ationship between God and man for the reason that God is too great
to be interested in man, and man too little to be an object of interest.

Before indicating the essential error of this attitude, it is necessary
to state, merely for the sake of historical accuracy, that the
Christian conception of the Godhead, as expressed by St. Thomas
Aquinas, Dante, Lessius, and a host of Christian writers, has never
been approached in its sublime suggestions of Infinite and Eternal
power and glory by any modern philosopher. In the second and third
Lectures of Cardinal Newman's, "Scope and Nature of University
Education," there is an outline of the Christian teaching of the nature
of God which, in painstaking accuracy of thought and sheer grandeur of
conception, has no counterpart in modern literature.

Let us always remember that telescope and microscope in all the range
of their discoveries have not uncovered the existence of anything
greater than man himself. The most massive star of the Milky Way is
not so wonderful as the smallest human child. Moreover man's present
entourage of illimitable space and countless circling suns and planets
cannot be said to have cost an omnipotent God more trouble, so to
speak, than a universe a million times smaller. The prodigality of the
Creator reveals His endless resources; if the vision of sidereal
abysses and flaming globes intimidates me and makes me cynical about my
unimportance, is it not because I have lost the high consciousness of a
spiritual being and forgotten the unplumbed chasms which separate
matter from mind?

[Illustration:

Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death? _Page 57_]

In Francis Thompson's Catholic philosophy, which must be partially
understood if the reader is to get at the heart of the "Hound of
Heaven," the tremendous manifestations of God's attributes of power
prepare us to expect equally tremendous manifestations of His
attributes of love. The more prodigal God is discovered to be in
lavish expenditures of omnipotence in the material universe, the more
alert the soul becomes to look for and to detect overwhelming surprises
of Divine Love. Hence, to Thompson there was nothing irrational in the
special revelation of God to man, in His Incarnation, His death on the
cross, and His sacramental life in the Church. The Divine energy of
God's love, as displayed in the supernatural