felt keenly the nobler impulses of the soul, who has had brilliant dreams of life and drunk dry the cup of woe. "What you find to your sorrow is the star of hope. Your doubts are 66 the stamp and signet of a most perfect life." There is in life a purpose; one equal to all the wants of the heart and the capacities of the soul; a purpose that will give to the heart a perpetual freshness of youth, to the mind an ever increasing vision of beauty, and to the will a divine basis for action. And this purpose can be yours.' "Believe it! or trust one who has been where you are, and who speaks to you now, not of day-dreams, but of actualities, of hopes realized and of aims accomplished; one who can say, 'What once I dreamt not now is true, Lo! in the fields the yellow grain, the ripening fruit, the full-blown rose, how full of life! how perfect! how beautiful! And shall man, the crowning piece of God's workmanship, walk with aimless feet? Shall he be 'Weighed upon with heaviness, And utterly consumed with sharp distress, While all things else have rest from weariness?'t No; man has a destiny, and to corrupt, to enfeeble, or to abandon those instincts, faculties, and activities which God has given to him whereby to reach his destiny, this is the soul's suicide; this, and this alone, is sin. "Man has a destiny, and his only evil is to deviate from it; and not to be able to act in accordance with his destiny, is the greatest of all miseries; this is, in every sense of the word, to be damned; this is the greatest torment of hell. Man has a destiny, and man's highest good, his life, his happiness, and true being's bliss, is in nothing else than in the fulfilment of his destiny; it is in this, that his beatitude and heaven consist. We beg the reader to remark this sentence, so directly in the face and eyes of Calvinism and Jansenism: "No; man has a destiny, and to corrupt, to enfeeble, or to abandon those instincts, faculties, and activities which God has given him whereby to reach his destiny, this is the soul's suicide; this, and this alone, is sin." Here is the distinct recognition of all that is true in the saying of the Transcendentalists about following our instincts, and the truth without the error. After having settled the question that man has a destiny, the author proceeds to the question, What is man's destiny? He shows by a series of most interesting extracts from the writings of the greatest and most distinguished non-Catholics of the age, of men who are rightly called its representative men, that, while this question torments its soul, it is unable to answer it. Who greater than Goethe, that many-sided German? Yet here is the best answer he could give: "I've set my heart upon nothing you see; Hurrah! We must cite the Chapter on the Dignity of Man. "Come to it we must, if not before, at least at the moment of death, that God, God alone, is all our best having, our repose, the complete and perfect answer to man's whole being. "Shall we ask the intelligence of man what it demands? Its answer is: To know, to know the truth; to know the whole truth; the primal and infinite truth ; - to know God!' "Shall we ask the heart of man the end of all its desires? It will answer: To love, to love the good; to love the supreme and infinite good; to love God and all things else because of some reflect of God!' Shall we ask the will of man its purpose? It will reply: To act; to act in accordance with the primal truth for the Supreme Good; to do God's will.' "The head, the heart, the hand of man with one voice proclaim that the end of man is to know, to love, to live for God! This is God's own destiny. Man's destiny, therefore, is God-like. For God created man in his own image and likeness.' "The destiny of the soul, then, is to come to God; to be one with God. To live, is to think for God, to love for God, to act for God. “A truthful life is one in which all the thoughts of the mind, all the affections of the heart, all the acts of the will, are directed to God. A truthful life is one in which all the faculties and energies of the soul tend to God. "But God's happiness is one and the same with his life. Man, therefore, living the same life as God, participates in God's happiness, and his life here is the beginning of his eternal beatitude hereafter. "What higher end can be conceived than that of God; what more beautiful life can be imagined than that of God; what more blissful can be thought of, than the happiness of God? "Say not that in making God the limit where all our wishes end,' we isolate man from nature and humanity? Is not God in nature? in humanity? in all things? If so, then to see God is to see and know all things eminently; - to love God and be one with him, is to love and be one with all things most intimately; — to do God's will, is to do everything and serve all things most effectually. With God and one with God, man, like God, embraces all, and is eminently practical; without God, he is incomplete and his actions ineffectual. "We may be told that this is all poetry, rhapsody, moonshine, smoke, and will, like 'Yon wavering column, perish!' "To some these thoughts may appear so; the world is wide, and leaving such by the way, we say this is 'A truth too vast for spirits lost in sloth, But to those who feel within their hearts the strivings of a noble enterprise, we have a word of hope. Ye, whose thoughts make the world a solitude, and who feel a bliss by you not understood, we have a word of hope. Ye, to whom God has given generous views of life and courage to act for Eternity; to you we have a word of hope, and, with assurance, say: 'These are not dreams for laughter. Now but shoots, these trees hereafter pp. 30-33. We commend this chapter on the Dignity of Man to our non-Catholic readers. They suppose, in their ignorance of Catholicity, or rather in confounding Catholicity with the heresy of the Jansenists, usually regarded by Protestants as "the better class of Catholics," as said to us one day the excellent Dr. Nevin, that we degrade human nature, and in order to exalt God belittle man. But in our Catholic belief, it is not necessary to detract from the creature in order to make up the greatness of the Creator. God is infinite, and infinitely great in himself and in his own right. No greatness of the creature can diminish his greatness, or lessen his dignity. God himself has lowered himself to man, that he might raise man to himself, and not lightly should we speak of that nature which the Son of God has not disdained to assume as his own. That nature which was created by God, redeemed by him, and destined to consort eternally with him, cannot be wanting in dignity. The views of your Dr. Channing, who, in the later years of his life, made the dignity of human nature his constant theme, fell far below those entertained by the Catholic. We honor all men, not as God, nor as able without the assistance of his grace to attain to supernatu * Schiller. † Sterling. + Goethe. ral union with him, but as the noble creatures of God, made in his image and his likeness, and for an inconceivably glorious destiny. There is no danger in overrating the dignity of our nature, so long as we do not forget that God is its principle and end, and that we can do nothing without him, and are unable by our simple natural strength to attain to eternal life. From the question of man's destiny in general, the author proceeds to show that each man has "a special destiny, a definite work to do," and that "this work is a great, an important, a divine work." This will be found a most interesting and instructive portion of the work. It offers an admirable commentary on Fourier's doctrine of " Attractions proportional to Destiny," and on the attempts made to realize it by means of associations and communities in ancient and modern times, including Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and the Brotherhood of the Cross. He shows that there is a tendency in a choice number of minds, in all ages and in all countries, to make it their special object to strive after perfection and an unworldly life. In other words, that the monastic life is in some sense a natural want, and only a mode of realizing the natural aspirations of highly spiritual souls. But he shows, at the same time, that these souls have never been able to fulfil their special destiny in any of the institutions founded outside of the Catholic Church. After showing the failure of all these institutions, he asks, Is there no path? That is, no way by which men may attain not only to their general, but to their special destiny? "Were all these high hopes but idle fancies and splendid insufficiencies? Were all these holy aspirations but illusions and deceptive dreams? Were these heroic sacrifices but evidences of minds deluded? Then is life a mockery, and true it is that The fiend that man harries Is love of the Best, Whose soul seeks the perfect, * Emerson. |