eaven and watch men turn away from the Door."

So, then, in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary,
representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis are
but childish and half-civilized images--Mary as triumphant Queen, with
the gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, with
her dead Son across her knees. For she who is both Divine and Human
alone understands what it is that Humanity has done to Divinity.

Is it any wonder, then, that the world thinks her extravagant in both
directions at once; that the world turns away on Good Friday from the
unutterable depths of her sorrow, and on Easter Day from the unscalable
heights of her joy, calling the one morbid and the other hysterical? For
what does the world know of such passions as these? What, after all, can
the sensualist know of joy, or the ruined financier of sorrow? And what
can the moderate, self-controlled, self-respecting man of the world know
of either?

Lastly, then, in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both these
passions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into pain
and suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joy
and exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than the
Majesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of the
Eternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternal
united with Man, and both suffering and rejoicing through that union. It
is His bliss which she at once experiences and extends, in virtue of her
identity with Him; and in the midst of a fallen world it is the
supremest bliss of that Sacred Heart to suffer pain.

V

LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN

_Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy
neighbour as thyself_.--LUKE x. 27.

We have already considered two charges brought against Catholicism from
opposite quarters; namely, that we are too worldly and too otherworldly,
too much busied with temporal concerns to be truly spiritual, and too
metaphysical and remote and dogmatic to be truly practical. Let us go on
to consider these same two charges produced, so to speak, a little
further into a more definitely spiritual plane; charges that now accuse
us of too great activities in our ministry to men and too many
attentions paid to God.

I. (i) It is a very common complaint against Catholics, laymen as well
as clergy, that they are overzealous in their attempts to