ancients. A union with the Divinity has ever been the principle of love; but it has been developed in different degrees. Without losing the character of uniformity, it has more profoundly penetrated human nature, since the incarnation which has established between God and man more intimate communications; as in the same way, without injury to this uniformity it will receive a boundless expansion, when the bonds which fetter it here below shall have fallen at the portals of the heavenly country. Thus the divine work is progressing to its accomplishment: all the developements which religion receive here below are but the transition from the temporal to the eternal order.

CHAPTER IV.

The idea of the Eucharist according to Catholic Doctrine.

Catholicism is the universal belief, not in an abstract, but in a real and effective presence of God with man. God is really present to our intelligence by his word, of which general tradition is but the prolonged echo through the vast space of ages. He is really present to our will by grace, of which external worship is the permanent organ. Hence, through the medium of man's free concurrence, arises a union with God, who is the ultimate object of his existence. as well as that of all beings. Going forth from God to people the universe, he recalls them into the infinite bosom of his eternity, to be all in all: such, according to the belief of antiquity, were the last words of creation.

The spirits that departed from the pale of primitive Catholicism followed two different directions. The one setting out with the idea of God, and, endeavouring to discover the secret of creation, conceived a union of each individual being with God, similar to that which exists between modification and the substance modified; thus making man one of the innumerable forms of the Divinity. The other restricting themselves to man, sought to find in him the reason of all; but as a contingent and limited being does not contain within itself the reason of any thing, not even of its own existence, these entirely lost sight of the truth, and scepticism was the result of their feeble researches. Such are the two extreme points to which the rationalism of antiquity, whether in India or Greece, conducted. With the sceptic, man was but the shadow of a being, with the pantheist, he was the supreme being. From these two doctrines emanated two corresponding orders of sentiments. Scepticism, which, in annihilating intelligence, suffers only an animal activity to exist, plunged man into a sensual life, whilst ideal pantheism absorbed even the senses themselves in the delirium of perpetual ecstacy.

Equally remote from these absurdities, primitive Catholicism sustained during four thousand years the reason and the heart of man, by faith in a union with God, which, without degrading, admonished him of his weakness, and, without inspiring an equality, fixed him in the place which eternal order had assigned him. Bereft of that guiding faith, this anxious and feeble creature, hurried along on the waves of time, would have inevitably perished on one or other of these rocks-pride or despair. It is particularly since the preaching of the Gospel that the salutary influence of this leading dogma of Catholicism, the genuine polar star of mankind, has been more clearly seen and deeply felt.

Christ is the truth personally residing among men. Cotemporary with Christ, the Church which received from his lips the eternal word, but clothed in human language, unceasingly communicates, under the same relative and limited form, the infinite Word to mortal intelligences, until passing from this region they become united to him in a more perfect world. How could this tradition of the Word have been even for a single instant suspended? Could the Church in some

day-dream have imagined that word to be eternal which was but of yesterday, or could she ever have said: I will announce what I have not learned? Is it not notorious that she has always inexorably cast from her bosom every innovator who, substituting for common tradition his own ideas, sought, instead of transmitting truth to create it? In hearing theChurch, the faithful then hears Christ himself, who speaks to them as really as he did to his disciples seated around him on the Mount of Beatitudes. For the essence of the word is not the material sound that is borne on the wind, but that internal sound which vibrates in the heart, that expression always the same, which, though repeated by a thousand voices, invariably awakens the same thought, as an image reflected by an hundred mirrors is always the same image. Catholic tradition, ever preserving inviolable the primitive sense of Scripture, is not a word which stands alone, or independently of the word of Christ; no it is the permanent vibration of his word through every point of space and time.

But Christ is not merely the creative light of all