BY grace we are indwelt by God. At first sight there seems to be a problem here. Since God is present in us, maintaining us in existence, what further indwelling can there be? What is the difference between God's presence in us by nature and His indwelling of us by grace? The primary difference is that, as to the first, we have no choice. We were not consulted before God brought us into existence, we are not consulted at any subse-quent time as to our remaining in existence. We cannot escape this existence-giving presence of God. The demons in hell cannot escape it, nor the lost souls. For them is the awful fate of having nothing of God but His presence, awful because it sustains in existence beings who for their own fulfilment need all sorts of other gifts from Him and must suffer in their absence.
In order to be, we need do nothing. But in order to be super-naturally, we must do something. God's presence, we have seen, is by no invitation of ours: but His indwelling is by invitation. There is a sense in which we may say of an earthly visitor, that no one can enter our home unless we invite him. He can enter our house without our invitation, but not our home. God's indwelling means God making Himself at home in us, and depends upon our invitation. When we are infants, the sponsor extends the invitation to Him on our behalf, when we reach the use of reason we confirm the invitation. We can withdraw it at any time, and so lose God's indwelling and be left only with His presence.
Thus we may see the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity by grace not simply as God's action upon our souls, but as the result of the soul's reaction to God's action. God is present, says St. Thomas, much as something known is present in the knower, something loved in the lover. Our invitation to God to make Himself at home in us produces a vast energizing of God in our soul, or if you will a vast development of the soul as a result of its willing response to God's energizing. Everything hangs on this, that Sanctifying Grace is a real trans-formation of the soul. Where Luther taught that the soul in grace is wearing the garment of Christ's merits, the Church teaches that the very substance of the soul is renewed, the soul is affected in its very being so that it can well be called a new creation: it has a new life in it, a life with its own vital "organs" and operations, so that it can now perform actions at the level of its new being, actions which because they are supernatural can merit a super-natural reward. Thus it is that St. Paul speaks of us as in Christ a new creature (2 Cor.v.17), the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth. Yet it remains the same soul, with the same faculties: soul and faculties are not destroyed that some new thing may take their place, but elevated to a new level of life and the operations that go with it. Grace does not destroy nature, but is built into it, and from within elevates it. The intellect has the new power of faith, the will the new powers of hope and charity. The point is so important that one must take the risk of labouring it. A rough analogy may help: the wire in an electric light bulb, when connected with the battery, is luminous; so much so that, looking at it, we seem to see only light, and no wire, and might be tempted to think that the wire was gone and that the light had taken its place. But it is the same wire, only luminous. And if the connection with the source of power be broken, we see that it is the same wire. The soul in grace is luminous, but it does not cease to be the soul.
With what is the soul luminous? With Sanctifying Grace: with the Theological Virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity; with the Moral Virtues, Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude; with the gifts of the Holy Ghost, Knowledge, Understanding, Wisdom, Counsel, Fortitude, Piety and Fear of the Lord; Meanwhile let us note the distinction between the Theological Virtues and the Moral Virtues, sometimes called the Cardinal Virtues. To understand the distinction, we must distinguish in our minds between the end of an action and its object. The end of every virtue is God. It is for God that we do it. But the object of a virtue may not be God, but some created thing. If a boy is serving on the altar at Benediction, the end of his action is the glory of God; but the object of his action is the thurible. If he concentrates so exclusively upon the end of his action that he neglects the object, he will probably spill the incense. The reason why Faith, Hope and Charity are called theological virtues is that God, or some attribute of God, is not only their end, but their object too. By Faith we believe in God; by Hope we desire to come to God; by Charity we love God. Thus, as St. Thomas says (S.T. 1-2, q.lxiv. a.4),
God Himself is the measure and rule of a theological virtue: our faith is regulated according to God's truth, charity according to His goodness, hope according to the greatness of His omnipotence and His love for us.
The Moral Virtues, on the other hand, have God for their end, but their object is the created universe. By Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude we are given the power so to handle created things, ourselves and other things, that we may attain God.
There are, of course, two ways of receiving the Supernatural Life— the easy way of the baptized infant and the harder way of the man who comes to it in adult life; but either way one can receive it only as the whole of it, theological virtues, moral virtues and gifts of the Holy Ghost. This life in us can grow, as we have seen. But just as it is received only as a whole, so it can grow only as a whole.
We
may be brought to a clearer understanding of this Super-natural Life and its
reception, if we consider for a moment those who receive it in adult life.
They cannot receive Supernatural Life unless God gives it.
By their own strength, they could not merit that God should give it, because no
natural action could merit a supernatural reward. Prior to the reception of
Sanctifying Grace they must receive that special help from God which is called
Actual Grace.
The use of the word "grace" for two things so different may easily
confuse us.
It may simplify our understanding if we think of Sanctifying Grace as
Supernatural Life, and Actual Grace as Supernatural Impulsion.
By Actual Grace God assists us, thereby making us capable of an action which
without that special assistance would be beyond our powers:
Actual Grace is a sort of thrust or impetus,
in the power of which we can act above our powers.
But if we co-operate with this impulsion from God,
let ourselves go with it,
then we shall receive Supernatural Life,
either a beginning of it if we lack it,
or an increase of it if we already have it.
What is to be noted here is that there could be no beginning of Supernatural
Life without Supernatural Impulsion.
There is no seed of Supernatural Life in our nature,
no faintest beginning of it,
it is wholly a gift.
top
The root of the Supernatural Life, when God gives it to us, is Faith. So St. Paul writes: Once justified, then, on the ground of our faith, let us enjoy peace with God through Our Lord Jesus Christ, as it was through Him that we have obtained access, by faith, to that grace in which we stand. (Rom.v.1-2.)
The Vatican Council gives us the definition: Faith is a supernatural virtue by which, under the inspiration and with the aid of God's grace (gratia Dei inspirante et adjuvante) we hold for true what God has revealed not because we have perceived its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason but on the authority of God Himself as its revealer, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
The last three sections are so clear that they hardly need comment even for the newcomer to theology. But so much is wrapped up in the first two that some expansion is needed. Faith is defined by St. Thomas (S.T. 2-2, q.iv. a.2) as an act of the intellect assenting to a divine truth owing to the movement of the will, the will in its turn being moved by the grace of God: the act of the intellect is the intellect's assent to whatever God has said because He has said it. Taking this statement to pieces, we see what happens. God gives Actual Grace, that is a supernatural impulsion, to the will; the will thus moved moves the intellect to make its act of assent. Observe that this says nothing of evidence, of argument, of what we sometimes call grounds of belief; nor of prayer, humility and such like. The whole process is attributed to God. This does not leave prayer and intellectual inquiry no function at all; but their function is solely preparatory; in the production of the virtue of faith itself they have no direct role. God, we say, moves the will, which moves the intellect. But God does not do violence to nature. He does not force either will or intellect to act against the nature He has given them. The function of prayer and humility is so to prepare the will that when the impulsion comes from God it is ready to go with that impulsion, with no violence done to its own nature as a will. The function of evidence and argument is so to prepare the intellect that when it feels the impulsion of the God-moved will, it, too, will be prepared to co-operate with that impulsion, with no violence to its own nature as an intellect. It would be outside God's normal mode of working upon man to move his intellect to an assent for which nothing had prepared it, against which much of its own experience as an intellect might well have predisposed it.
Thus, provided that intellectual inquiry by way of argument upon the evidence has prepared the intellect to go along with the impulsion from God, it has served its purpose. The virtue of faith in no way depends upon it, but solely upon God moving the soul to it and sustaining the soul in it. Reason can produce a flawless chain of arguments, showing that there is a God, that God became man and revealed certain truths; and a man might, one imagines (though I have never met such a man), by the sole power of reason, unmoved by God's grace, follow the arguments and assent to the truths. But this assent would not be the supernatural virtue of faith, for it would be produced in him and sustained in him by arguments, whereas the assent of faith is produced in us and sustained in us by God. Again though the arguments for revelation are flawless in themselves, they are not necessarily so as seen by every believer. One may see them vaguely, or superficially; one may be quite unable to sustain them against an objector. But just as the most perfect grasp of the arguments is no substitute for the grace of faith, so defect in them, as they have worked on a given man, does not weaken or invalidate his faith, because faith is in fact not produced by arguments, or founded on them, or kept in being by them. They do not produce faith in our souls, but only make us willing to let God produce it. They make us willing to open the shutter to let the light pour in. The opening of the shutter is necessary if there is to be light in the room, but it does not produce the light. However slight the reason for which one has opened the shutter, there is the light.
It is pleasant, given our human stumblingness, to know that we can stumble towards the light. Given the rarity of powerful intellects, it is fortunate that sure faith can be had by imperfect intellects. The light is the fact. The believer cannot always prove, that is state a flawless logical case for his faith, very much as a man in a lighted room might have no clear notion how electricity works. But he is in no doubt about the light. He is living in it. That is why faith carries with it a kind of certainty which no chain of argument can produce. By logic we see that a thing must be so: by faith we see it so— at any rate when, as we shall see, faith is perfected by the gift of Understanding. I do not mean that we see it as if we were gazing at the object itself, for faith is that which gives substance to our hopes, which convinces us of things we cannot see. But it is more than seeing the conclusion of an argument. It is a living awareness that reality is so. That is why one who has faith cannot convey what it is to one who has not got it. You cannot tell a blind man what seeing is. Indeed you cannot prove to him that colour exists at all. If one puts this analogy to an unbeliever, it will very naturally irritate him to madness.
Although faith is in the intellect, it will be noted that the intellect is moved to it by the will, and this might at first sight seem puzzling, savouring somewhat of wishful thinking. The intellect, one feels, is the faculty whose job is to know, and any interference by the will seems like a usurpation. There is some colour of truth in this in relation to natural knowing, where the assent of the intellect is based upon the evidence presented to it. But this colour of truth is not the whole truth as to the relation of will and intellect even in the natural activity of knowing, and in any event the assent of faith with which we are here concerned does not depend upon the evidence presented to the intellect, but upon the grace of God. Once we grasp this, we can see what part
God does not do violence to nature, and a direct impulsion producing the utter certitude of faith in the intellect might do very great violence to nature indeed. The will is deeply concerned in the intellect's decision, for an obvious reason, and for a reason less obvious. The obvious reason is that the will is so profoundly affected by all the things that may follow upon the assent of faith— the interference with pride for instance and the necessity of union with the will of God—that left to itself it would be quite capable of preventing the intellect from giving the assent. The less obvious reason is that all men find certitude, complete and utter certitude, difficult; and some men find it impossibly difficult. There is something about the absoluteness of certitude, the inescapable yes or no of it, from which all in some measure and some in vast measure shrink. It is a shrinking from finalities, comparable to that of people who cannot decide to get married: they would like to marry, they would like to marry that particular person, but they cannot be sure and they hesitate, and someone else marries her, and the marriage works out well or ill, but anyhow the human race is carried on, while the man who cannot be sure lives in a fine balance of conflicting possibilities and dies without issue. This fear of certitude is a disease of the will. The intellect is not really in doubt. It is the will that persuades it that it is.
That may be one reason why God gives the impulsion of grace to the will. But even apart from this, the truths to which we assent by faith are remote from our daily habits, not presented direct to the intellect with their own evidence, but only with the evidence that God has revealed them, and not stated as they are in their own reality but only so far as human language can utter them—so that even with such illumination as God gives to the intellect, it still needs the support of the God-moved will. If we find this first action of the will in the assent of faith mysterious, observe that it has one superb consequence: the root of the Supernatural Life is faith, and the first movement of faith is in the will, the faculty by which we love: so that as love is the fruit it is also the root of Life.
We have now considered all the elements of the definition save one. When we gain the virtue of faith and make the act of faith, what is it that we believe? We believe God, that is to say we believe that what God has said is true because He has said it. Faith puts our mind in the attitude of unquestioning acceptance of what God has said. But it does not mean that we know all that God has said; it does not exclude the possibility of ignorance or actual error as to what God has said. We believe all that God has said, and thus implicitly possess it. But that we may actually know it, we must use our intellect to find it, that is to find the teacher who can tell us with certainty what things God has said. When we have found that teacher and learned what he has to teach us then we possess certain truths, but the possession of these truths is not precisely the same thing as the virtue of faith. Thus we must distinguish three elements: one, the preliminary preparation of will and intellect to co-operate with God's grace; two, the virtue of faith; three, the truths we possess by faith.
Observe
that defects in the first or third of these elements do not mean defects in our
faith.
We may have fallen into erroneous arguments on the way to it;
we may
have misunderstood some of the teachings of God and not even heard of others.
Neither sort of defect is a defect in our faith, the virtue by which the
intellect adheres to God as the source of truth. If the preliminary inquiry as
to where the truths God has revealed are to be found is totally successful,
then we discover that the Church is their repository and their custodian and
their teacher. But even one who has not come so far may still have found truths
revealed by God, and by God's grace accepted them, and so have the virtue of
faith.
The teaching of the Church is the rule of faith:
one who has not found
it will not have access to all the truths God has revealed,
so that his
faith will not be doing all for him that faith can do.
But it is still the
supernatural virtue of faith,
the root of the supernatural life.
top
With Faith there enters the soul the whole of our supernatural equipment, the theological virtues, the moral virtues, the gifts of the Holy Ghost. We are supernaturally alive. The soul is made new in its essence and its operations. It is, has its be-ing, does its be-ing, at a higher level; and it not only has its be-ing at a higher level, it has the power to act at a higher level. Grace and the virtues are not something external of which the soul is given the use, as an eye might be enabled to see by a microscope things otherwise too small for it. Grace and the virtues are in the soul itself, very much as seeing is in the very eye itself. The theologians call them habits, and the word is worth dwelling on. It is not a mere piece of terminology, but will later help us to solve some of the most practical problems affecting the running of our own lives. Here let us grasp what they mean by it. Habit is a modification of a nature whereby it is made more apt to act in one way or another. Thus the habit of piano-playing is a real modification— in this instance a development—of mind and body whereby we can produce music from a piano. It is something real and objective. One either has it or lacks it. The whole point of it is that it enables us to do something
The virtues we are discussing have in themselves all three elements of habit: they are a modification of our nature, something actually in our nature, not merely an external aid; they are real and objective, not a matter of feeling thus and thus; and they enable us to do specific things which without them we should not be able to do at all— to believe supernaturally, hope supernaturally, love supernaturally and so on. They differ from natural habits in the way we acquire them. The supernatural habits we receive in one act from God. A natural habit is acquired by the continual repetition of certain acts: we do not acquire the habit of playing the piano in one lesson, nor the habit of craving alcohol by one glass. But though the mode of acquisition is different, the supernatural virtues are habits as truly as those we acquire for ourselves.
Let us look at them now in some little detail. Faith we have already discussed. It is simply the acceptance of God as our teacher. Hope cannot be stated so simply. It is a complex of three things: we desire God, that is to say our final union with God; we see this as difficult; we see it as possible. With all three in full operation, we hope. We long for union with God in Heaven, and we rely upon His promise that we shall attain it. We know that our own powers are totally insufficient, so that without His help it is impossible. In that sense our salvation is wholly a work of God. But we know also that God will not save us without our co-operation. We must obey His laws and use the means He has set for us. To err upon either of these would be a sin of presumption: for it is presumptuous to think that God will save us if we make no effort at all; more presumptuous still to think that we can save ourselves by our own unaided effort.
At the opposite end from presumption is despair, an absence of the virtue of hope, which again may be one of two failures: we may cease to hope by no longer particularly wanting to achieve union with God and therefore setting our aim upon created things, or by feeling that we ourselves have reached so low a point that even the grace of God can no longer save us. The first is a cheaper thing. By comparison there is almost nobility in the second— at least we may feel that a certain fineness of spirit is necessary before a man could be so aware, so over-aware as it happens, of his own baseness. But it is a want of trust in God all the same, and an exaggeration of the part that the self is meant to play in salvation. St. Paul has told us of the magnificence of hope: Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction, or distress, or persecution, or hunger, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? For Thy sake, says the scripture, we face death at every moment, reckoned no better than sheep marked down for slaughter. Yet in all this we are conquerors, through Him who has granted us His love. Of this I am fully persuaded; neither death nor life, no angels or principalities or powers, neither what is present nor what is to come, no force whatever, neither the height above us nor the depth beneath us, nor any other creature, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which comes to us in Christ Jesus Our Lord. (Rom.viii.35-39)
Charity, like faith, is simple. By charity we love. We love God, and we love our neighbour because God loves him. Charity has suffered both from those who do not know that it means love and from many of those who do. For the modern world charity has become associated with help to the poor, given without heart and poisoned by condescension. It is the coldest word in the language. But charity means love. And the trouble is that this meaning has led to almost as great a debasement of the notion. It is a great thing to know that charity means love, provided one knows what love means. Unfortunately if the word charity has become a cold word in the modern mouth, the word love has become a sentimental word, with all sorts of emotional overtones. We must carefully separate love from its emotional accompaniment. Love will emerge the stronger for the distinction. Love is the highest and strongest act of the will. In relation to God it means that the will has deliberately chosen God as the supreme value, by which all others must be measured. In relation to our neighbour, it means willing his good; and how much good must we will to him? As much as we will to ourselves. In the natural order, love will inevitably have some accompaniment in the emotion. There is no space here to go into the psychology of the emotions, but we may say generally that the emotions belong neither wholly to the soul, nor wholly to the body, they are a certain excitement in our organism made possible because our soul is united to our body in such a way that the states of the soul have bodily effects. An angel, having no body, has no emotions. Thus love is not an emotion but can produce an emotion, that is to say can set up certain vibrations in the bodily organism, which in turn have their effect upon the
But we must grasp that our supernatural life has no direct access to the emotions. In so far as our supernatural love of God brings our natural power of loving into play, that in turn will tend to produce a feeling of love. But neither the feeling of love, nor the operation of our natural power of loving, is the thing that matters essentially, but that supernatural gift by which, feeling or no feeling, we steadily choose God as our supreme good. The emotional accompaniment will depend very much upon the temperament of the individual. Its absence is no matter for concern. Certainly we should not harry our souls in the effort to make them feel that they love God. For the most of us, the prayer will suffice on the side of feeling: "Concupivit anima mea desiderare te "—My soul has longed to yearn for You.
How little any sort of external action matters in comparison with charity, St. Paul has told us (l Cor.i.1-3): I may speak with every tongue that men and angels use; yet, if I lack charity, I am no better than echoing bronze or the clash of cymbals. I may have powers of prophecy, no secret hidden from me, no knowledge too deep for me; I may have utter faith, so that I can move mountains; yet if I lack charity, I count for nothing. I may give away all that I have, to feed the poor; I may give myself up to be burnt at the stake; if I lack charity, it goes for nothing.
So the thirteenth chapter opens, and the opening prepares us for the closing.
Meanwhile faith, hope and charity persist, all three: but the greatest of them all is charity.
Charity is the life-giving virtue, and makes the other virtues to be alive.
It is possible, as we shall see, to lose charity by mortal sin,
yet retain faith and hope.
But in the absence of charity they are dead.
The reason for this life-giving function of charity may be stated in two ways,
which in the end are one way.
Charity is the union of man's will with God's will;
lose charity, and the union is broken, the invitation to God to dwell in us
withdrawn; so that the life which flows from His in-dwelling ceases in us.
Again, charity is love;
and throughout all that is, the uncreated being of God and the universe at all
levels, love and life go together.
Love is life-giving.
The denial of love is the destruction of life.
top
The theological virtues are concerned directly with God, the moral virtues deal with the conduct by which we are to come to God. A brief reflection upon the ways in which we may deviate from the road that leads to our goal will show the relation of the moral virtues to man's necessity. We may deviate either by a failure of the intellect to grasp the bearing of our actions, or by a failure of the will to act, either in the control of ourselves or in relation to other men, according to the true light that the intellect has.
That our intellect may rightly see what things help towards our eternal salvation and what things hinder, there is the virtue of Prudence. Its direct work is upon the intellect, but thereby it provides a rule according to which the activities of the will may be regulated, too. The will operates properly when it keeps to the right path which the intellect operating properly sees. Like Charity, Prudence has suffered from a degradation of its name in common speech. Prudence is not a timid virtue. It is not that virtue by which we avoid all occasion for the use of the virtue of Fortitude. Prudence is a bold virtue. It sees the bearing of conduct, not upon our immediate convenience, but upon our ultimate salvation. It is by the virtue of Prudence that the martyr clearly sees his way to martyrdom. There are occasions when the avoidance of martyrdom would be highly imprudent. The word Prudence itself is simply another form of the word providence, and providence is from the Latin word "to see": it is the virtue that sees in advance and provides.
The other three virtues furnish the will with what it requires to act prudently— in the meaning of Prudence just given. Justice has to do with our relations with others. It means that the will is set towards their having whatever is due to them. Observe, again, that Justice is not simply a willingness to restrict our own desires to what is strictly our due, but a firm will that all should have their due. Our Lord urges that we hunger and thirst after justice, and this hunger and thirst is very different from that sort of diffused niceness which, provided that we have what is due to us, finds a sort of agreeableness in the thought that others should be as fortunate.
Temperance and Fortitude are for
the perfecting of our conduct in relation to ourselves.
Between them they cover
the two principal deviations that come from within the will.
By Temperance we control our natural impulse towards the things we should shun;
by Fortitude we control our natural impulse to avoid the things we should face.
Temperance strengthens us against certain pleasures that solicit us.
Fortitude against certain dangers and difficulties that frighten us.
Temperance moderates,
Fortitude stimulates.
top
It might seem that man's supernatural equipment as described so far is so complete that no more would be required. With grace perfecting his soul in its very being, the theological virtues relating his faculties at this new level to God, the moral virtues regulating his activity in relation to created things, it would hardly seem that more could be required. There are theologians who hold that more is not required. But the majority, among them St. Thomas, teach that, though with this equipment and no more a man could obtain beatitude, it would be but haltingly. By the virtue of Faith, for instance, he believes without doubt whatever God has revealed; but the virtue of Faith does not of itself tell him all that God has revealed, nor give him any profound understanding of those truths that he does know about. It gives him the utter certainty that what God has revealed is true, but does not tell him what it is nor what it means. For each of these, short of some new supernatural aid from God, he would have to use his own powers of inquiry and judgment as best he might—that is with an alarming admixture of ignorance and error. He might or might not find the Church, through which God gives the fullness of His revelation; having found the Church, he might or might not understand the truths she gave him. In any event, there arise all sorts of special situations to which no teaching of the Church seems specifically to apply, and he might or might not succeed in making the right application of some more general principle.
What has been said of Faith applies in principle to Prudence also. By it our intellects are so formed that they will judge concrete situations in the light of God's revelation as to the reality of things, but only in so far as they know God's revelation, that is in so far as they have been able by the best use of their intellect to find it.
It seems clear that even with Sanctifying Grace and the Theological and Moral Virtues, the intellect would not be equipped for action with speed or certainty. In so far as the will depends upon the intellect for light, the operation of the will would be affected by this dimness in the intellect; and in any event the will finds such appal-ling difficulty that even if strictly speaking it needs no further aid from God than the virtues which perfect it, one could hardly be other than glad if in fact God gave such further aid. It is for this double function of more and more certain light for the intellect, and special aid for the will when special difficulties call for it, that God gives us, along with the virtues, the Gifts of the Holy Ghost. To illumine our mind and to strengthen our will. God is continually giving us Actual Graces, impulses of the divine energy which if the soul responds to them will move intellect and will in the way they should go. The Gifts of the Holy Ghost are habits residing in the soul in a state of grace, by which the soul is capable of responding readily and fruitfully to these Actual Graces when God gives them. To use the illustration which is by now traditional, the Gifts are like sails catching the wind of the Spirit. The wind will move a boat, even when the boat has no sails; but incomparably less swiftly and surely. The soul, even without the Gifts, could receive some motion from Actual Grace, but incomparably less swift and certain motion. The action of the Spirit, says Christ Our Lord (John iii.8), is like a wind that breathes where it will, and we can hear the sound of it, but know nothing of the way it came or the way it goes: but by the Gifts of the Spirit we can go with it.
Isaias lists the Gifts for us: The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom, and of understanding, the spirit of counsel and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and of godliness (piety). And he shall be filled with the spirit of the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge according to the sight of the eyes, nor approve according to the hearing of the ears. (Is.xi.2-3)
Thus the Vulgate, following the Septuagint, gives us seven gifts. The Hebrew has only six, for one Hebrew word stands for Piety and Fear of the Lord.
Four of these gifts—Understanding, Wisdom, Knowledge, Counsel— are for the perfection of the intellect. By Understanding the intellect is equipped to respond to the power of God bringing a comprehension of the truths of revelation and a power to explore hem more deeply. Roughly we may think of the gift of Understanding as giving new eyes to the virtue of faith. Wisdom and Knowledge make the soul responsive to the true, the spiritual, value of things. Wisdom in relation to God Himself, Knowledge in relation to created things. Understanding is of special value in enabling us to see the difficulties of Faith and not be troubled by them. Counsel makes the mind responsive to God's guidance in relation to the individual here and now problems that face us. It has the same sort of relation to the moral virtue of Prudence that Understanding has to the theological
The three Gifts by which the will responds to the wind of the Spirit of God are Fortitude, Piety and Fear of the Lord. Fortitude corresponds to the moral virtue of Fortitude; the Fear of the Lord to the moral virtue of Temperance, —Pierce Thou my flesh with Thy spear, for I am afraid of Thy judgment.
Piety is primarily the love of the instructed heart for God. Piety is in itself the love between two who are already bound by the bond of authority. The gift of Piety leads us to a love of God precisely because of the reverence we owe Him: and gives a keener sensitiveness than Justice alone implies in
The
limits of this book will not allow of a fuller treatment of the Gifts, nor of
what theologians call the Fruits and the Beatitudes.
They are immensely worth
following up (in some such book as The Holy Ghost, by Dr. Leen, or The
Gifts of the Holy Ghost, by Fr. Bernard Kelly).
But enough is here to show what the Life is
which Christ came that we might have,
and have more abundantly.
top