The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part II, Chapter I. Introduction to the Sorrowful Mysteries: The Rebuilding of Jerusalem in Straitness of Times
Sorrow and suffering cannot be supposed to have been the work of an Almighty and merciful Creator, or to have any place whatever of its own right in His creation. God is the Author and the Giver of life, while sorrow and suffering are at once the evidence that the precious gift of life lies under a forfeit, and the prelude to the approach of death. God, as the Book of Genesis relates, “created man in His own image, male and female created He them, and He blessed them, and said, Increase, and multiply, and fill the earth. Subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth. And God saw all things that He had made, and behold they were very good” (Gen. i. 28).‸
Into a world thus formally blessed and pronounced to be good by the voice of its own supreme Lord, if sorrow and suffering have found an entrance, it has certainly been owing to some cause or other foreign to the original plan of the All- wise and All-merciful Creator. “The gifts of God,” says St Paul, “are without repentance;” and God having once freely given the good and precious gift of a life, not merely devoid of suffering, but abounding in joys, could never simply of His own act and deed have revoked His own gift, and with His own hand, as it were, have maimed and deformed His own work. If misery and suffering, therefore, have entered into the world which God has made, has pronounced to be good, and to which He has solemnly given His blessing, the hand of some one else, and not the hand of God, has been concerned in bringing them in. We have already seen in the explanation of the type of “Eve’s colloquy with the serpent,” how it was the transgression into which she was seduced which became the cause of God revoking His gifts, and pronouncing a curse where He had at first given a blessing.
Through the act of transgression of the law of Paradise, the whole condition of the world of man, which its Creator had blessed, undergoes a signal change. In the place of the unlimited gift of life, which accompanied the breathing into man a living soul, the gift of life has become a forfeit, which will in due time be claimed. The condition under which life is allowed its temporary respite is also changed. Paradise is gone. The banished pair no longer find, as before, the choice fruits of the earth grow spontaneously to their hands. It is no longer with them, as the poet describes—“Nullo munuscula cultu Errantes hederas passim cum baccare tellus Mixtaque ridenti colocasia fundit acantho.”—Virgil, Eel. iv. 18.
The word of God has gone forth, which He alone can revoke: “Maledicta terra in opere tuo”—“Cursed is the earth in thy labour, in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life.” (Gen. iii. 17). Life has become forfeit, and its Divine Giver not only announces that He will reclaim His forfeit whenever He shall think fit, but He says, “Though I may suffer you to retain for a certain time, to depend on My good pleasure, the possession of that which you have forfeited, you will retain possession of it no longer as before in a paradise, where everything will grow ready to your wants, but upon the earth, which is cursed for your sake, and where you must toil and labour in order to subdue it to the purposes of your life, until I reclaim my forfeit gift, for ‘dust ye are, and unto dust ye shall return.’”
But if a mere limitation by itself of the gift of life, and an exchange of daily labour for the ease and abundance of Paradise be the whole of what has ensued from the transgression of Eve, this, it may be argued, does not at all account for the Christian doctrine of the necessity of God Himself coming into the world to offer a sacrifice and an atonement for it. The life of Paradise, with its ease and abundance, its peace and security, may have the palm easily conceded to it over the life of the world as it is, with its labour and short duration. A Divine gift of life not revoked, and in the full enjoyment of everything good for life, is no doubt much superior to the same gift, when it is only allowed to remain on the terms of a forfeit, to be reclaimed without any covenanted notice, and is deprived of every good which has not been won by hard labour. Still, it may be argued that life is quite enough worth having even on the inferior tenure, and that all mankind think so with the most perfect unanimity. Even Satan himself bears witness, where he says, “Skin for skin, everything that a man hath will he give for his life” (Job ii. 4). The mere exchange, therefore, of the thorns and the thistles of the earth for the flowers and fruit-trees of Paradise, cannot be any sufficient or satisfactory explanation of the Christian doctrine, that God took our human nature upon Himself, and died upon the Cross for the life of the world. The objector may also push his reasoning still further, and say, that even upon the Christian showing itself, the death upon the Cross of the God- Man has not made matters, in the world of man, at least, perceptibly better: the gift of life continuing, under Christianity, subject to precisely the same forfeit as before, no single instance being on record in which it has not been rigorously exacted, while there remains exactly the same necessity as there ever was for toil and labour. For any visible proof, then, that we have to the contrary, the objector on the infidel side will say, Christianity had made no difference to the world, which is as far as we can see neither more nor less what it would have been, whether the Christian doctrine had ever been heard of in it or not.
To this it is to be replied, that such language expresses the mind of the person whom St Augustine would call a citizen of the “earthly city,” of which he writes thus: “The earthly city will not last for ever (for when it shall have been condemned to eternal punishment, it will be no longer a city at all); and it has all its good things here, in the enjoyments of which it finds its delight, in the sort of way in which delight can be found in such kind of things” (City of God, Book xv., chap. 4). And secondly, that the Christian doctrine nowhere alleges that God became incarnate, and died upon the Cross, merely to effect an amelioration in the condition of this present mortal life. God came down, according to the Christian doctrine, for us men and our salvation, to rebuild in the midst of the earthly city—that is, in the present world—the city of God, or the heavenly city. And compared with each other, these are, as St Augustine says, two societies or companies of men, one of whom lives according to human ways, and is destined to undergo eternal punishment with the devil, and the other lives according to God, and is destined to reign for ever with God.
It is, of course, to be asserted that even the condition of the earthly city has derived incalculable benefits from the presence and the ministry of God, who became Incarnate, and who has rebuilt His own city in it, but this is by reason of the overflowing of His mercy, and the good measure with which the gifts of God are given, and not because Jesus Christ had received any direct mission to benefit the condition of the earthly city. “Let the dead bury their dead,” said Jesus, “but go thou and preach the kingdom of God” (Luke ix. 60). The mission of God Incarnate into the world is to rebuild the city of God, in the midst of the earthly city; and for this purpose to take the very citizens of the earthly city, and convert them into the citizens of the heavenly city. He rebuilds, in short, His own city out of the fallen ruins themselves of the earthly city.
This rebuilding of the city of God by the Just One, who leaves the bosom of the Father, and comes among the unjust into their fallen world; who takes upon Himself their nature, being like unto them in all things, sin only except; who begins to teach them the doctrines and precepts of a world different to their own, and builds up His own heavenly city, which He binds, attaches to Himself, and to which He gives the obligation to practise all that He has taught;—this, we say, is a work which necessarily brings upon Him suffering and contradiction while He is engaged upon it, and which can only be accomplished by His perfect sacrifice of Himself.
“O fools, and slow of heart,” says Christ Himself to His disciples on the way to Emmaus, “to believe in all things which the prophets have spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?” (Luke xxiv. 25.) “The wall and the streets of the city of God shall be rebuilt,” says the prophet Daniel, “in straitness of times” (Dan. ix. 25).
Sorrowful mysteries are thus a necessary part of our salvation; for Christ, according to His own words, must suffer; and the wall and the street, according to His own prophet, can only be rebuilt in straitness of times.
God, who continues the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, could not consistently with His eternity come into the world, whose life is already forfeit, merely to effect in it some temporary purpose, however merciful such purpose might be, during the time which the forfeit world has to run before the forfeiture is claimed. But He comes into the world as Man, to effect an eternal purpose, to collect about Himself the citizens of an eternal kingdom, the life of which is not to be subject to any forfeit.
The first point that He has to secure in the accomplishment of His eternal purpose, is to redeem the forfeit which stands in limine as the bar to every citizen of the world which is subject to death by reason of its birth-sin, gaining the rights of citizenship in His eternal kingdom. This, St Anselm teaches,* He alone could do, who could redeem His fellow-citizens by the voluntary laying down of a life which had incurred no forfeit. No ordinary man could redeem his fellow-men by a voluntary death, because, in the case of any ordinary man, even a voluntary death could never be anything more than the surrendering, possibly a little earlier in point of time, that which was already a forfeit. Death, in the case of every one born of Adam, is nothing more than the payment of the debt due by the person himself, a thing which can never, in the nature of things, become the ransom of the debt of another. When, therefore, God Himself lowered Himself to take our nature, He took a life which, not being forfeit like that of the rest of men, its voluntary laying down could be an all-sufficient ransom for the debt of those whom He came to redeem. Thus the plan of human redemption was, that God should become Man, and should lay down His life, as His apostle says, a “ransom for many.” And it is by His death that God the Son made Man redeems the forfeit life of all the children of Adam, and purchases from the Eternal Father the right to make all whom He may choose and elect citizens in His eternal kingdom. The death of God made Man is thus the necessary condition of the fulfilment of His eternal purpose. God takes our nature to come into our world; and in consequence of our fall He comes into our world to die; and by His death He redeems the citizens of the earthly city, which is destined to eternal punishment with the devil, and purchases for them rights of citizenship in His own eternal kingdom, where there is to be no death.