ledge of himself! delight of intimate love, of which he spoke to his creature man, on the banks of Jordan, and on the top of Thabor! 1 O Father! we adore thee, but we also love thee; for, a Father should be loved by his children, and we are thy children. It is an Apostle that teaches us that all paternity proceeds from thee, not in heaven alone, but on earth too. No one is Father, no one has paternal authority, be it in a family, or in the State, or in the Church, but by thee, and in thee, and in imitation of thee. Nay more ;-thou wouldst have us not only be called, but really and truly be thy Sons, not, indeed, by generation, as is thine Only Begotten Son, but by an adoption, which makes us joint-heirs with him.1 This divine Son of thine, speaking of thee, says: I honour my Father; 5 we, also, honour thee, O sovereign Father, Father of infinite majesty! and, until eternity dawn upon us, we glorify thee now from the depths of our misery and exile, uniting our humble praise with that which is presented to thee by the Angels, and by the Blessed ones, who are of the same human family as ourselves. May thy fatherly eye protect us, may it graciously find pleasure in us thy children, whom, as we hope, thou hast foreseen, whom thou hast chosen, whom thou hast called to the faith, and who presume, with the Apostle, to call thee the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation. Glory be to thee, O SON, O Word, O Wisdom, of the Father! Thou emanatest from his divine essence. He gave thee birth before the day-star;" and he said to thee: This day have I begotten thee; and that Day, which has neither eve nor morrow, is 1 St. Matth. iii. 17; 2 St. Pet. i. 17. 2 Eph. iii. 15. 3 1 St. John, iii. 1. 4 Rom. viii. 17. 5 St. John, viii. 49. 6 2 Cor. i. 3. 7 Ps. cix. 3. 8 eternity. Thou art Son, and Only Son; and this name expresses one same nature with him who begets thee; it excludes creation, and shows thee to be consubstantial with the Father, from whom thou comest forth, perfectly like him in all things. And thou comest forth from the Father, without coming out of the divine essence, being co-eternal with thy source; for, in God, there is nothing new, nothing temporal. Thy Sonship is not a dependency; for the Father cannot be without the Son, no more than the Son can be without the Father. If it be a glory in the Father to produce the Son, it is no less a glory in the Son to be the exhaustive term to the generative power of the Father. O Son of God! thou art the Word of the Father. Uncreated Word! thou art as intimately in him, as is his thought; and his thought is his being. It is in thee that this his being expresses itself, in its whole infiniteness; it is in thee that he knows himself. Thou art the spiritual fruit produced by the divine intellect of the Father; the expression of all that he is, whether he keep thee mysteriously in his bosom,' or produce thee outside himself. What language can we make use of, in order to describe thee, and thy glories, O Son of God! The Holy Ghost has vouchsafed to come to our assistance, in the writings which he has inspired: and it is with the very expressions he has suggested, that we presume thus to address thee: Thou art the brightness of the Father's glory; thou art the figure of his substance.2 Thou art the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the image that reflects his eternal goodness. We presume, likewise, to say to thee, what we are taught by the holy Church assembled at Nicea: Thou art "God of "God; Light of Light; true God of true God." 1 St. John, i. 18. 3 And we add, with the Fathers and Doctors: "Thou "art the torch eternally lit by the eternal torch. Thy Light lessens nought of that which commu"nicates Itself to thee; neither is thy Light inferior, "in aught, to that from which it is produced." But when this ineffable fecundity which gives an eternal Son to the Father, and, to the Father and Son a third term, willed to manifest Itself outside the divine essence; and, not having again the power to produce what is equal to Itself, it deigned to call forth, from nothingness, intellectual and rational nature, as being the nearest approach to its author, and material nature, as being the least removed from nothingness, then, O Only-Begotten Son of God! the intimate production of thy Person in the Father's bosom revealed itself by Creation. It is the Father who made all things; but, it was in Wisdom, that is, in thee, that he made all. This mission of working, which thou receivedst from the Father, is a consequence of the eternal generation, whereby he produces thee from himself. Thou camest forth from thy mysterious rest; and creatures, visible and invisible, came forth, at thy bidding, out of nothing. Acting in closest union with the Father, thou pouredst out upon the worlds thou createdst somewhat of that beauty and harmony, of which thou art the image in the divine essence. And yet, thy mission was not at an end when creation was completed. Angels and Men, who were intellectual and free beings, were destined for the eternal vision and possession of God. The mere natural order could not suffice for these two classes of thy creatures; a supernatural way had to be prepared for them, whereby they might be brought to their last end. Thou, O Only-Begotten Son of God! art this Way. By thyself assuming human nature, thou unitedst thyself to thine own 1 Ps. ciii. 24 work, thou raisedst Angel and Man up to God, and, by thy Human Nature, thou showedst thyself as the supreme type of the Creation, which the Father had effected by thee. O unspeakable mystery! thou art the uncreated Word, and, at the same time, thou art the First-born of every creature;1 not, indeed, to appear, until thy time should come; and yet preceding, in the divine mind and intention, all created beings, all of which were to be created, in order that they might be thy subjects. The human race, though destined to possess thee, in its midst, as its divine intermediator, rebelled against its God by sin, and, by sin, was plunged into the abyss of death. Who could raise it up again? who could restore it to the sublime destiny it had forfeited? Thou alone, O Only-Begotten Son of the Father! It was what we never could have hoped for; but this God so loved the world, as to give his Only-Begotten Son,2 to be not only the Mediator, but the Redeemer, too, of us all. Thou, our First-born, askedst thy Father to restore thine inheritance unto thee; thou hadst to purchase back this inheritance. Then did the Father intrust thee with the mission of Saviour to our lost race. Thy Blood, shed upon the Cross, was our ransom; and, by it, we were born again to God, and restored to our lost privileges. Therefore, O Son of God! we, thy redeemed, glory in calling thee OUR LORD. 3 Having thus delivered us from death, and cleansed us from sin, thou vouchsafedst to restore us to all the grand things we had lost; for, henceforth, thou art our HEAD, and we are thy members; thou art KING, and we thy happy subjects; thou art SHEPHERD, and we the sheep of thy one fold; thou art SPOUSE, and the Church, our Mother, is thy Bride; thou art the living BREAD come down from heaven, and we are 1 Coloss. i. 15. 2 St. John, iii. 16. 3 Ps. xv. 5. thy guests. O Son of God! O Emmanuel! O Son of Man! blessed be the Father that sent thee; but blessed, also, be thou, who didst fulfil the mission he gave thee, and hast been pleased to say, that thy delight is to be with the children of men!1 Glory be to thee, O HOLY SPIRIT, who eternally emanatest from the Father and the Son in the unity of the divine substance! The eternal Act, whereby the Father knows himself, produces the Son, who is the infinite image of the Father; the Father is full of love for this brightness which eternally proceeds from himself; and the Son, contemplating the source whence he for ever comes, conceives for this source a love as great as that wherewith himself is loved. What language could describe this mutual ardour and aspiration, which is the attraction and tendency of one Person to Another in the eternally immovable Essence! Thou art this Love, O divine Spirit, that proceedest from the Father and the Son as from one same principle; thou art distinct from Both, and yet art the bond that unites them in the ineffable delights of the Godhead; thou art living Love, personal Love, proceeding from the Father by the Son, the final term which completes the divine Nature, and eternally perfects the Trinity. In the inaccessible bosom of the great God, thy Personality comes to thee both from the Father, of whom thou art the expression by a second production, and from the Son, who, receiving of the Father, gives thee of his own; for the infinite Love which unites them is of Both Persons, and not of one alone. The Father was never without the Son, and the Son never without the Father; so, likewise, the Father and Son have never been without thee, O Holy Spirit! Eternally have they loved; and thou art the infinite Love which exists between them, and to which they communicate their Godhead. Thy 3 1 Prov. viii. 31. 2 St. John, xv. 26. 3 Ibid. xvi. 14, 15. VOL. X. L |