Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/106

in this way they may take another aspect of these marvels and secrets. They do not contemplate God in order to discover new things in him, but that they may view the things, already known to faith, in a new light; so that these two ways of knowing God are only two different ways of adoring him.

There is no mystery taught by faith, and proposed by the Church, that does not combine, by an admirable arrangement of God, two qualities commonly antagonistic—obscurity and evidence. The Catholic mysteries may be compared to bodies that are both luminous and opaque; and in such a manner that their shadows can never be dissipated by their light, nor their light obscured by their shadows. They remain both perpetually obscure and perpetually luminous. While they diffuse their brightness over the world, they themselves remain impervious to light. They illuminate creation, yet nothing can throw light on them. They penetrate everywhere, and remain impenetrable. It appears an absurd thing to admit these mysteries, but it is more absurd to deny them; because for those who embrace them, there is no other obscurity than their own; while for those who reject them, darkness rests over all things. Yet, notwithstanding, the blindness of men is so great that they would rather deny these mysteries than concede them. Light is intolerable to their eyes if it proceed from an obscure region. In the madness of their gigantic pride they condemn themselves to an eternal blindness, regarding the clouds that enshroud a single mystery as more fatal than those which spread themselves over the entire horizon.

It is easy to demonstrate what we have just asserted, without turning aside from the contemplation of those