of from sin and error. Kingdoms may many fall; terrible chastisements may be in store for

Europe; the future is dark; one hope we cannot renounce,-God will protect His Church. Though He should kill me, yet will I hope in Him" (Job xiii. 15).

66

G. PORTER, S.J.

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

CHAPTER I.

OUR IMPRESSIONS.

Ir is probable that most of us have been, at some time in our intellectual and spiritual life, conscious of a divergence between our mental impressions and our received belief respecting the nature and characteristics of the Divine Being. Outside the closed-in boundaries of our faith there has been, as it were, a margin of waste land which we seldom explore, but the undefined, uncultivated products of which flit athwart our imagination with something like an uncomfortable misgiving. We do not go far into it, because we have our certain landmarks to stand by; and while the sun of faith shines bright on these we can say to ourselves that we have nothing really to do with the sort of fog-land which surrounds our own happy

A

enclosure. Our allotment is one of peace within the true fold of the Church.

We know where we are; we know what we have got to do; and we refuse to be seriously troubled by the dubious questions which may possibly never disturb us, unless we deliberately turn to them.

To us, as Catholics, this is a safe resolve. We know the Church cannot err. We believe, and are ready, absolutely and unreservedly ready, to believe all she puts before us as claiming our belief. And this is no childish superstition. It is no unmanly laying down of our inalienable right to know good from evil; it is no wilful deafness or deliberate closing of our eyes. It is the absolutely necessary and inevitable result of the one primary foundation of all our belief- namely, that the Church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, the infallible utterance of an infallible voice, which voice is none other and no less than the voice of God, speaking through and by the divinely-instituted kingdom which constitutes the Church of God. With this once firmly fixed in our hearts and intellects, nothing can disturb us. Even supposing something to be defined by the Church for which we were unprepared-as was the case with some on the definition of the Infallibility of

the Sovereign Pontiff - still these surprises, if surprises they be, can be no otherwise than sweet and welcome. To us there cannot be a jarring note in that voice which is the voice of the Holy Ghost. The trumpet cannot give a false sound. It is our fault-either from intellectual deficiency or from spiritual negligence and lukewarmness

-if the blast of that trumpet painfully startle us from our slumbers. To all who are waking and watching the sound can only be cheering and encouraging. The good soldier is ever ready to hear it and prompt to obey. The slumberer is among those to whom our Lord says: "You know how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times ? "*

He evidently expects us to know the signs of the times. The Lord is not in the strong wind, nor is He in the earthquake or the fire. He is in the gentle air. But the wind and the earthquake and the fire are His precursors, and those who have experienced, and heard, and witnessed these warnings should be all attention for the softer sound which is the utterance of the Divine Voice in the Church.

There should be no surprise save the surprise of a great joy, the admiring astonishment of finding +3 Kings xix. II, 12.

* S. Matthew xvi. 4.

out how good our God is, and what marvellous treasures of things new and old our great mother the Church lays before us from time to time, as the Spirit of God moves over the ocean of divine love, as it were incubating the creations of the world of grace. We lie down in our certainty as the infant lies down in his mother's lap, and we rise on the wings of hope and faith as the lark rises in the morning light, without the shadow of a doubt that the lambient air will uphold the little fluttering wings with which it carries its joyous song to the gates of heaven. Underneath us are the "everlasting arms," "* and therefore we "dwell in safety and alone "-alone as regards those outside the Church who cannot understand our security, because they have never grasped the idea that, the voice of the Church being the voice of the third Person of the ever-blessed Trinity, to doubt the Church is the same as to say that God is a liar.

If we have dwelt thus at length upon our certitude, and upon the intellectual and spiritual repose it gives us, we have done so for the purpose of making it impossible for our readers to suppose that when we speak of a divergence between some of our mental impressions and our received belief,

* Deuteronomy xxxiii, 27.