we are in any degree insinuating that we have not got all we require in the absolute and definite teaching of the Church; or that we have any cause to feel troubled about any question which the Church has left as an open question, and respecting which any one of us individually may have been unable to arrive at a conclusion. All we mean is this that there are certain feelings, impressions, and imaginings which we find it hard to silence and extinguish, difficult to classify in accordance with our substantial belief, and which hang about us like a square sail on the aft mast of a ship which the unwary crew have left flapping in a dangerous gale.

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The points in question may be various as the minds that contemplate them. They may embrace a variety of subjects, and may assume different shapes and aspects, according to the external circumstances under which they present themselves, or to the colour of our own thoughts and feelings at the moment they are before us. Their field is so vast, and their possible variety so great, that it would be vain for us to attempt to give even a glance at them all. Indeed, the doing so is beand would be beyond the capacity of any one man. For who shall tell what is fermenting in the thoughts of even one of

yond our capacity,

his fellow-beings? He can merely guess blindly at the souls of others from having dwelt in the depths of his own, and knowing, as the one great fact, that all men are brothers.

We are far, therefore, from intending to take up all the possible questions not hedged in and limited and defined by dogmatic teaching, or to try and help others to come to a conclusion on each. We might as well attempt to count the sands of the sea-shore. All we are proposing to ourselves for our own consolation, and if possible, for that of our readers, is to lay hold of certain facts which will give a clue to other less certain facts, and in short-if we may be allowed to resort to a chemical term - to indicate certain solvents which will hold in solution the stones that lie in our path, and which might grow into great stumbling-blocks had we not a strong dissolving power always at our command.

It is self-evident that there is one knowledge which contains all other knowledge, and that is the knowledge of God. As all things flow from Him, therefore all things are in Him; and if we could see or know Him, we should know all the rest. That knowledge, that seeing, is the "light of glory." Its perfection is only compatible with the Beatific Vision, which vision is impossible to

mere man in his condition of viator, or pilgrim. It is the conclusion of faith, just as broad noon is the termination of darkness. But as faith is the leading up to the Beatific Vision, to the light of glory, and to the knowledge of all things, therefore in its degree is it the best substitute for sight -the dawning of a more perfect day, and the beginning of knowledge. Consequently, "faith is the evidence of things that appear not." And as it is some of the things "that appear not which are puzzling and bewildering many of us, let us lay hold of our faith and go whither it shall lead us.

We can in this life only know God mediately and obscurely, by reason and faith. But as the direct and clear intuition of God in the Beatific Vision will include the knowledge of all else, so even our present imperfect knowledge of Him comprises in a certain sense all other and lesser science, and is necessary to the highest knowledge of created things.

To do this thoroughly we will investigate the occasional divergence between our mental impressions, as we sometimes experience them, and our received belief of the Divine Nature and characteristics.

* See Appendix A.

In a burst of holy exultation S. Paul asks, "Who hath known the mind of the Lord ? "*_ not as though regretting his ignorance, but rather with the feelings of one who having suddenly come upon an evidently priceless treasure, exclaims, Who can tell what wealth now lies before us?

Yes, indeed! we know Him well while we know Him but imperfectly. There is more to know than we can guess at, but our hearts are too narrow to hold it. And yet sometimes how full to overflowing has that knowledge seemed! Have we not followed Him from the cradle to the grave, in that sweet brotherhood which He has established with each one of us? Have we not lost ourselves in far-reaching thoughts of how and where He was when His brotherhood with us was not an accomplished fact, but only an ever-enduring divine intention co-equal with His own eternal existence?

It is true the act of the eternal generation of the Son in the bosom of the Father underwent no change or pause when, by the act of the hypostatic union, the Son of God became the Son of man in the bosom of Mary. The Divinity touched upon humanity; but the humanity could in no way impinge upon the Divinity.

*Romans xi. 34.

Nevertheless a change has passed over the extrinsic relations of the Divinity with humanity; and that a change of so momentous a nature that it presents God to our appreciations in a quite new and different aspect.

There was an eternity in which the Son of God -He whom we most seem to know of the three Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity-dwelt in the bosom of the Father unconnected with His sacred humanity. There was an eternity when His name was not Jesus, when He was the Son of God only, and not the Son of man.

We are expressing what everybody knows who is a Christian-a platitude almost, and yet so full of wonder that unless we have thoroughly gone into it and sifted it, we have not ransacked half the riches of what we can and may know of the "mind of the Lord."

In truth, we are very apt to be repelled by this contemplation. There is something dreary to us in the eternity when the Brother of our race and. the Spouse of our souls was only known as the everlasting Begotten of the Father, dwelling in that inscrutable eternity to which we, as the creatures of time, seem to have no link. Our thoughts and imaginations are shackled by the conditions of our own being. Yesterday we