essons which are the first principles
of the oracles of Christ. But they are not to stop with this. They
are, and they are all of them without exception[27], intended to grow
up to the full apprehension of the wisdom of the 'perfect' or perfectly
initiated. They are to dwell upon the divine secret, now revealed, of
God's purpose for the universe through the church till their whole
heart and intellect and imagination is enlightened and enriched by it.

{74}

v.

[Sidenote: _It is all of grace_]

And is the greatness of this exaltation and knowledge vouchsafed to the
Church to be a renewed occasion of pride--that spiritual pride, the
fatal results of which had already become apparent through the
rejection of the Jews? No: unless through a complete mistake, the very
opposite must be the result. The strength of human pride, as St. Paul
had seen long ago, lay in the idea that man could have merit of his
own, face to face with God: could have good works which were his own
and not God's, and which gave him a claim upon God. That Jewish
doctrine of merit[28] had been convicted of utter falsity in St. Paul's
own spiritual experience. He had found himself brought to acknowledge,
like any sinner of the Gentiles, his simple dependence upon the divine
compassion for forgiveness and acceptance. This spiritual experience
of St. Paul was only the realizing through one channel of what is, in
fact, an elementary truth about human nature. The idea of human
independence is demonstrably a false idea. As a matter of fact, man
draws his life, physical and spiritual, from {75} sources beyond
himself--from the one source, God. In constant dependence on God he
lives necessarily from moment to moment, whether to breathe, or think,
or will. The freedom of will which he has is not really originative or
creative power, but a capacity of voluntary correspondence with what is
given him from beyond himself. In that power of correspondence, or
refusal to correspond, man's liberty begins and ends. He creates
nothing. It is not that man does something and then God does the rest.
The truth is that when we track man's good action to its root in his
will, we find for certain that God has been beforehand with him. The
good he does is in correspondence with moral and physical laws and
forces of the universe, or, in other words, with divine powers and
purposes lent and suggested to him. To attempt independence of God, to
have schemes and