its totality. He remembers this 
mountain and that stream and the other village; but how one 
is related to the other, and the general winding of roads 
that he has barely glimpsed, cannot in the nature of things 
stand clear in his mind: and a map of the whole country seen 
at the end of his travels, may very well be full of 
surprises and is, in any case, a totally new view. In very 
much the same way a traveller through life gets vivid--
sometimes extremely vivid--impressions of things near at 
hand: confused impressions of things seen at a distance or 
only heard of: but of the whole plan of life, no idea at 
all. In his mind will be a jumble of facts, tossed about in 
any order--God, sin, church-going, disease, sacraments, 
suffering, the treason of friends, hostilities, death and 
the fear of death, money and the loss of it, God-made-man--
and so on without end. But which of these things are big 
things and which of them are little, he will not know with 
certainty: the things that have come nearest to himself will 
seem big things: the remoter things will seem small.

And of the relations of these things one to another--how one 
thing agrees with, or conflicts with, another--of all this, 
merely by dint of living, he will have only the most 
confused and uncertain impression. In fact it may easily 
happen that a man who merely lives, and neither reflects nor 
is taught, does not even suspect relationships, but thinks 
of all things as accidents with no reason in themselves save 
that they happened, and no connection with each other save 
that one came earlier and one came later. Because of this 
confusion, I propose to try to make what may roughly be 
called a map of life--a scale map in which the principal 
"natural features" will be shown in their right proportions 
and the roads between them drawn in. This map will not be of 
my own drawing, fruit of my own experience of life. Nor will 
it be of any man's drawing. It will be a transcript of what 
God, the Author of life, has revealed as to the meaning of 
the whole and the relations of the parts.

Nor will it be a demonstration. Maps do not prove, but only 
state. There are only two reasons for trusting a map: one is 
the authority of the mapmaker: the other is one's own 
experience, when one has travelled the road with its 
guidance. The second is normally of less practical value. We 
need to be assured of a map's trustworthiness at the 
beginning of a journey. A map, therefore, must be accepted 
or rejected according to the confidence the map-maker 
deserves. In this instance, fortunately, the map-maker is 
God. In this effort to set out the plan of life, there will 
be no attempt anywhere to prove the truth of what is said, 
but only to state what, according to the Church He founded, 
God has said.



I. THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S PURPOSE

To the detached observer man is something of a curiosity. He 
lives in two worlds at once, and this not as a being who 
belongs to one world and has simply got tangled up in 
another, but as a being who belongs essentially to both of 
them. God, who alone exists in His own right, who is all-
knowing and all-powerful, who exists without the shadow of 
limitation, made all things. Considering the beings God has 
made, we find two broad categories, spirit and matter.

Spirit is being which has the power of knowing and willing. 
Matter is being which has not these powers. There is a more 
obvious but less important distinction between them: matter 
can be perceived by the senses, spirit cannot.

Of God's creatures there are some that are pure spirits--
angels--with no material part. There are some that are 
purely material--animals, plants, stones and the rest--with 
no spiritual part. Between them is man. In him alone spirit 
and matter are united: by his soul he is a spirit as the 
angels are: by his body he is part of the material universe.

And, as has already been said, he belongs to both worlds by 
his essence. He is not simply a spirit who is for the moment 
tied down to, or tied up in, a body. It is of his very 
nature to be a union of matter and spirit.

The soul of man is not more essentially a partner in the 
human compound than his body: but it is the more important 
partner. For in the first place it is the principle of life 
in the body: it remains with the body so long as the body is 
capable of being animated by it: the body corrupts whereas 
the soul continues in existence; and in the second place it 
knows and wills: that is, it has the two faculties of 
intellect and will by which it can enter into conscious and 
determined relationship with all that is.

Such a being, then, is man. It is life as it concerns man 
that is the business of this map.

We shall understand the map better if we grasp its universal 
necessity. A man may very well say that whether there is or 
is not a divine revelation as to the meaning of human life, 
it is at any rate only of academic interest, desired by none 
save the dwindling number who like things cut and dried and 
take comfort in the voice of authority.

For a man who reasons thus we must show that an acceptance 
of the revelation of God as to the meaning of life has a 
bearing not only upon holy living, but even upon sane 
living; that only those who believe in such a revelation can 
shape their own lives correctly or help their fellow-men. 
Those who do not accept the revelation, even if they have 
the best will in the world (which not all men have), can 
neither direct their own lives aright nor help other men--
save accidentally and within a very narrow field. From such 
men the world has little to hope and an immense amount to 
fear. And into their hands the world is tending more and 
more to fall.

In one word, the reason for their helplessness, both in 
relation to themselves and in relation to others, is that 
they do not know what a man is.

You do not truly know what anything is until you know what 
it is for. Knowing what a thing is made of, even knowing 
whom a thing is made by, these things are but scanty 
knowledge, impotent of themselves to lead to fruitful 
action. The complete knowledge demands a knowledge of 
purpose. A very crude instance may make this sufficiently 
obvious truth still more obvious. Suppose a man who has 
never shaved: and suppose that he suddenly discovers a 
razor. He does not know what it is, but he discovers that it 
cuts. Whereupon he uses it for cutting wood. He does not cut 
a great deal of wood and he ruins the razor, leaving it fit 
only for the scrap-heap. The point is that he has used it 
without knowing its purpose; and save by accident such use 
must always be misuse. And in the face of the general 
proposition that nothing can be used aright until its 
purpose is known, the man who uses anything at all without 
such knowledge is acting blindly. He may mean well, but 
well-meaningness is not a substitute for knowledge of 
purpose.

Obviously the perfect way to know the purpose of the thing 
is to find out from its maker: any other method leaves too 
many loopholes for error.

Apply this principle to man himself: we cannot use ourselves 
aright nor help any other man till we know what man is for: 
we can meddle with him, tinker with him, mean well to him, 
but save in a limited way we cannot help him.

Here we must make a short digression. There are only two 
ways in which anything can come to be. Either it is 
intentional or accidental: that is, either someone intended 
it or it merely chanced. The thing that is intentional has a 
purpose: accidents have no purpose. Humanity, like other 
things, must be either an accident and so purposeless, or 
else have been made with intent. Catholics know that man was 
made, and made by an intelligent Being who knew the purpose 
of His own action. Further, God who made us and knew what He 
made us for, has told us what He made us for. Accepting His 
Word, we know the purpose of our existence, and we can 
proceed to live intelligently according to it. Short of this 
knowledge, intelligent living is not possible for us.

For apart from God's own statement as to what He had in mind 
when He made us, we have no way of knowing. We cannot tell 
ourselves: the scientist can tell us what we are made of, or 
rather what our bodies are made of, but he cannot tell us 
what we are made for: and by comparison with this altogether 
vital matter, what he has to say, interesting as it is, is 
but trivial.

In other words, short of God telling us, we cannot be told; 
and short of being told we cannot know. We can of course 
theorize--or in plain English, guess. There is one, and only 
one, colourable alternative to a revelation from God as a 
means of knowing the purpose of man's existence. We might 
simply take human nature as it is, study it, come to a full 
and accurate knowledge of it: we could then reason from 
man's nature as to the particular purpose for which a being 
of that nature must have been made: or, avoiding the idea of 
purpose altogether, we might reason as to the best use to 
which a being of those powers could be put.

This, I say, is a colourable alternative. Indeed, for one 
who is unaware of the revelation of God, it is the highest 
exercise of the intellect. With this method, had God not 
told us what was in His mind, we should have had to rest 
content.[1] Yet we may be glad that He did not so leave us, 
since it is liable to error in many ways, of which two are 
of capital importance:

(1) There may be error in the reading of human nature. Most 
of men's efforts to read human nature, and frame a system of 
life in accord with it, err by inability to seize the whole. 
One part of human nature is isolated, the rest ignored. 
Further, as between various uses to which powers might be 
put, there can be no deciding which is higher and which is 
lower, save in the light of the purpose of the whole being: 
those uses which serve the purpose are good, those which 
hinder it are bad.

(2) The second objection is far more important and is, 
indeed, fundamental to the understanding of the whole of 
what is to come. Even if human nature were fully understood 
with no shadow of error, the purpose of man's life could be 
deduced from it only if the purpose of man's life were 
contained in it-that is, if man's purpose simply meant the 
highest activity possible to his own nature. But supposing 
the purpose of human life is some activity or state higher 
than man's nature. Then we cannot find it simply by studying 
his nature. And God has in fact taught that He destines us 
not for something of which our nature is in itself capable 
(and which might, therefore, as I have said, be deduced from 
our nature) but for something to which He in His generosity 
chose to lift us; and this obviously cannot be deduced from 
any study of us: one may deduce the incidence of justice, 
but not of generosity.

Given, then, that apart from the revelation of God we cannot 
know with certainty what is the purpose of our existence as 
man, the only thing left for the one who does not believe in 
such a revelation is to choose an object of life: to decide 
for himself what he will use his life for. But given the 
myriad possibilities before every man, the chances are that 
he will choose the wrong one and so spoil his life: and if 
he is in a position to control the destinies of others, 
whether as a king or a dictator or simply as the father of a 
family, the disaster will be very great: and the more 
zealous and energetic he is, the greater will the disaster 
be. In no case is intelligent living--that is, living 
consciously for the true purpose of our being--possible to 
us unless we are told by God what the purpose is.

It is, therefore, the very highest act of our intellect thus 
to grasp the revelation of God, since this is knowledge that 
we must have, and knowledge that we must either be told or 
do without. It is foolish to stigmatize this acceptance as a 
denial of freedom or a form of intellectual suicide. The 
object of thought is truth: if a particular piece of truth 
is necessary, can be known with certainty by the teaching of 
another, and cannot be known otherwise, then a man is really 
acting suicidally in rejecting the truth merely because he 
did not find it for himself. He is preferring the exercise 
of the means to the attainment of the end. If a man knows 
what knowing means, he cannot even think he knows man's true 
purpose save through the revelation of God. And so he cannot 
direct his own life rightly. Nor can he help others.

Here the philanthropist might say: "I am a practical man 
doing the immediate job. Whether there is a God or not, here 
is a man suffering, here is a wrong to be righted": but this 
is not practical, this dashing at the job without the 
necessary preliminary theorizing. For if you do not know 
what men are--that is, are for--how do you know what is good 
for them? That thing is good for any being which helps it to 
achieve the true purpose of its nature. How can you help men 
to that, if you do not know what their true purpose is?

Nor should we be misled by the fact that there are certain 
obvious things that such a man can do. Principally he can 
relieve bodily suffering. But all his aid is "first aid": of 
profound, permanent, certain help to man he can do nothing. 
In fact the general effort of those who thus would help 
their fellow men with no thought of God is almost 
exclusively confined to bodily well-being, or the relief of 
bodily suffering.

And when they approach such questions as birth-control, 
divorce, the killing of the incurable, and a dozen others, 
it is beyond their power really to answer the question 
raised. For these things are right or wrong according as 
they help or hinder a man in the achievement of the purpose 
of his being: and it is not so much as possible to express 
an intelligent opinion on them save in the slight of a sure 
knowledge of what the purpose of life is. When the 
philanthropist is not merely unaware of God's revelation, 
but definitely convinced that man is only the matter of his 
body, his position is easier. If he has to decide upon the 
question of divorce, for instance, then for him the only 
problem is whether an accidental collection of electrons and 
protons--called for convenience a man--will function more 
harmoniously with that second collection of electrons and 
protons which it is at present living with, or with some 
third collection of electrons and protons. Such a question 
is simple enough. Simple because it really does not matter. 
But if man is more than that--a being with a true purpose in 
life--then all that is said in ignorance of his purpose is 
quite irrelevant.

On all the moral teaching of those who have not the Catholic 
revelation, there lies this mark of superficiality: the only 
rule that appears to be of universal application is that 
suffering must always be relieved. But even this, one dare 
not call a principle, since it is not related to any true 
view of life. By good fortune, it is a rule that often works 
to the advantage of the sufferer; and in the one who 
exercises it, it bears witness to a true virtue: indeed the 
relief of suffering is one of the highest rules of the 
Christian life. But, apart from a right view of the purpose 
of human life, it is a blind rule, and there is no virtue in 
blindness. Carried too far, as our age is tending more and 
more to carry it, the rule can work immeasurable evil. For 
there are things that are worse than suffering.

Two questions, then, are to be asked of any religious or 
social teacher who offers some system of life for the 
acceptance of men: The first is: What, according to you, is 
the purpose of man's life?

The second is: How do you know?

When he answers the second, be very insistent. Unless he 
says "God has revealed it," then he is wasting time. If he 
says God has revealed it, then he must be prepared to show 
that God has done so. To both questions the Catholic Church 
has an answer. In this book I am concerned only with the 
first and with certain things that flow from it. Life, and 
all the things of life, have a meaning in relation to man, 
in themselves, in relation to one another. What the meaning 
is, God has told us: we need to know it: there is no other 
way of knowing. This book is simply an attempt to transcribe 
what God has said.



ENDNOTES

1. See Chapter XII.



II. THE PROBLEM OF LIFE'S LAWS

THE argument of the first chapter went to show that the very 
minimum required for intelligent living--namely, the 
knowledge of the purpose of our life--is dependent upon a 
revelation from God: that without such a revelation we 
cannot know our purpose, and so cannot have any means of 
testing the value or the significance of anything that we 
do. As I have said, this is a minimum, and reflection on 
experience is sufficient to show that something more is 
needed from God than a bare revelation of what He made us 
for.

Very early in life man becomes aware that he is living in a 
world of laws: the series of happenings which lead him to 
the conclusion are nearly all unpleasant: but whether he 
ever formulates the idea or crystallizes it in a word, or 
whether he remains merely the practical man--in the usual 
sense of the unreflective man--he acquires the certainty 
that there is a whole series of conditions and results in 
the world which may fairly well be counted upon. This 
certainty becomes part of the very texture of his mind. Thus 
he discovers that fire burns, that hunger weakens, that rain 
wets, that bodies fall towards the earth and not towards the 
sky; and so with a myriad other things. If he reflects at 
all upon these laws, he realizes that they are not of his 
choosing--in fact that, in many cases, they are the reverse 
of what he would have chosen--but that their power is in no 
way affected by his disapproval. There is no way in which he 
can get free of them. He can act as though they did not 
exist, in which case they damage or even destroy him. If he 
is a sane man he may dislike them, but he accepts them, and 
does his best to live in accordance with them. In any case 
there is no such thing as freedom from them: but only 
freedom within them. And freedom within them can be attained 
only by one who knows them. This knowing them is always a 
matter of discovery and not invention: in other words, one 
finds out what they are, one cannot in any way make them to 
be.

All this is obvious enough as applied to the body. Men, 
however, do not always make the application of precisely the 
same truths to the soul: yet the parallel is exact. As there 
are laws that govern the body so there are laws--in 
particular the moral law--which govern the soul. The moral 
law is no more made by man, or dependent on the approval of 
man, or in any way escapable by man than the material law. 
Man can ignore the moral law as he can ignore the material 
law, but the result in both cases is his own diminution or 
destruction. There is no freedom from the moral law: but as 
with the material law there is freedom within it, the only 
freedom possible to man. And a condition of this freedom is 
the same as in the other case--namely, knowledge of what the 
law is.

In the light of all this it is possible to judge the extent 
of folly of those who talk of emancipation from the moral 
law, or from any particular article of the moral law: and 
because this talk has folly at its root, it runs to folly in 
every leaf and flower. To take only one instance: one hears 
the phrase that the modern man is no longer to be bound by 
the two-thousand-year-old law of marriage. It is as though 
one were to say that it was beneath the dignity of modern 
man to be bound by the even older law of gravity. For the 
question is not whether the law is old, but whether it is a 
law. A man might very well say that he would not be bound by 
the law of gravity: yet he would be well advised to keep his 
affirmation within the sphere of words. Let him push it to 
act, and he will no longer be a modern man but a corpse, 
part of that history which, in his newness, he so heartily 
despises.

Another category of this folly is the not uncommon 
assumption that this or that human authority may abrogate 
the law, even if the individual would be a little reckless 
in declaring it not binding upon himself. But the State--to 
take the most obvious example of all--cannot in any way 
affect the moral law.[1] The State declares that a man may--in 
certain circumstances--leave his wife and marry another. But 
this is adultery. To assume that therefore adultery is no 
longer harmful to the soul is unduly optimistic. State 
action can no more make adultery harmless to the soul than 
it can make prussic acid harmless to the body. Men have come 
into a collision with the law of God: the law of God does 
not suffer from the collision.

The conclusion, then, is that we are living in a world of 
law, material law and spiritual law, and that successful 
living involves obedience to this law which, in its turn, 
supposes a knowledge of it. If it is asked how we are to 
know what the law is, experience suggests an answer. Since 
men were men, they have had their own bodies and the world 
of matter under their eyes, and they have been at work 
discovering what the laws are that govern matter. Yet on 
this most obvious ground, men are constantly changing their 
views, learning laws that till yesterday were not so much as 
suspected, discarding what all men before them had held to 
be laws, certain and irrevocable. So that it is clear enough 
that, left to themselves, men will make no more than a 
tolerably successful job of this discovering of the laws of 
matter. Much more, then, it is evident that left to 
themselves, men will fail to discover, with any fixity or 
certainty, the laws that govern the soul--since the soul is 
so much less obvious to man, so very much more inaccessible 
in its essential being. And failure in this sphere is far 
more serious than in the other. For disaster to the body is 
the lesser evil, and is only an anticipation of the disaster 
that awaits all bodies inevitably. But disaster to the soul-
because it is the nobler part of man, because disaster is 
not its inevitable destiny, because it is not only the 
nobler part but the decisive part--is a thing not to be 
faced. And, in fact, given that no one but the law-maker can 
know with certainty the text of the laws he has made, there 
is immense food for thought in this: that God, the author 
alike of the laws that govern matter and the laws that 
govern spirit, has left man very largely to discover--with 
an endless accompaniment of disaster--the laws that govern 
matter, as though the discovery of these were a trivial 
thing, not vital; but has revealed to man the laws that 
govern spirit because they are essential laws, whose breach 
is fraught with eternal catastrophe.

Thus, not only that man may know the purpose of his life, 
but also that he may know the nature of the life through 
which he must strive to his goal, a teaching from God is 
something vitally necessary. It does not follow that even 
with this knowledge a man will always act rightly. The will 
of man is capable of choosing a course of action contrary to 
what he knows to be right. And even if the will is right, 
the intellect may err in applying its knowledge of purpose 
and law to a particular set of circumstances. Where the law 
of God applies explicitly, there is no problem. But in a 
situation to which the law has not been applied by God in 
express terms and it is a question of men applying a 
principle, then they may easily go astray, misled by custom 
or environment or inclination. Thus, for example, a Catholic 
might, with excellent intentions, support a bad social or 
economic or judicial system. But for all that he possesses 
the true principles and with these there is always the 
possibility of rectification. Without them there is none. So 
that right living, though not guaranteed by, is yet totally 
dependent upon, knowledge of purpose and law, and therefore 
upon God.

It may be well at this point, to say one thing further about 
freedom and about the dependence of man upon God. Freedom is 
usually defined as the power to do what one likes. Accepting 
the definition, one sees instantly that the power to do what 
one likes may be the goal, but doing what one likes is not 
necessarily the road to the goal. In the bodily order, 
eating what one likes, for instance, may very well be the 
very solidest hindrance to doing what one likes, and a 
certain prelude to suffering what one very much dislikes. It 
is only by doing as one ought, that one attains a condition 
in which one has true physical freedom, the uttermost 
freedom possible to the body. And the same truth applies 
exactly to the soul. Freedom, then, is not to be attained by 
doing what we like unless by chance we like what we ought: 
which brings us back to the true purpose of our being and 
the laws by which our being may progress towards it. Apart 
from that is only loss.

It is true that this argues a very extreme degree of 
dependence upon God, a dependence to which not all men 
resign themselves easily. Yet no view of life will work--
because no view of life is intelligent--which does not 
accept both the fact of our dependence upon God and the 
rightfulness of it--that God has no duty whatever to us, and 
we have no rights whatever against God. If a carpenter makes 
a chair, the carpenter owes nothing to the chair. The chair 
has no rights against him, and he may do as he pleases--sit 
upon it or set a match to it. But God made us and He made us 
more fully, so to speak, than any carpenter ever makes a 
chair. For the carpenter, at any rate, does not make the 
wood: and there is always the possibility that his rights 
over the chair may, to some extent, be limited by an unpaid 
bill for the wood. But God made us, using no material at 
all. Therefore we have no more rights against him than the 
chair has against the carpenter. Occasionally it seems to us 
that the fact that we have intelligence and free will does, 
in some way, make a difference, giving us some claim that 
the chair has not. But God gave us these gifts too: they are 
as much His creatures as we: and, therefore, they give us no 
claim against Him. God could not contract a duty towards us 
by giving us more. But though God has no duties towards us, 
yet He has a duty towards Himself, the duty of acting 
intelligently. Intelligent action means action with a 
purpose, and God who gave us intelligence and gave us free 
will, thereby put Himself under obligation so to speak, to 
treat us in accordance with that which He had given us. Our 
dependence, therefore, upon God, though total, absolute, and 
without any shadow of exception, is not the dependence of 
machines upon a mad mechanic or of slaves upon a mad king. 
It is the dependence of free men upon an All-Wise and All-
Loving Creator, who knows their being more intimately than 
they know it themselves--who knows wherein the fulfilment of 
their being lies, and whose will it is that the fulfilment 
should actually be achieved. As we shall see, His will for 
them is even more than that--a fulfilment immeasurably 
beyond anything that the mere powers of their being would 
lead men to dare to hope, or even to conceive.



ENDNOTES

1. Nor can the Church. See X. Law and Suffering.



III. HEAVEN

IN this third chapter, we come at last to the map itself, or 
rather to a first general outline of it. We must begin at 
the end. For this map is the map of a road, and it is only 
in the light of its end that any road makes sense. If you 
ask why it turns this way or that, the answer will always 
lie in a consideration of the place it is going to: till you 
know that you cannot even know that it is a road, but only 
that it looks like one; still less can you know whether it 
is a good road or a bad road. Therefore, if this map is to 
be drawn rightly, we must begin at the end.

What is the right end of the life of man? In other words, 
what should the road of life lead to? Faced with this 
primary question, men have tried various ways of arriving at 
the answer. The atheist makes an effort to place the end of 
the road at death: the road of every man's life runs 
inevitably to earth in a newly opened grave. But atheists, 
at any time in the world's history, are exceptional, almost 
freakish. And for the generality of men, the question of 
what is the end of life, is simply the question of what 
comes after death. In this at any rate, the generality of 
men are right. But after this initial correctness there is 
every variety of error. Some men have decided to work out 
for themselves what they think lies on the other side of the 
door of death, with the ill-success that must always attend 
any effort to arrive theoretically at a true idea of an 
unvisited country. Some have decided that whatever lies on 
the other side of the door, there is no need to worry about 
it, but merely to await death and hope for the best with a 
fair certainty that things will turn out well enough. A 
small number--even smaller than the number of atheists 
perhaps--have, in all ages, tried to find out by consulting 
the souls of the dead--which, logically, is at any rate a 
far better method than merely theorizing about the life 
after death. For all that, the method is fraught with 
endless danger of deception, and for all the thousands of 
years of its history, the results are so meagre that 
spiritualism can hardly be conceived as anything more worthy 
than a kind of peeping through the keyhole.

The Catholic has always realized that as to what comes after 
death, the only way of finding out is to be told by someone 
who has personal knowledge of the other world. No other way 
could possibly be right. So far the spiritualist has hold of 
a truth. But of all the beings who may have such personal 
knowledge, one has it supremely--God. And God, the author of 
this life and the next, has told us of the future that He 
has prepared for us. The road of life runs through this life 
to heaven. Heaven, then, is the end of the road, and we can 
only understand the road if we have some knowledge of 
heaven, the place to which it leads, and for which it was 
made.

At this stage no more will be said of heaven than is 
necessary for the mapping of the road. A slightly fuller 
treatment of heaven, in its own right and not simply as 
something which makes this life on earth comprehensible, 
must be reserved for the final chapter.

Outside the Catholic Church, the idea of heaven has suffered 
because the only section of Protestants who talk very much 
about it--Protestants of the Nonconformist type--having no 
theology on the subject, have been forced more and more to 
use the imagery of Scripture. For centuries they have 
talked, preached and sung of heaven as a place of harps, 
hymns, crowns of gold, streets of jasper. These, of course, 
are symbols intended to convey a vivid impression of endless 
happiness. In themselves they give no notion of the life of 
heaven any more than pictures of men with wings give a 
notion of the being of angels. As symbols they are made only 
as ornaments to a great body of teaching, in which the life 
of heaven is expressed in its true relation to the nature of 
God and the nature of man. Lacking this true teaching--owing 
to its suspicion of "theology"--Protestantism has for 
centuries had no food for its mind save the symbols; and 
symbols, while an admirable stimulus to the imagination, are 
not food for the intellect. The result is that for the 
average man heaven, thought of in terms of endless hymn-
singing, is not attractive.

For the moment, then, we must neglect the symbols 
altogether. Heaven consists in the knowledge of God and in 
the love of God flowing from and proportioned to, that 
knowledge. As such, it means perfect happiness. If we 
consider what brings happiness to man in this life, we shall 
find certain very clear principles. Happiness is always in 
the soul: it may be caused by some condition of the body, 
but the body as such is neither happy nor unhappy. It is the 
soul that knows of the good or ill condition of the body, 
and rejoices in the good or suffers in the ill. In that 
happiness of the soul which comes from some condition of the 
body, the condition always is that the bodily organs are 
functioning properly. Let them cease to do so, and the state 
of the soul which we call "unhappiness" is nearly certain to 
result in some measure: not quite certain, be it noted: the 
soul can triumph even over the body's agony. This fact, that 
the soul is the seat of happiness, is further shown when we 
consider a situation in which the body is functioning 
properly, but the soul itself is perturbed. In such a 
situation the state of the soul is decisive: the man is 
unhappy. A very simple instance is where the man has all, 
not only that he needs, but even that he wants to drink and 
eat and wear and entertain himself with. The death of a 
friend is instantly sufficient to plunge him into the 
deepest unhappiness. That being so, it is necessary to 
consider in what lies the happiness that comes from the soul 
itself.

Like that which comes from the body, it always results from 
a proper functioning of a faculty. The intellect knows truth 
and is happy in the knowledge: the will loves goodness and 
is happy in the love. The soul of man sees and rejoices in 
beauty--beauty of sound, beauty of colour, beauty of form,--
above all, beauty of spirit. In heaven all this is carried 
to its very highest point. The intellect, whose property it 
is to possess the knowledge of truth, now knows God Himself, 
who is supreme Truth. The will, whose property it is to love 
goodness, is now in immediate contact with God Himself, who 
is supreme Goodness. The whole soul is therefore functioning 
at its very highest, and happiness is the inevitable result.

Our imagination may find in this statement--that the 
happiness of heaven consists in the direct knowledge and 
direct love of God--a doctrine that it feels to be deeply 
unsatisfying. To the ordinary man, such a description of 
heaven seems far too spiritual, too remote from the kind of 
happiness that springs to his mind the moment he starts to 
think of happiness at all. It is, therefore, well to analyze 
just one stage further what happiness involves. In looking 
at a sunset or in listening to a piece of music, the soul of 
man may be lifted, if only for the moment, to an absolute 
ecstasy of happiness. Yet no man can go on endlessly looking 
at the same sunset, and an endless repetition of the same 
piece of music might very easily lead to madness. Both these 
effects, the original joy and the too rapid fatigue, come 
from the same source. The beauty that man enjoys in the 
sunset and the music, is a beauty that God Himself has 
created, and it is to this that the soul of man responds. 
But, because God has created it, it is only a shadow or a 
reflection of that beauty which, immeasurably, is in God 
Himself, or more truly is God Himself. Man, therefore, who 
has rejoiced in the beauty that God has placed in the 
sunset, will rejoice immeasurably more in God Himself, the 
Author and Source of all beauty. And whereas he grew weary 
of the sunset--which was not the beauty of God Himself, but 
only a created reflection of it-of the infinite beauty of 
God Himself he will never grow weary.


THE SUPERNATURAL LIFE

This, then, is some idea of the end of the road: what 
bearing has it on the road? To many, the connection is 
obscured by a truth which is only one truth, and not the 
most important. Heaven is thought of as the reward of a good 
life. As such, it has only a kind of accidental connection 
with this life. It is better to think of heaven, not only as 
a reward, but also as the result of a good life. A simple 
comparison may make clear the distinction. If a student 
passes an examination he may be rewarded in one of two ways: 
he may either get a mere prize--a tennis racquet say, or a 
volume of Browning--or he may be admitted to a further 
course of study which his success in the examination has 
proved him to be fitted for. The tennis racquet has no real 
relation to the examination he has passed: but the further 
course of study has; it is a true result of it. To an 
immense number of people, heaven is rather like the tennis 
racquet, and, as such, is not really understood at all. But 
think of it as the further course, resulting from a life 
well lived, and instantly the connection is seen. This life 
is not only a test which a man must pass in order to obtain 
the reward of heaven, it is a preparation which man must 
successfully undergo in order to live the life of heaven.

From this it follows that whatever is necessary to enable a 
man to live the life of heaven must, in some way or other, 
be acquired by man in this life: otherwise this life would 
not be a preparation for heaven. And this consideration 
brings us to the most important point in the whole of 
Catholic teaching, the doctrine to which all others 
whatsoever are related, an understanding of which is 
necessary if Catholicism is to be understood at all. We may 
approach it in this way. If we were offered a journey to 
another planet, we should be wise to refuse, because the 
breathing apparatus which we have by nature, was made for 
the atmosphere of this world. In our atmosphere it works: in 
a totally different atmosphere it would not work, and we 
should die of suffocation. This illustration points the way 
to the truth, namely, that the equipment which is adequate 
to life in one world, may not be at all adequate to life in 
another. And God has told us that our human nature, while 
adequate to the ordinary life of this world, is not adequate 
to the life of the world to come. If we were to enter heaven 
with only the powers of our human nature, we should no more 
be able to live there than, in the illustration I have 
given, we should be able to live on another planet with no 
powers beyond those of our nature.

And just as we should need some extra powers of breathing, 
not contained in our nature, to live on another planet, so 
we need extra powers in our soul, not contained in our 
nature, in order that we may live the life of heaven. These 
powers which are not ours by nature, which are necessary in 
order that we may live a life totally above our nature, are 
what is called in Catholic teaching, the Supernatural Life.[1]

All that has just been said of man applies equally to those 
purely spiritual beings, the angels. Heaven consists in such 
a relationship with God that no created nature, by its own 
powers, could be adequate to it. Just as men must receive 
powers above their nature if they are to live the life of 
heaven, so must angels. Angels had their testing. Those who 
remained in the love of God were granted the powers and 
admitted to heaven. Those who rejected God were fixed in 
eternal separation from Him.

But as we have already seen that our life upon earth is to 
be a preparation for the life of heaven, and that heaven is 
to be the logical conclusion of this life, and that, 
therefore, whatever is necessary to the life of heaven must 
be acquired by us here-because of all these things it 
follows that in this life we must obtain from God the 
Supernatural Life.

Our life will be a success if, at the moment of death, we 
have in our soul the life above our nature, the Supernatural 
Life. It will be a failure if, at death, we have not the 
Supernatural Life. For if we have it, then we have in our 
soul the powers that would enable us to live the life of 
heaven; if we have it not, we lack these powers and 
therefore will be totally unable to live the life of heaven.

The road of our life, then, will lead us to heaven only if 
on it we have acquired the Supernatural Life, and at the end 
of it, have retained the Supernatural Life.

This, then, is the first general outline of our map. There 
is a road which leads man to that ineffable intimacy with 
God which we call heaven. The condition of walking the road 
aright, is the Supernatural Life. It will be seen how every 
single thing that happens to man has its bearing on this 
Supernatural Life, and is a good thing or a bad thing 
according as it helps it or hinders it. Every single 
doctrine of the Catholic Church is bound up with this, and 
every single practice of the Catholic Church is concerned 
with this and with nothing else, and apart from this, has no 
meaning.



ENDNOTES

1. Not, be it noted the spiritual life, though in Scripture 
this term is often used for the Supernatural Life. It seems 
better here to keep the terms distinct. Man's soul is by 
nature spiritual. The Supernatural Life is something that 
elevates spirit.



IV. THE CREATION AND FALL

WE have now seen the right road in its simplest elements. 
Our entry into life is at one end: heaven is at the other: 
death lies between. To understand the map we need a 
knowledge of the purpose of life and a knowledge of the laws 
to be obeyed; to put our understanding to fruitful use--that 
is, to attain the end for which we are made--we need the 
Supernatural Life.

These three things would be necessary, given a supernatural 
destiny, in any condition of the human race. And all of them 
must come as a free gift of God or not at all. For us, then, 
the question simply is: How does God give these gifts--the 
Life and the twofold Truth--to man here and now? The answer 
to this question is the actual road of to-day--life as it 
must actually be lived by ourselves. But we cannot 
understand the strange, winding, arduous, almost 
incomprehensible road of to-day unless we realize that it is 
not the first road God laid down for us: that in the 
beginning there was a simpler, less puzzling road; and that 
by sin man dynamited it; or from another point of view man 
so damaged himself by sin that he could no longer walk it. A 
study of the first road and its ruin will make the road of 
to-day considerably more comprehensible.

From the first man, Adam, we all are sprung; in him the 
whole human race was incorporated, since there is no one of 
us that does not come from him; he was the whole human race 
when God made him. He gave him, along with many other gifts, 
the three things necessary. He gave him the twofold Truth-
the knowledge, that is, of the purpose of the human race and 
of the laws by which it must be governed if it is to avoid 
disaster. He gave him the Supernatural Life. Adam, then, had 
the natural life that made him man--the union of spiritual 
soul and material body which constituted his nature as man, 
without which he would not have been man: and this natural 
life he had in a state of perfection, all his powers and 
faculties rightly ordered, body subordinate to soul, soul 
ruled by reason. He also had the Supernatural Life--the life 
above nature--that whereby he would be able to live the life 
of Heaven hereafter, whereby even in this life his whole 
soul was "supernaturalized," capable of a relationship with 
God altogether higher and holier than anything that could 
take its rise in man's merely natural endowments. The 
highest and holiest point of this relationship and the very 
condition of the Supernatural Life was for Adam, as it is 
for all men, the union of the soul to God by love. And while 
he had the Supernatural Life, God also exempted his nature 
from the law of death--from the separation of soul and body 
which is the natural termination of man's life on this 
earth.

Now Adam is not to be thought of simply as an individual: he 
was the human race. God, then--in the very beginning, and, 
so to speak, as a matter of course--had conferred upon the 
human race the three gifts necessary. For Adam the simplest 
elements of the road of human life were two, not three--his 
entry into life was at one end and Heaven was at the other: 
death did not lie in between. That, simply and directly, was 
God's scheme: man had knowledge of the end of his existence, 
knowledge of the laws by which he might attain the end, the 
Supernatural Life which put the end within his power. And 
man wrecked the scheme. Adam sinned, rebelled against God; 
and thereby lost the Supernatural Life, for this life cannot 
exist where the love of God is not, and love of God cannot 
exist where there is rebellion against Him.

Scripture represents the sinful action as the eating of the 
fruit of the forbidden tree. There is some mystery here. But 
two things about it we know. The first is that it was a sin 
of disobedience to God. The second is that the devil played 
a part in it. It has already been said that among the 
creatures of God were certain purely spiritual beings, the 
angels; and that these angels had the same purpose as man--
to attain to Heaven--and like man they had a period of 
testing. Some succeeded and are now in Heaven. Some failed 
in the test, chose their own will rather than God's, and so 
lost Heaven eternally. In the affairs of the human race 
angels good and bad are mysteriously concerned. The good 
angels exercise a certain guardianship over men: the fallen 
angels--devils--are concerned to lead men into sin and so 
cause them to fail to reach Heaven. The devil, then, tempted 
man to commit his first sin.

It is important to understand Adam's new condition. He had 
lost the Supernatural Life: he retained the natural life or 
the union of body and soul; the soul retained the natural 
powers of intellect and will. Supernaturally he was dead, 
for the loss of life is death; naturally he still lived. But 
even his nature did not emerge from the disaster unimpaired: 
it lost the privilege of exemption from death; henceforth 
man must pass through the gateway of death to reach his 
eternal destiny. More serious still was that man's nature 
lost its direction. Adam had sinned because he had chosen 
his own will instead of God's--he had swung his nature out 
of its true Godward direction, and had introduced war into 
the very inmost part of his nature, into the union of body 
and spirit--body warring against spirit, spirit torn by war 
in its own powers.

Thus then stood Adam, the individual man--the Supernatural 
Life lost, the natural life impaired because given a wrong 
direction; but still knowing the purpose of his being and 
the laws set by God for the governance of his life. But Adam 
was also, by God's dispensation, the representative man, and 
the effect of this original catastrophe upon the whole human 
race is measureless. As a mere physical consequence the 
nature he had to hand on to his descendants was an impaired 
nature, strongly attracted to sin. Worse than that: the 
right relationship between God and the human race was broken 
and Heaven was closed to men.

In him the race lost the Supernatural Life: so that men 
thereafter (with one glorious exception) entered this world 
with the natural life of soul and body (so much was 
necessary that they should be of the human race), but 
without the Supernatural Life, which but for Adam's fall 
they would have had. This is what we call Original Sin: 
which is thus to be thought of not as a wrong done by us 
personally, not as corruption of the soul in its essence, 
but as the absence of that Life which makes us sons of God 
and will hereafter open Heaven to us.[1]

Thus then through the spoiling of God's plan one of the 
three elementary things was lost--and lost instantly.

The other two were not lost so quickly. Adam we may assume, 
passed on his knowledge of God's purpose and God's laws to 
his children and they to their children. But as the slow 
centuries passed and men became farther removed in time and 
space from the first revelation, that happened to it which 
must always happen to a tradition of men unguarded by God: 
error crept into it, passion distorted it violently and 
self-interest less violently, but no less certainly; mere 
forgetfulness was deadlier than all. The nature of man still 
bore witness to God's purpose and God's law--but a witness 
that grew ever fainter; the fragments remained of the first 
revelation--but ever more broken and shapeless; the little 
company of the Chosen People clung to certain fundamental 
truths--the oneness of God, for instance, and the certainty 
of a Saviour to come--but only under pressure of endless 
reminders from God and with heaven knows how much weariness 
and backsliding. And there came a time when the whole of the 
threefold gift almost seemed to have perished from the 
earth. The Life man had lost in one great catastrophe; the 
Truth man had frittered away. Men were born into the world 
without the Supernatural Life: with a nature hopelessly at 
war within itself. They could still, from the universe about 
them, reason to the existence of God. But even in this their 
reasoning was accompanied by a horde of errors, and they 
could have no certain knowledge of God's purpose or God's 
law. Chaos was upon them: their foot was upon a road whose 
end they did not know--a road which could only be travelled 
with aids which they did not possess and could not for 
themselves obtain. And, be it repeated, Heaven was closed to 
man. This is something different from having lost the 
Supernatural Life. For an individual might, by God's grace, 
regain the Supernatural Life: and yet because he was a 
member of a fallen race, he could not enter Heaven. Man is 
not simply an individual, he is a member of a community. And 
while the only great human community in existence was Fallen 
Humanity--to which as a race Heaven was closed-the 
individual, however holy, was debarred from Heaven. Not till 
the right relation between God and the Human Race was re-
established (as God had promised Adam it would one day be) 
could the individual member of the race enter Heaven. There 
was no question of course of a holy man being eternally 
debarred from Heaven. But till Heaven was re-opened he must 
be in a place of waiting.[2]

At last God did for man what man could not do for himself: 
He made the threefold restoration and so built a new road 
for the human race; but consider what man had by his own act 
become, and it will be small wonder if the new road lacks 
some of the simplicity of the old. The first road had been 
planned for man as he came, all perfect from the hand of 
God; the second had to be planned for man as he was, with 
the wounds and stains that were upon him after countless 
ages of bearing the assaults of the world, the temptations 
of the devil, the warfare within himself. For the first road 
God had made man; for the building of the second road God 
became man.



ENDNOTES

1. The exception referred to earlier in the paragraph was 
Mary, the Mother of Christ. From the first moment of her 
existence in her mother's womb, her soul possessed the 
Supernatural Life. This is called technically her Immaculate 
Conception.

2. This place is referred to in various terms. Our Lord 
spoke of it as "Abraham's bosom" (in the parable of Dives 
and Lazarus), and "Paradise" (in His promise to the Good 
Thief). St. Peter calls it "prison" (1. Pet. iii., 19), 
theologians "Limbo," and in the English version of the 
Apostles' Creed it is called "hell."



V. THE INCARNATION

THE human race then had broken its right relation of 
friendship with God: men had lost the way because they had 
lost the life (without which the way cannot be followed) and 
the truth without which the way cannot even be known. To 
such a world Christ, who had come to make all things new, 
said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." In those three 
words--way, truth, life--Christ related Himself quite 
precisely to what man had lost: as precisely as a key fits a 
lock. In the precision of that threefold relation, we are 
apt to overlook the strangest word in the phrase--the word 
"am."

Men needed truth and life: what they might have expected was 
one who would say "I have the truth and the life": what they 
found was one who said "I am the truth and the life." This 
strange word forces us to a new mode of approach. If a man 
claims to have what we want, we must study what he has. If a 
man claims to be what we want, we must study what he is. 
With any other teacher the truth he has is our primary 
concern--the teacher himself is of no importance save as the 
bearer of truth, and his work is done when he has given it. 
With Christ, the teacher is primary: He cannot simply give 
us the truth and the life, and then have done with us. He 
can only give us Himself, for He is both. This point must be 
insisted on, not as a figure of speech, but as a strict 
fact. It is a map we are making, not a poem; and what is now 
being said, mysterious as it is, is strictly and literally 
true. Our study of the road of life has brought us to an 
examination of truth and life: we cannot understand the road 
if we do not understand them. But if Christ is the truth, 
then we must understand Him: if He is the life, then He must 
live in us.

Obviously, then, our map-making cannot progress till we are 
clear about Who and what Christ is, because the road we are 
to travel depends even more on what He is than on what He 
did.


THE TWO NATURES OF CHRIST

Christ is God-made-man: that is He is truly God and He is 
truly man. He is God--with the nature of God: He took to 
Himself and made His own a complete human nature--a real 
human body and a real human soul. He is, then, one person--
God--with two natures--divine and human. Nor is all this 
mere abstract matter, of no real concern to us. Everything 
in our life is bound up with the one person and the two 
natures of Christ. We must grasp this central luminous fact, 
or everything remains in darkness.

The distinction between person and nature is not some deep 
and hidden thing to which philosophy only comes after 
centuries of study. It is, on the contrary, a distinction so 
obvious that the smallest child who can talk at all makes it 
automatically. If in the half-light he sees a vague outline 
that might be anything, he asks "What is that?" If, on the 
other hand, he can see that it is a human being, but cannot 
distinguish or does not recognize the features, he asks "Who 
is that?" The distinction between what and who is the 
distinction between nature and person. Of every man the two 
questions--what is he? and who is he?--can be answered. 
Every man, in other words, is both a nature and a person. 
Into my every action, nature and person enter. For instance 
I speak. I, the person, speak. But I am able to speak only 
because I am a man, because it is of my nature to speak. I 
discover that there are all sorts of things I can do: and 
all sorts of things I cannot do. My nature decides. I can 
think, speak, walk: these actions go with the nature of man, 
which I have. I cannot fly, for this goes with the nature of 
a bird, which I have not.

My nature, then, decides what I can do: it may be thought of 
as settling the sphere of action possible to me. According 
to my nature, I can act: apart from it, I cannot. But my 
nature does not do these things--I, the person, do them. It 
is not my nature that speaks, walks, thinks: it is I, the 
person.

A man may then be thought of as a person--who acts--and a 
nature--which decides the field in which he acts. In man 
there is simply one nature to one person. In Christ there 
are two natures to one person: and our minds used to the 
one-nature-to-one-person state of man tend to cry out that 
there is a contradiction in the idea of two natures to one 
person.

But once it has been grasped that "person" and "nature" are 
not identical in meaning: once it has been grasped that the 
person acts and the nature is that principle in him which 
decides his sphere of action, then we see that mysterious as 
Our Lord's person and nature may be, there is no 
contradiction. God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed 
Trinity,[1] assumed--took to Himself--a human nature: made it 
His own: not simply as something which He could use as a 
convenient sphere to act in, but really as His own: just as 
our nature is our own. In us the relation of person and 
nature is such that not merely do we say "I have a human 
nature" (as we might say "I have an umbrella") but person 
and nature are so fused in one concrete reality that we say 
"I am a man." So God the Son can say not only "I am God with 
a human nature to act in" but in the most absolute fullness 
of meaning He can say "I am man." He does not simply act as 
man: He is man--as truly man as we.

This one person has two spheres of action: Christ our Lord 
could act either in His nature as God or in His nature as 
man. Remember the principle stated a few paragraphs back, 
that it is not the nature that acts, but the person. 
Therefore, whether He was acting in His divine nature or in 
His human nature, it was always the person who acted: and 
there was only the one person--God.

Then this is the position. Christ is God: therefore whatever 
Christ did, God did. When Christ acted in His divine nature 
(as when He raised the dead to life) it was God who did it: 
when Christ acted in His human nature (as when He was born, 
suffered and died) it was God who did it: God was born, God 
suffered, God died. For it is the person who acts: and 
Christ is God.


THE ATONEMENT

The next paragraph must be read with the closest attention 
or the map will not be properly understood.

Because Christ was God and Man, He was able to effect the 
reconciliation of God and man. The human race had broken the 
first relationship of oneness by sin: and of itself the 
human race with all its imperfections on it could make no 
offering to God in reparation for its sin. Literally the 
human race could not make reparation. Yet for the human act 
of rebellion, a human act of atonement was required: for the 
sin of human nature, only an act of human nature could 
satisfy--yet this act of human nature man could not perform. 
Christ was God and Man. The acts He performs in His human 
nature were truly human acts: yet because every action is of 
the person, they were acts of God, whose every act is of 
infinite value: Christ could make the necessary reparation. 
That particular action of His human nature which Christ 
chose as an offering-in-reparation--a sacrifice--was His 
death: at the age of thirty-three He was crucified upon 
Calvary.

This was the atonement. By it the breach between God and the 
human race was closed. The race was redeemed from that 
condition of separation from God into which the sin of Adam, 
the representative man, had plunged it. Heaven, the final 
and eternal union of God and man, was once more possible to 
man. For even the holiest man of the time between Adam's 
fall and Christ's death was still a member of the human 
race, a member of the race that had lost oneness with God, 
and as such debarred from heaven. But, by this re-making of 
the oneness, not only was Life--the Supernatural Life--set 
flowing with new richness for the elevation of man's soul: 
but that Life could now in heaven receive the full and 
complete flowering which before Calvary was impossible to 
it.

Christ had come "to save His people from their sins": He had 
come that man "might have life and have it more abundantly." 
These two purposes are in reality the same purpose--the 
effect of sin is the destruction of the Supernatural Life: a 
soul in sin is a soul that lacks the Supernatural Life: sin 
is removed by the pouring into the soul of that life-as 
darkness is removed by the turning on of the light. So far, 
then, for the first part of Christ's mission: He had 
reconciled the human race to God: He had brought back the 
rich store of Supernatural Life.


CHRIST AS TEACHER

There remains to be considered the other need of man--Truth. 
As we have seen this involves as a minimum that man shall be 
taught the purpose of his existence and the laws by which he 
must live. Christ taught this necessary minimum-and much 
more. The laws will be discussed in detail in Chapters IX 
and X: here notice only two things:

(a) He took the ten commandments given to the chosen people 
of Israel by God some fifteen hundred years before--most of 
them beginning with "Thou shalt not" and summed them up into 
two, both beginning "Thou shalt": for the first three 
commandments, which set out our duty to God, He expressed 
concisely as "Thou shalt love God"; and the remaining seven, 
which set out our duty to our neighbour, He expressed 
equally concisely as "Thou shalt love thy neighbour." In 
other words, all the commandments lie implicit in this 
twofold love;

(b) Just as the commandments are summarized and made 
positive, so they are traced back from external conduct to 
the internal root of conduct, from actions (commanded or 
prohibited) to love--a state of the soul: and sins of the 
mind--or heart-or intention become as serious as sins of the 
exterior action: the yielding of the mind to lust not only 
is as bad as adultery, it is adultery; the yielding of the 
mind to murder not only is as bad as murder, it is murder. 
The essence of sin is now clear--it is the soul of man 
twisting itself out of the right relation to God. That is 
sin. Nothing else is. And the laws which express the right 
relation are all forms of love.

So much, for the moment, for the laws to be obeyed. On the 
truths to be believed--including the minimum requirement of 
the purpose of man's existence, of what was in the mind of 
God when He made man--Christ is equally revealing and 
equally fundamental. The purpose of man's existence is to 
come to God. This includes a multitude of things, but 
principally, because man is an intelligent being, it 
involves some revelation of the nature of God: the more man 
knows of his goal, the more likely he is to make for it 
effectively. Thus He revealed to man that in the divine 
nature are three persons--God the Father, God the Son, God 
the Holy Ghost: that He Himself was the Second Person, God 
the Son. Of this supreme mystery of the Trinity and of 
mystery in general something will be said in Chapter VIII. 
Here we must consider not the revelation of God that our 
Lord gave by teaching, but the revelation of God that Our 
Lord gave simply by being.

Mankind has never been without means of acquiring some 
knowledge of God: in the Universe we have God's work before 
our eyes and by examining any work we can learn something of 
the workman. But, in practical fact, not much. We can learn 
more about a boilermaker by five minutes' face-to-face 
conversation with him than by five years' examination of the 
boiler he has made. Similarly, though we learn many things 
about God from contemplating the Universe He has made, there 
is something a little remote and shadowy about such 
knowledge. And this for the further reason that we can know 
nothing of what is involved in making a universe. But if we 
could see God--not making a universe--but obeying His 
mother, feeling hunger, paying taxes, receiving insult: then 
instantly we should be on our own ground. For all these 
things we have done ourselves. Now because Christ was God, 
all these things are there for men to see. God did obey His 
mother, suffer hunger, pay taxes, receive insult. Christ, 
then, in a sense, is God translating Himself into our 
nature. And the difference between God acting in His own 
nature and God acting in ours is as great as the difference 
between a man talking in his own language and the same man 
talking in ours. For in the first case such a man can convey 
some things to us--but rather by signs than speech--and we 
catch what he has to say haltingly and uncertainly: in the 
second case he really speaks to us and we know what he wants 
to communicate.

Thus the fact that Christ is God takes on a new 
significance. As we first used it, it was as a fact about 
Christ: now we see it as an even more revealing fact about 
God. Christ--acting in our nature, which He had made His--we 
can study and make our own: to realize that the knowledge 
thus acquired of Christ is true of God is altogether 
revolutionary. For only by learning that Christ is Love have 
men learnt that God is love: and that is almost the greatest 
gift of Christianity to the world.

Our Lord's life upon earth seems to have been especially 
devised with the purpose of bringing man into the closest 
possible intimacy with God. The general outline of His life 
is sufficiently well known. He was born of a virgin, the 
wife of a carpenter of Nazareth, during the reign of the 
Roman Emperor, Augustus. Then, with the exception of one 
strange incident when he was aged twelve, there is silence 
till he reached the age of thirty. Then came three years of 
teaching and the working of miracles. The leaders of the 
Jewish people turned against Him and more or less forced the 
Roman Governor to have Him executed. He was nailed to a 
cross and after three hours He died. On the third day He 
rose again from the dead, and after forty days He ascended 
into the heavens and vanished from the eyes of men. Within 
this framework there are two rich streams of human contact, 
a greater and a less. The greater, naturally enough, was 
through His mother. From her He had drawn His human body: if 
man may call Him brother, it is solely through her. She 
lived with Him throughout the years before His public life 
began: to please her He worked a miracle at Cana and began 
His public ministry sooner than He had meant. When He died, 
He committed her to the care of John, the follower that He 
loved best: and this apostle, who became as a son to her, 
later wrote a gospel, in which from the beginning men have 
found a deeper insight into Our Lord than in any other. It 
would have been strange had it been otherwise--if any man 
could have lived in such intimacy with the mother of Christ 
and had no richness to show for it.

The second stream was through His apostles--the men He 
gathered round Him, and prepared with especial care as the 
instruments for the spread of His kingdom among men. It is 
important to grasp here the mode of Christ's revelation of 
His own Godhead. Obviously had He begun with the statement 
that He was God, the road would have been closed. Some would 
have disbelieved Him: those who believed would have been far 
too overcome with terror at the majesty of God and their own 
sinfulness to make any progress in human intimacy with Him. 
What actually happened was that these men came to know Him 
as men can only know one in whose company they constantly 
are, in every variety of circumstance. Gradually--or rather 
with sudden bursts forward followed by fallings away--they 
came to the feeling that He must be God and ultimately to 
the full knowledge that He was. But before that time they 
had come to know Him: to know Him as a friend and not only 
as a master: from men who had companioned with Christ for 
three years, even the discovery that He was God could not 
take away the certainty that He was love: so that God, too, 
must be love. The fruit of our Lady's thirty years with 
Christ and the apostles' three years with Him, enshrined in 
part in the gospels, is the very essence of the Christian 
tradition, woven into the very fabric of the Christian mind.

If we compare the attitude to God of the most pious pagans 
with that of the Christian the gulf is enormous. In the 
Christian attitude there is a warm personal devotion not to 
be found elsewhere. For other men have seen the Works of 
God, but Christians have seen God.

These two truths, God is love and Law is love, are the two 
specifically Christian truths, unknown outside the Christian 
revelation. It is difficult to say which idea would have 
come upon the world with a greater shock. For outside 
Christianity, God has seemed to be a master or even a 
tyrant, but never love: and as a consequence law has seemed 
to be force, or even cruelty, but never love. And even 
inside Christianity it is hard to hold, continuous and never 
dimmed, the idea of God and law as love: for there come 
moments when another face seems to be presented to us; 
feeling or no feeling, we know. And we know because Christ 
was God.

Here then in outline is God's answer to man's need. The 
human race needed first to be reunited to God (that Heaven 
might once more be open to it), and second it needed the 
Life and the Truth by which it might attain Heaven once 
salvation became a possibility. Christ our Lord--God-made-
man-made the act of reparation that reunited the human race 
with God and so made Heaven a possibility, brought back for 
man the rich profusion of the Supernatural Life, and 
revealed to man not only the necessary truths of purpose and 
law but a great store of truth besides. The next question is 
how man was to obtain what Christ had brought.



ENDNOTES

1. Something will be said of the doctrine of the Trinity in 
Chapter VIII.



VI. THE MYSTICAL BODY OF CHRIST

So far we have seen that for the intelligent living of life, 
men need to know the purpose of their being and the laws by 
which they should govern their lives: and it has been 
established that man is totally incapable of finding these 
out for himself and can know them only if God reveals them. 
Further, we have seen that for the achievement of his 
purpose-namely, to live the life of Heaven--the natural life 
of man is not sufficient: that men need certain further 
powers-in the soul, that these flow from the Supernatural 
Life, that men must acquire this Supernatural Life here upon 
earth; and again that they cannot acquire it for themselves, 
but can have it only if God gives it.

These three things--truth, law, life--we have seen, would 
have been necessary in any condition of the human race. But 
the first man--Adam--complicated the position by breaking 
the friendship of the human race with God and so closing 
heaven to the race. Heaven then had to be made once more a 
possibility, after which the three original requirements 
would still be in force. Christ came to offer Himself as 
sacrifice to God in atonement for the sin of the race, and 
so opened Heaven once more to man; and He brought the gifts 
man needed of truth, law and life. On the question how men 
were to obtain these gifts from Him the last chapter closed.

Now to this question there is a very simple and satisfying 
answer. While He was upon this earth, Christ gathered a 
small band of followers, the disciples. Of these He selected 
twelve--the Apostles, of whom one, Peter, was singled out 
from the others--took them about with Him, taught them, and 
when He was about to leave the earth gave them a commission 
to teach the truths and the laws He wished men to know: to 
administer the sacraments by which His life might flow to 
the souls of men. Thus, when He left the world, He left His 
followers as a body among whom were officials, with Peter at 
their head, who could transmit the truth, law, life men 
needed: by joining this body, then, men could receive from 
its officials what all men need. Christ extended their 
commission to all nations: that it might survive the ages, 
He extended it to the end of the world: that the teaching 
and the life might never fail, He promised to be with them 
in the work He had given them to do. Thus, then, you have 
His arrangement. His followers, still united with the 
successor of Peter, the visible point of unity, were to be 
one body till the end of time: and in that body they should 
receive teaching which is infallible, because Christ is with 
it, and sacraments which are channels of true life, because 
Christ is with them.

The Church, thus understood, is a great thing: a thing 
immeasurably beyond man's deserts, and fulfilling the three 
primary needs. But that is not all. He who sees only that is 
missing the depth of it.

For observe that, as stated, it leaves two questions 
unsettled. The first is this: the work of God among men is a 
close-knit, deeply-intertwined thing without loose ends. Why 
then should men share in the benefits of Christ's atonement? 
He offered a redeeming sacrifice--but where do men come in? 
How can they share in His act?

And the second is this: Christ said: "I am the Way, and 
Truth and the Life." The description of the Church set out 
above would be perfect if He had said have: but He said am. 
What has become of that mysterious word?


"I AM THE LIFE"

Let us consider the second question first: Christ is the 
life, the life that must live in us if we are to be capable 
of Heaven. Christ then must live in us. How? How can one 
being live in another? Here we must follow very closely. We 
dare not abandon the phrase with a vague feeling that its 
general meaning is obvious and edifying, but that it will 
not bear too close inspection. For He comes back to this 
idea of His living in men again and again, literally scores 
of times. Like every word of Christ, this one demands the 
closest scrutiny. No words were ever weighed as His were, 
and if by chance we should forget that, St. Paul shocks us 
back to attention: "I live, yet now not I, but Christ liveth 
in me."

At the same time Our Lord constantly speaks of our living in 
Him. There is then a twofold in. He must live in us. We must 
live in Him.

In our own natures we find the clue to the answer. Our 
bodies are composed of countless cells, living cells. The 
cells, we say, are living in the body. It would be truer to 
the order of real values to say that the body is living in 
the cells. That is the right order of thought. The cells 
live not with their own life, but with the life of the body. 
There is one life of the whole man and by it the cells of 
his body live. Somehow then we must be in Christ as the 
cells are in our body: then Christ will live in us as we 
live in our bodily cells. Here again thought might falter: 
but St. Paul works it out very clearly. Christ, living on 
this earth, had a human body, in which He worked among men. 
He taught with His lips, healed with His hands, converted 
sinners with the look of His eyes, gave Supernatural Life 
with His breath, made atonement with the suffering of His 
body. And all this, done through His body, was done by 
Himself, God. He has left the earth: He is eternally in 
Heaven at the right-hand of the Father: but He still works 
among men in His body, no longer in His natural body, the 
body that was brought into being in the womb of Mary by the 
power of the Holy Ghost, but in His mystical body, the 
Church, the body that was brought into being in the Upper 
Room after His ascension by the power of the Holy Ghost. The 
Church, then, is His body, linked to Him really, 
organically, inseparably, as a body to its head: His life 
flows through the Church as my life flows through my body. 
My body has cells: and so has His. And as I live in the 
individual cells of my body, so He lives in the individual 
cells of His body. Membership of His Church then means more 
than joining up with a useful organization from which many 
spiritual benefits may be derived. His Church is--
mysteriously but really--His body. Joining it means being 
built into His body--that is to say incorporated with Him. 
Once we are thus incorporated with Him, we are cells in His 
body, He can live in us.

That is the Church--the living body of Christ. Because of 
this, Christ could say to Saul when he was persecuting the 
Church--"Why persecutest thou Me?" So, Christ's own words: 
"I am with you all days even to the end of the world," have 
a more immense depth of meaning than we at first knew. So we 
see the meaning of that strange word am--"I am the Way, the 
Truth and the Life." To be in the way we must be in Him: to 
possess the truth we must possess Him: to have the life in 
us, He must live in us.


REDEEMED HUMANITY

To this idea of the Church we have come, following up the 
second of the two questions left unsolved: it will now be 
seen that we have found the answer to the first as well--how 
can Christ's atonement be shared in by us? It is easy enough 
to see how we are involved in Adam's loss: for Adam is the 
representative man, the ancestor of all men. In him, by 
nature all men were incorporated. But men may be 
incorporated in Christ too, not by nature but by super-
nature, not by birth but by baptism, the first of the 
sacraments (treated more fully in Chapter XI). That is the 
immense importance of baptism,[1] repeated again and again by 
St. Paul: "Being baptized in Christ we have put on Christ." 
Incorporated with Adam by birth, which makes us men, we 
share in his loss: incorporated with Christ by baptism, 
which makes us Christians, we share in His act of 
redemption. Both Adam and Christ are representative men: 
Adam because he is the first man, Christ because He is the 
perfect man. Adam was the head of the human race: Christ is 
the head of redeemed humanity. We come from Adam: we come to 
Christ.

In this view of the Church we see how all our needs are met. 
Incorporated, built into the mystical body of Christ, we 
share in the benefits of His atonement, we are reconciled 
with God, and to us, as members of redeemed humanity, Heaven 
is once more open. From that Church, which is thus united 
with Christ, we receive Christ's teaching--so that we may 
know the truths bearing on the meaning and purpose of our 
lives, and the laws by which we may live rightly. In that 
Church we are so united to Christ that the Supernatural Life 
pours into our souls. The whole of man's needs are thus met, 
those needs which have been kept constantly in mind from the 
beginning of this book.

But there is a wider horizon yet. This mystical body of 
Christ is the Church. But the Church is not only a thing of 
this world. It contains not only its members still in this 
life, but also all who have died with the Supernatural Life 
in their souls--whether having attained their goal they are 
in heaven, or in final preparation for Heaven they are in 
Purgatory.

The mystical body is a growing body. All who die with the 
Supernatural Life are in it for ever: each new member is a 
new cell. There will come a point, St. Paul tells us, when 
the mystical body will have grown to its perfect stature, in 
some such way as a natural body reaches its fullest 
development. When that time comes, the human race will have 
achieved its purpose and the world will come to an end. For 
there is a purpose for the whole race as well as for the 
individual man, and the end of the world will be not simply 
a decision by God that the world has gone on long enough, 
but will definitely mean that the race has achieved its 
purpose.

But the end of the world is not yet. And meanwhile the 
Church is in the world, acting upon its members, acting upon 
the world at large. Not all its members here below are fully 
receptive of the life of Christ: some, as we shall see in a 
moment, while remaining members, have totally shut off from 
their souls the stream of Christ's life. Thus the Church, 
the actual visible Church here below, presents itself under 
a double aspect. In so far as it is Christ Himself living in 
men--for the teaching of truth, for the promulgation of the 
moral law, for the life-giving work of the sacraments--it is 
perfect. In so far as it is considered in its human members 
(even its officials) vivified in their varying degrees or 
not vivified at all by the life of the Body, it is always 
short of perfection, sometimes very far short. But perfect 
it is one day to be.


THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

Meanwhile see how the map of life grows in the light of this 
fact of the Church. We have to live our lives not as 
isolated units, but as members of a living thing, united 
organically with Christ and with all men, living and dead, 
who are in the love of God. This is the full force of the 
Communion of Saints--the oneness of all men in Christ.

Because we are members of Christ's Body we are one with Him: 
and also we are one with one another. In a body, one member 
can help another: if the foot be hurt the hand can tend it. 
So in the mystical body: one man can help another, by prayer 
and teaching and sacrifice. Here upon earth our prayers for 
one another are thus fruitful: we can pray for the souls in 
Purgatory: the souls in Heaven can pray for us. It has to 
some been a difficulty that death should be no barrier to 
this stream of prayer. That one living Christian should pray 
for another, or ask another to pray for him, has always 
seemed obviously right. But within the Body of Christ, death 
makes no difference. The soul of one who has left this world 
is not less a member of the same body as we, but is living 
more intensely with the life of Christ which we also share. 
If we should have asked him to pray for us during his life, 
we do so now more than ever. One striking characteristic of 
the Catholic Church is that real friendships do exist 
between her children still upon earth and one or other of 
the saints in heaven. Sin is a barrier between souls: death 
is not. There is this constant flow of prayer throughout the 
whole body: for we are not members simply of one society, we 
are members of one thing--a living thing.


LIFE IN THE BODY

It is necessary now to see what all this comes to in 
practical effect upon us. We are cells in the body of 
Christ, so that He lives in us and we have one life in 
common with all men, in this world and the next, who are in 
the love of God. But observe that all this refers to the 
Supernatural Life--the life by which man is to be able to 
live the life of heaven. Supernaturally we, the cells, live 
with the life of Christ. But our natural life is not 
destroyed: and naturally we live with our own lives. Now it 
is part of our nature that we have free will, and part of 
our natural life to exercise it. We can do so in one of 
three ways: we can yield our wills wholly to God: or we can 
yield them to God, but not wholly: or we can reject God. And 
according to the use we thus make will be our state in the 
mystical body. If we yield ourselves wholly to the 
Supernatural Life, the life of the mystical body, then we 
are living supernaturally at the fullest intensity. If our 
wills are not wholly yielded to God, then we hinder the flow 
of the Supernatural Life in us and though we are living 
supernaturally, though we are still sharing the life of the 
body so that Christ really lives in us, yet that life is not 
present in its fullest intensity.

And if, being once incorporated--that is, built into the 
body of Christ--our wills turn against God and reject Him 
for self--then we shut off the stream of life altogether and 
though we remain in the body we are dead cells[2]--retaining 
our natural life, which is of no avail for salvation--but 
without the Supernatural Life. While we are still in this 
world, Supernatural Life may be set flowing again, as we 
shall see. But if at the moment of our earthly death we are 
thus dead cells in the body, we are cut out from the body 
and eternally lost.

Sufficient has been said to show how our position in the 
Church lays open to us life and the knowledge of truth and 
law. It remains now to examine the truth, the law and the 
life in detail. Two chapters will be devoted to each of 
these.



ENDNOTES

1. This book is concerned with God's plan for mankind in
what may be called its mormal working. There is no
discussion here of the position of those who are not
baptized or of baptized non-Catholics.

2. For a more detailed discussion of the state of those who
have lost the Supernatural Life, see Chapter XXII. The
Supernatural Life.




VII. TRUTH: (A) THE TEACHING CHURCH

WE have seen that man, by membership of Christ's Church, 
receives the three things necessary--truth, law, life. The 
next step is to examine each of these three in more detail. 
This chapter and the next will be concerned with Truth.

Christ gave to His Church, in the person of its first 
officials, the apostles, a mass of truth concerning God and 
man: concerning the nature of God, His threefold 
personality, His attributes, His purpose in making man, the 
means by which His purpose was to be achieved. This 
teaching, given by Christ to the apostles, was by them 
passed on to others, who in their turn passed it on. Some of 
it was, by the inspiration of God, written down. The part 
written down, what we now call the New Testament, was small 
in relation to the whole mass of teaching, but of priceless 
value.


THE SCRIPTURES

In thus inspiring men to write God was continuing in the 
Church what He had begun with His chosen people. This fact 
of Inspiration marks off certain books from all other 
writings in the world. It involves a special relation of God 
to the human author and to the thing written, not to be 
found elsewhere. God so acted upon the mind and will of the 
author that what was written was what God wanted written. 
The inspired writing of the Jews--collected together in the 
Old Testament--were in sum a record of the Creation and Fall 
of Man, God's dealing with fallen humanity and the 
preparation for the coming of a Saviour. The New Testament 
shows the Saviour actually in the world, doing the work he 
came to do, and arranging for its continuation to the end of 
time. It falls roughly into three divisions: (1) The Four 
Gospels (already touched upon in Chapter V) are records of 
Christ's life upon earth; (2) The Acts of the Apostles and a 
handful of letters--written mainly by St. Paul--show the 
Church facing its first disciplinary and doctrinal problems; 
(3) The Apocalypse is a series of visions concerned mainly 
with the universal conflict of good and evil and its 
ultimate issue.


DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE

The Church then, by the time the last apostle died, had all 
the mass of truth the apostles had taught, the whole of it 
by word of mouth, a part of it in writing. She might have 
simply gone on, through the nineteen centuries since, 
repeating what had been taught, reading what had been 
written. In this case she would have been a preserver of 
truth--but scarcely a teacher. She would have been a piece 
of human machinery, but not a living thing, not the Mystical 
Body of Christ. In fact, she not only repeated what the 
apostles had been taught: she thought about it, meditated on 
it, prayed by it, lived it. And, doing all this, the Church 
came to see further and further depths of truth in it. And, 
seeing these, she taught these too. Everything was contained 
in what Christ had given the apostles to give the Church: 
but though everything was there, it was not all seen 
explicitly--not all at once. A rough comparison may make the 
position clear: a man brought into a dark room begins by 
distinguishing little: then he sees certain patches of 
shadow blacker than the rest: bit by bit he sees these as a 
table and chairs: then, as his eyes grow accustomed to the 
obscurity, he sees things smaller still--pictures, books, 
ash trays--and so on to the smallest detail. Nothing has 
been added to the contents of the room: but there has been 
an immense growth in his knowledge of the contents. So with 
the Church. She has, generation by generation, seen deeper 
and deeper. This development in the Church's understanding 
of what has been committed to her is not like anything else 
in the world. Science, for instance, progresses, but its 
progress consists to a large extent in discovering and 
discarding its own errors. The teaching of the Church 
develops by seeing further truths. At every stage the Church 
adds something: but not at the cost of discarding anything. 
At every stage all she teaches is true: at no stage does she 
teach all that is contained in the Truth.

This development--which we find in theology and nowhere 
else--combines two things: the work of men's minds, the 
over-ruling protection of God. In theology, as in science, 
progress comes by the minds of men working on what they have 
been taught: but left to themselves, men may simply make 
further mistakes. In science they do so. In the teaching of 
the Church they do not: and the reason is that God 
intervenes, to prevent the teaching of error by His Church. 
God's actions--whether revelation or sacrament or miracle--
are never labour-saving devices: God does not do them to 
save men the trouble of doing what they can very well do for 
themselves. In revelation, for instance, God teaches men 
what they could not (at any rate could not with absolute 
sureness) find out for themselves: but having given them 
that, He leaves it to them to meditate upon it and arrive at 
a clearer understanding of it. He does not do their thinking 
for them.


THE TEACHING CHURCH

But if we are to say that in the teaching of the Church 
there are no mistakes, it is necessary to look a little more 
closely at what we mean by the phrase "the Teaching Church." 
The first teachers in the Church were the apostles: their 
successors are the bishops. The bishops are the teaching 
body of the Church. Therefore, since God will not have His 
Church taught error as to His doctrine, He will not allow 
the bishops to teach error. This or that bishop or group of 
bishops may give wrong teaching in theology. But what is 
taught by the bishops as a body cannot be wrong. On some 
given subject it might be difficult to know what the bishops 
as a body do teach: in that case they might be gathered 
together in a General Council where they could state their 
teaching and so place it beyond doubt. But however we come 
by the knowledge, once we do know what the bishops as a body 
teach, we know the certain truth, for their teaching is 
guaranteed by God. And that is the ordinary way in which the 
Catholic does learn God's truth--from the teachers appointed 
by his bishop. But there is another way--an extraordinary 
way. The bishops as a body are not allowed by God to teach 
what is wrong on matters of faith or morals revealed by Him: 
this is what we mean when we say they are infallible. But 
one of them, the Head, Christ's representative on Earth, the 
Bishop of Rome, whom we call the Pope, is infallible,[1] 
independently of the other bishops. And in case of doubt as 
to what bishops teach, a definition by the Pope himself is 
sufficient to inform us of the truth.

But if the body of bishops, with the Pope at their head, are 
the sole infallible teachers of doctrine, they are not the 
only people in the Church who are studying doctrine. Every 
Catholic does it to some extent: theologians give their 
lives to it. Throughout the ages there has never ceased to 
be a stream of solid thinking on theology. Now this thinking 
is the thinking of men: the result of their thinking may be 
the emergence of some truth not previously so clearly seen; 
but likewise the result of their thinking may be error. How 
shall men know which it is? It is for the bishops to decide. 
If it is true, then they adopt it and teach it. If it is 
false, God does not allow them to adopt it and teach it. An 
erroneous view might become current, even widely current. 
Sooner or later the teaching authority acts and the 
erroneous view is declared to be erroneous. A theologian who 
has fallen into error may persist in his error-become a 
heretic. The very task of refuting him leads to a closer 
examination and thus to a better understanding of the 
doctrine at issue.

But the decision of the bishops as a body--or of the Bishop 
of Rome as head--is final. And that, as we have seen, is 
watched by God: He does not allow them to teach His Church 
what is wrong. He does not add new teaching or fill their 
minds with new doctrine: for that they must use their minds 
in the ordinary way of man. But he prevents falsehood from 
being taught by them.

To put this matter in a nutshell. The ordinary man has three 
courses open to him--he may say what is right, he may say 
what is wrong, or he may be silent. The infallible man has 
only two. He is prevented by God from saying what is wrong. 
He may therefore say what is right, or he may be silent. As 
to which of these alternatives he shall pursue in a 
particular case, what is to decide? As between teaching what 
is right and remaining silent, his infallibility will not 
help. It prevents him from teaching what is wrong. It can do 
no more for him. What, then, is to decide whether he shall 
teach right or remain silent? He can say what is right only 
if he knows what is right--if, that is, he has made the 
fullest possible use of all the means of acquiring 
knowledge. If he does not know the right answer, he must 
remain silent: and this might very well happen. A Pope does 
not necessarily by some miracle know the whole of Catholic 
doctrine, the answer to every doctrinal question that could 
be raised. The Church, of course, is over-ruled by the 
providence of God, and if some teaching were at a given 
moment essential for the Church's well-being, God would see 
that we had it. But I am concerned here with the human 
machinery, so to speak, of infallibility. And it remains 
true that what he does not know he cannot teach. But in no 
case can he teach what is wrong: for God will not let him, 
lest we, the members of the Church, be led into error.

One further thing remains to be said. We believe what the 
Church teaches because the Church is the Mystical Body of 
Christ, because, therefore, her teaching is the voice of 
Christ Himself. Among the mass of the things she teaches and 
the moral laws she propounds, some are, as it were, easy for 
the human mind, some difficult. For some we seem to see a 
score of reasons, for some we see no reason at all, some 
actually might seem to us against reason. But all alike we 
accept on the one secure ground-that the Church teaches 
them. We do not accept the easy ones because we can see why, 
and the others only by an act of Faith. We accept the easy 
ones--because the Church teaches them; and we accept the 
difficult ones--because the Church teaches them. When a 
doctrine or a moral law is presented to us we may ask what 
are the reasons for it, but only that we may the better 
comprehend it, not that we may decide whether or not to obey 
it. For that we only ask does the Church teach it. For it is 
thus that Christ would have us know the Truths by which our 
lives are to be lived.



ENDNOTES

1. This book is concerned with Catholic doctrine from a 
special point of view, the view of a map-maker. 
Infallibility, therefore, is treated only as it bears upon 
the Catholic's need to learn the truth. It may be useful to 
consider it for a moment in its effect upon the man who has 
it. It has no necessary effect at all. His infallibility 
exists, not for his own sake, but for ours. It is of no more 
benefit to him than it is to us. It does not make virtue 
easier for him or sin less attractive. It does not, 
therefore, make the salvation of his soul any easier. It is 
simply a way in which God uses him for the preservation of 
truth. And as it does not affect his character, so it does 
not arise from it. If by chance a bad man is Pope, it is 
just as necessary for us that he should be prevented from 
teaching error and just as easy for God to prevent him!



VIII. TRUTH: (B) THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY

THUS then we are in a position to learn from the Church the 
truths Christ entrusted to her, and these truths cover not 
only the bare minimum of necessary things--purpose and law--
but also much besides for the further enrichment of man's 
mind and man's life. All that is set forth in these articles 
is simply the general outline of it. It contains the great 
mysteries of the Trinity, the Creation, Grace, the 
Redemption, the Mystical Body, the Sacraments, Hell and 
Heaven. Some of these have already been looked at, at least 
in part: the others will be looked at in later chapters. 
Here I wish to speak only of mystery in general and of the 
greatest of all mysteries, the Trinity.


MYSTERY

First of mystery. As used by theologians the word does not 
mean a truth of which we cannot know anything: it means a 
truth of which we cannot know everything. Mystery there must 
be once we touch the nature of God. He is the Infinite, the 
Immeasurable, the Limitless. We are finite, measured, 
limited on all sides. It is impossible that we should 
totally contain God in our minds so as totally to comprehend 
Him. But by His loving kindness we are endowed with a nature 
that can know something of Him-some little by its own 
powers, vastly more by what He tells us of Himself in the 
mysteries He has revealed.

But a mystery is not merely a truth about God which we 
cannot discover for ourselves and can know only if God 
reveals it. If it were only that, the subject would present 
no difficulties. There is the further fact already 
suggested: that, even when God has revealed it to us, it 
remains a truth about an infinite being and is therefore not 
fully comprehensible by us. And the trouble is that it first 
presents itself to the mind as an apparent contradiction in 
terms. Thus the mystery of the Trinity appears as a 
statement that there are three Persons, each of them God, 
yet not three Gods. Transubstantiation appears as a 
statement that what, by every test known to man, is bread is 
yet the Body of Christ. And so with the others. Now 
contradiction is the enemy of thought. If any article of 
belief presented for the mind's acceptance appears to 
contain a contradiction within itself, then the mind cannot 
be at ease with it. So that a mystery of religion presents 
itself first to the mind rather as a burden than as a light.

Now in some cases the sense of contradiction arises from a 
sheer misunderstanding of the doctrine and can be removed 
instantly by a correct statement. But in others it arises 
from a defect in the mind-the defect of superficiality.

Two statements appear to be at variance. The mind 
scrutinizes them more closely and still cannot see how they 
are to be reconciled. Now the fact that the mind cannot 
reconcile the two statements may originate either in the 
statements or in the mind: either the statements may be in 
fact irreconcilable, or the reconciliation may be at a depth 
to which the mind cannot pierce. This double possibility 
will always be obvious to a mind which has realized that the 
surface of a thing is not the whole of it.

For the mind to proceed from the affirmation that it cannot 
reconcile two statements to the affirmation that they are in 
contradiction is legitimate only on one condition: that both 
are fully understood. If two statements are fully 
comprehended and yet cannot be reconciled, then there is 
real contradiction and one of them must be false. But in 
these mysteries of religion, it soon becomes clear that the 
truths concerned plunge rapidly into depths where the mind 
cannot follow them. It still cannot see how they are to be 
reconciled: but realizing how immeasurably more there is in 
them than it can comprehend, will not assume that one of 
them must be false.

The result is that though it may still find them 
irreconcilable, this ceases to be a burden to it. The sense 
of contradiction, the one burden the mind finds intolerable, 
has vanished. The discovery of its own limitation does not 
thus trouble it. And the discovery that there are depths 
beyond depths of truth is the strongest possible stimulus to 
the mind.

For to call a doctrine a mystery is not to warn men's minds 
off it, as though it were something on which thought cannot 
profitably be employed. It is not to be conceived as a blank 
wall barring further progress: it is to be thought of rather 
as an endless gallery, into which we can advance ever 
deeper, to the great enrichment of our minds, but to the end 
of which we shall never come. Or better still think of it as 
an inexhaustible well of truth--a well from which for all 
eternity we can drink our fill yet which in all eternity we 
shall never drink to the last drop--so that we shall never 
know thirst. This infiniteness of truth is the most splendid 
assurance we can have of eternal happiness: for it means 
that the mind can for ever progress, that it will for ever 
be enriched by new draughts of truth, yet that it will never 
reach the end of truth. This inexhaustibility of truth is 
our guarantee against stagnation of the mind: it guarantees 
to our minds the possibility of progress through all 
eternity.

Mystery then is not the prohibition of thinking, but 
actually an invitation to think. The mysteries revealed by 
God are revealed as food for the mind, not as dangerous 
things that should be left alone. Every mystery contains a 
central nucleus of truth that is comprehended, surrounded on 
all sides by things that we do not comprehend. Think of it 
as a globe of light surrounded by darkness. The man who 
rejects mystery is rejecting the central globe of light and 
accepting the impenetrable darkness. Whereas for the man who 
accepts it, the light grows and expands, sending longer and 
longer rays into the darkness around.


THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

Thus the doctrine of the Trinity, at first seen only as a 
sheer challenge to Faith grows steadily more luminous to the 
mind which accepts it and comes humbly to the study of what 
the Church has seen in it. This truth that the Godhead is 
absolutely one essence, one single concrete Something: yet 
that there are three Persons owning the one Nature--the one 
self-same identical Nature: this truth not only grows more 
luminous as the ideas of Person and Nature are studied, as 
the relation of Father and Son and the Spirit proceeding 
from both is meditated on; but throws a flood of light on 
the whole of our understanding of life.

The doctrine that in the unity of the Godhead there are 
three Persons truly distinct is the Supreme mystery revealed 
by Christ. Beyond it is no further mystery, for it deals 
with the innermost life of God. In a sense, man need never 
have been taught it apart from the Incarnation: for it is 
God in His unity who acts in relation to created beings, the 
threefold Personality being a fact of His own inner life, of 
His own internal activity, of that activity which remains 
within His own nature and does not directly affect the 
beings He has created. But it is a property of love that it 
wants not only to know but also to be known by the person 
loved. God loving us, wants us to know Him in His deepest 
and most secret life, and so gives us here upon earth a 
glimpse of that truth which it is man's proper destiny to 
spend eternity in contemplating. And, apart from that desire 
of God's to be known by man, the distinction of Persons has 
in fact a direct bearing on man's life since it was the 
Second Person, and not God in His threefold Personality, who 
became man for our salvation.

It is the supreme mystery in a double sense: it deals with 
the highest truth: and it is most inaccessible to the 
created mind. Yet certain elements of it can be grasped by 
us.

In the first place it states that in the one Divine nature 
there are three Persons. The distinction between nature and 
person has already been discussed in Chapter V, and the 
reader might very well return to it before proceeding here. 
Summarizing what is there said: Nature and Person are both 
principles of action but in different senses--the Person 
being that which acts, the Nature being that by which he 
acts. In man, nature and person coalesce in one concrete 
living being: but the attempt to analyse these two 
principles which in us are fused into one has two results: 
(1) it makes clear that we are far from reaching down into 
the depths of either principle: their deepest depths escape 
us and it would be a bold man who would dogmatise as to 
their uttermost possibilities; (2) it at least suggests to 
us that the total expression of one nature in one person 
which is in us is not the only possibility. Person may be 
seen as the "centre of attribution in a rational nature"--
that to which the actions of a rational nature are 
attributed. In an infinite nature, might there not be more 
than one such centre of attribution? Is the idea of one 
single mind and one single will three times focused totally 
self-contradictory?

No one dare affirm that there is any such contradiction. The 
mind of man may say, "I cannot see the possibility": it dare 
not say, "I see the contradiction." To the mind thus 
faltering comes the revelation of God that it is so: and 
contained within the revelation are certain truths which 
help the mind to progress in it. God has not simply revealed 
to us a handful of words.

The Three Persons--the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost--each 
possess the one Divine nature: they do not share it: they 
each possess it in its totality. It is important to grasp 
exactly what this means. Men, we say, have one nature, in 
the sense that they all are human and human nature is one 
thing. But though Brown and I are of one nature, I cannot 
think with Brown's mind nor love with Brown's will. I must 
think with my own mind and love with my own will. So that, 
although in a general sense human nature is one, in the 
concrete each man has his own nature and acts in it. With 
the Three Persons of the Trinity this is not so. There is 
but one Divine nature, one Divine mind, one Divine will. The 
three Persons each use the one mind to know with, the one 
will to love with. For there is but the one absolute Divine 
nature. Thus there are not three Gods, but one God. The 
Christian revelation cannot allow the faintest derogation 
from pure monotheism. The three Persons, then, are not 
separate. But they are distinct. The Father is God, the Son 
is God, the Holy Ghost is God. But the Father is not the 
Son, nor the Son the Holy Ghost, nor the Holy Ghost the 
Father.

What distinction can there be in three Persons who each 
possess the totality of one and the same nature? A 
distinction of Relations.[1]

What then are these relations?

For the relation between the First and Second Persons, the 
Gospels use two terms. The Second Person is the Son: and He 
is the Word. Both, by different approaches, bring us to the 
same Truth.

A son proceeds from his father by generation. One of the 
enormous difficulties in all discussion about God is that we 
are forced to use human language. Having been built up by 
the mind of man for the expression of man's experience, 
human language is necessarily inadequate for the expression 
of the Divine. Yet it is the best we have. No higher is 
within our power. And provided the inadequacy is remembered, 
there is no harm done. But, in addition to the sheer 
inadequacy of speech, for which there is no remedy, there is 
another way in which language can mislead: and this can be 
remedied by taking thought. Ideas which are in themselves 
quite simple get tied up in our minds with other ideas, 
because in human experience the two things are always found 
together. Thus the moment we think of the words "father" and 
"son" we think of the father as older than the son, as 
existing before the son. But in applying words to the 
understanding of God, we must get at the essence of the word 
and take away from it whatever ideas belong merely to the 
condition of human life.

The relation of "paternity" in the Godhead is not modelled 
upon human paternity: on the contrary human paternity is a 
shadow of the absolute fatherhood of the First Person of the 
Trinity. Thus a very slight examination of the idea of 
generation as such shows that the time-element does not 
belong to it. Generation means simply the origin of a living 
thing from another living thing, by communication of 
substance, unto similitude of nature. Wherever in the origin 
of a being these two conditions are fulfilled--communication 
of substance, similitude of nature--then there is sonship. 
The time element proceeds not from the nature of sonship, 
but from the finite nature of man: he must reach a certain 
point of development before he can generate a son. But in an 
infinite being, to whom time is not, there is no such 
requirement. God the Father eternally generates God the Son, 
who is thus co-eternal and, as a consequence of likeness in 
nature where the nature is infinite, co-equal.

The term Word--the Word of the Mind, which is Thought--
brings us to the same truth and in a way to a greater point 
of understanding. The First Person, as thinker, thinks. Now 
that which is produced by the act of thinking, what we call 
the "term" of the act, is a thought. With men, the thought 
is more or less adequate to the object they are thinking 
about. But with God, whose intelligence is infinite, the 
thought is absolutely adequate to the object. In this 
instance God's thought is of Himself, and since it is 
absolutely adequate, it is the Perfect Image of Himself, and 
so living, co-eternal, equal in all perfections: a Person. 
Thus, even more clearly than Sonship, this notion of the 
Word shows the Second Person as the perfect image of the 
First: shows also how there is no new nature produced, for 
there is no more complete oneness of nature than that which 
exists between the Thinker and the Thought.

Thus we have the First Person and the Second proceeding from 
the First by way of generation. But between Father and Son 
(or between Thinker and Thought) there is Love. Here we must 
proceed with the greatest care. In our human experience the 
term of an act of thinking is a thought, something that 
remains within the being of the thinker; and it is this 
thought and not the act of thinking which we conceive as the 
Second Person. Can we say that love likewise produces a 
"term" within the lover? St. Thomas tells us that we can. 
Though love tends towards a being outside itself, yet the 
act of loving arouses a state of warmth in the soul by which 
the being that is loved is present to the affections. This 
state is not the act of loving, but is produced in the soul 
by the act of loving, is what we have called a "term" of the 
act. And so it is in the love with which God loves Himself--
that is, with which the Father loves the Son and the Son the 
Father. The "term" of that act-of love (like the earlier 
term of the act of thinking) is subsistent, is a Person--the 
Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Ghost.

On this matter of the "procession"[2] of the Holy Ghost as 
breathed forth by God in an act of love, we cannot claim 
revelation. It is St. Augustine's magnificent contribution 
to the theology of that which we do know by revelation--that 
the Holy Ghost is the Third Person of the Trinity, co-
eternal and co-equal with the Father and the Son.

I have said that God acts upon creatures in His Unity, 
rather than in His Trinity. Yet we have His own warrant for 
associating certain of these actions with one or other of 
the Three Persons. The Father we say creates, the Son 
redeems, the Holy Ghost sanctifies. The principle of this 
"appropriation" is quite clear: the external operations of 
God can be particularly attributed to one Divine Person 
rather than another if they are especially bound up with the 
Relation of that Person within the Godhead; that is the 
Persons may be spoken of as having relations to mankind 
similar to their relations within the Godhead. Thus, because 
the Son is brought forth by an act of the Divine Intellect, 
the works of wisdom are especially attributed to Him. 
Because the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Divine Will, the 
works of Holiness are attributed to Him (since holiness is 
of the will as wisdom is of the intellect) and so also are 
God's gifts to men (since the Holy Ghost is Love, and gifts 
are the expression of love). The operation of the Holy Ghost 
within the Mystical Body will be treated later.

In thus setting down some of the elements of what God has 
revealed to us of His own innermost life, it is clear that 
the mystery remains, but it is mystery in the sense 
indicated earlier in this chapter--the reconciliation 
remains invisible to us, but it is rather the invisibility 
that comes from too much light than from sheer darkness. 
Thus it is an invitation to the mind. Already, the mind is 
freed by it from the awful weight of God conceived as 
solitary in infinity, with no adequate object of His 
infinite love. And new richness comes into our contemplation 
of human nature: thus human fatherhood is an immeasurably 
greater thing as a shadow of the Divine Fatherhood than it 
could ever be in its own right: the human soul is only the 
more like to God for its faculties of intellect and will, 
since in God Thought and Love not only exist, but. subsist 
as Persons: and the Unity of the Church takes on a new 
immensity when Christ proposes as its model the Unity of the 
Triune God.



ENDNOTES

1. These relations, as we shall see, are subsistent and not, 
as relations are in created beings. mere accidents.

2. The act by which the Holy Ghost subsists is not 
"generation"--this we know by revelation, God the Son is 
"the only begotten of the Father." The Holy Ghost, says the 
Athanasian Creed is "from the Father and the Son, neither 
made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding." What is 
the difference between the generation of the Son and the 
"spiration" or breathing forth of the Holy Ghost? Many 
answers are suggested. St. Thomas finds the difference in 
this: an act of the intellect has as its precise object the 
production of a term in the likeness of the thing conceived, 
and likeness is an essential of sonship: whereas though the 
Holy Ghost is in fact like in nature to the Father and Son, 
yet likeness is not the primary object of an act of the 
will.



IX. LAW AND SIN

CHRIST summarized the duty of man in the two phrases--"Love 
God," "Love thy neighbour as thyself." We cannot have the 
Supernatural Life if we do not love God and our neighbour. 
But love must express itself in act, and Our Lord left us 
not only the summarization, but also a great body of 
detailed rules concerning things to be done as an expression 
of the twofold love and things to be avoided as contrary to 
it. These, then, are the laws established by God for the 
guidance of man's actions. The means by which men can learn 
what the laws are, and certain practical problems to which 
they give rise, will be examined in the next two chapters.


CONSCIENCE

Now many will think that this is precisely what conscience 
is for. And it is absolutely true that a man must in all 
circumstances follow his conscience. But an investigation of 
conscience will show that by itself it is not sufficient--
that man has not within himself an infallible teacher as to 
what is right and what is wrong. Conscience is not a faculty 
or permanent part of man. It is loose speaking to say "I 
have something on my conscience." It would be more accurate 
to say "I have something on my soul." There is the same 
difference between conscience and soul as there is between a 
punch and a fist. The punch is an action of the fist, a 
thing the fist does. Similarly the conscience is an action 
of the soul, a thing the soul does. Precisely defined, 
conscience is the practical moral judgment of the intellect-
-the intellect being simply the soul itself considered in 
its activity of knowing things.

Whenever I am asked a question, the answer is a judgment of 
my intellect. Now the intellect makes many judgments, and 
conscience only differs from the others by its special 
scope. If I answer the question "Did Richard III murder the 
princes in the Tower?" my answer is a judgment of my 
intellect; but it is purely a historical judgment, not a 
moral one; therefore it is not my conscience. If the 
question is changed to "Ought Richard III to have murdered 
the princes?"--my answer is again a judgment of my 
intellect, and this time it is a moral judgment, a judgment 
on right and wrong. But it is not my conscience, for it is 
not a practical moral judgment, that is to say it is not 
concerned with what it would be right for me to do here and 
now. But if the question is again changed to "Ought I to 
murder the man next door whose manners are so maddening?"--
the answer is not only a judgment of my intellect and a 
moral one, but also a practical one.

In other words, conscience is the answer given by my soul 
when I am faced with a question "What ought I to do, what 
would it be right for me to do, in this particular matter?"

Yet, you say, is that not a sufficient guide? Unfortunately 
no. For conscience is a judgment of my intellect and 
therefore like any other such judgment it can be wrong. 
Conscience is not universally infallible. It is often firm 
and definite in its answer: but an answer may be firm and 
definite, and yet wrong. By what does the soul judge, if it 
has no teacher outside itself? By what standard does it 
decide what is right? The answer is that the law of God is 
imprinted on man's nature and by that he judges. In other 
words, God's laws for men are not something totally outside 
his nature: they correspond to something God has already 
placed in his nature. But in the course of ages, man's 
nature has grown distorted in all sorts of ways and any 
distortion in man's nature will mean a distortion in the 
thing imprinted on it. The moon, falling on a perfectly 
still lake, will give a perfect image of itself; but let the 
lake be ever so little ruffled, and the image will be broken 
up into small pieces: let the lake be really ruffled, and 
the image will be no more than broken sparkles of light 
scattered here and there. It is still from the moon that 
these sparkles come, but no one looking at them could form a 
picture of the lovely luminous globe of the moon itself. 
Thus, even where the distortion is greatest, no man's nature 
is without some trace of God's law still imprinted; but it 
is not always easy to read. If we could take the general 
consensus of the conscience of the race as a whole, it would 
probably be found to be in accord with the greater part of 
the natural moral law. But the individual conscience, though 
probably also in major accord, is apt to show startling 
variations, from country to country and from man to man.

Thus, even on matters which simply concern the right use of 
man's nature, conscience, lacking information from without, 
can give contradictory answers. But on the most important 
questions of all--those which are concerned with man's 
Supernatural Destiny--the unaided conscience gives no answer 
at all. On the question "Ought I to divorce my wife?"--
conscience, apart from God's teaching, gives different men 
different answers. But on the question "Ought I to be 
baptized?"--conscience, apart from God's teaching, gives no 
man any answer.

If, then, there is no teacher capable of giving us God's 
law, we are left with nothing but this internal judgment of 
our own, which on the most obvious questions is capable of 
being wrong and on the most important questions can only be 
silent. A man must follow his conscience, the judgment of 
his intellect as to what is right and wrong. But the very 
supremacy of conscience renders it vital that conscience 
should be instructed.

Consider man's position. There is in him no internal faculty 
that tells him with either certainty or completeness, in 
every situation that can arise, what things are right and 
what wrong. Yet without such knowledge how can he so act as 
to reach his goal? The task of achieving the end for which 
one is created is like any other task: it must be done in 
the right way. Certain actions will help the achievement, 
certain will hinder it. We can only know if we are told. God 
who made us has told us: His Church which enunciates His 
truths likewise enunciates His laws. Nor is conscience 
thereby annulled: conscience is the practical moral judgment 
of the intellect. Now the intellect which knows that the 
Church is giving God's law will naturally judge that it is 
right. The Catholic who unquestioningly accepts the moral 
law as taught by the Church is following his conscience 
unswervingly.


SIN

The Catholic therefore knows the law of right action. But 
knowledge is not enough. A man may know and yet disobey. 
Such disobedience is sin. Sin is, quite simply, breaking 
God's law. And in that lies its enormity.

The breach of God's law may be a small thing or a great. It 
may be a failing in a comparatively trifle--silly and 
weakening to the soul; or it may be a definite rejection of 
God. The first sort--venial sin--is still sin, yet it will 
not break the friendship that exists between the soul and 
God: it will not therefore damn a man's soul. The second 
sort we call mortal: having committed such a sin, to die 
without repentance means eternal damnation.[1] We shall return 
to that.

The essence of sin's gravity, as I have said, lies simply in 
its breaking of God's law. It is blank ingratitude to God; 
to whom all men owe so much--to whom Christians know that 
they owe so immeasurably more than the rest of man.

It is incredible stupidity: rebellion against God is one of 
the most ludicrous things in the world. For whether we are 
obedient or rebellious we are at every moment totally in the 
hands of God. He made us of nothing; by His almighty power 
He keeps us above the surface of our native nothingness. 
Without His concurrence, we could not act at all, we could 
not even defy Him. The sinner, as it were, stands up in the 
hand of God, sustained in being by that all-powerful hand, 
defying God, but in his very defiance using the power which 
God has lent him and which God could at any moment withdraw 
from him


LAW AND FREEDOM

This fact that the essence of sin is offence against the law 
of God sometimes--in fact most often--misleads the sinner as 
to the true nature of sin. He imagines himself in a small 
field, bounded by a fence put there to prevent him from 
breaking out of the field to sample the rich possibilities 
of life outside. Here, he says, am I: a being full of the 
possibilities of development, yet my development is checked 
at every turn by some absurd law. This view arises from a 
failure to understand the nature of God's laws. His laws are 
no mere whims, like the laws of some stupid despot. They 
are, on the contrary, the expression by God of His own 
knowledge of man's nature and destiny. He knows the kind of 
being man is, for He made him. And for the same reason He 
knows what man is made for. God's laws, then, are a precise 
statement of how this particular kind of being may avoid 
destruction and reach his particular goal. The man who makes 
an engine is not limiting your freedom when he tells you not 
to run it beyond a certain speed. He knows that if you do 
you will smash the engine. And if you should plead that your 
nature demands more speed, that you feel stifled by such 
slow running--he may very well grow impatient. He knows what 
speed is right for the engine, for he made it.

God's laws then are best thought of as "maker's 
instructions," directions for the right use of ourselves. 
His prohibitions warn us of wrong ways of using ourselves or 
our neighbours. Earlier I used the simile of a razor to 
illustrate the point that to misuse a thing was to destroy 
it. Emancipate the razor from its old humdrum task of 
removing hair from the face--defy the maker's statement that 
razors are only meant for shaving--use your razor for 
chopping wood and you will have a piece of twisted metal, 
fit only for the scrap-heap. God's law is not something 
altogether apart from us: the knowledge of it may have to 
come from outside, but the law itself is, in a special 
sense, inside us. For it is a statement of the way we are 
made. And any action against it is therefore an action 
against our own nature and is consequently destructive.

The act of running counter to God's law is sometimes 
justified on the ground of "self-expression." It certainly 
is not an expression of the self, for God, who made the 
self, has declared that such action is contrary to its 
nature. And a man who commits sin--any sin--is to that 
extent less of a man, just as a motor car, whose engine has 
been used in violation of its maker's instructions, is less 
of a motor car. To return to the argument of an earlier 
chapter--freedom results only from doing what one ought. The 
connection between law and freedom is absolute.

Yet we sin. Our will is so made that it can choose only what 
appears to us as good. But two different and contradictory 
things may both appear to us as good from different points 
of view: to abstain from meat on Friday is good because 
God's Church demands it: to eat meat on Friday is good 
because our body is very fond of meat. Between these two 
goods the will can choose. Its tendency, since the Fall, is 
to choose the more immediate, what we may call the nearer 
good--the one we like! To take a matter of more importance. 
If a married man falls in love with a woman who is not his 
wife, then two mutually exclusive courses of action will 
both seem to him, from different angles, good. To remain 
faithful to his own wife will seem good because God has 
forbidden adultery: to be faithless to her will seem good 
because his lower nature would find pleasure in the sin. 
Again the will must choose. And its tendency, against which 
it must struggle, is likely to be in the direction of the 
lower pleasure. Temptation--however tremendous--is not sin. 
It is not even venial sin. But for the will to yield to it, 
to choose the sin--even if it never proceeds to action--that 
is sin--as offence against God and a contradiction of one's 
own nature.


VOCATION

What has been said so far in this chapter concerns law as an 
expression of God's general will for all men equally. But 
there is likewise a will of God for each individual, what is 
called his vocation. Shall a man be a priest or a layman? If 
a priest, shall he be a secular priest or a member of a 
religious community? These questions are momentous. Within 
the priesthood there is almost every variety of way of 
serving God, opening for every type of character to proceed 
to its fullest development. If he is to be a layman, in 
which of the various ways of life open to him will he best 
serve God's purpose for him? To take one crucial question--
shall he marry or not? Marriage, God teaches, is a high and 
holy state: normally men and women are called to it, for it 
is the race's duty to carry itself on. But though it is the 
race's duty, it is not the duty of every individual. 
Celibacy, chosen for God's sake (not mere celibacy, be it 
noted, but a celibacy definitely dedicated to God) is a 
higher and holier state still. It is part o