1. To understand this first and great effect of grace I must know
what sin is, and to grasp sin in its fullness I must comprehend
God. To see the heinousness of what is done against Him I must
first realize what He is Himself. I have to go through all my
ideas of God, my ideas of His majesty, His power, His tenderness,
His justice, His mercy. I have got to realize all that He has done
for man before I can take in the meaning of man's actions against
God. I have to be conscious of the Incarnation, of the story of
that perfect life, the privations of it, the culminating horror of
the Passion and Death, then of the Resurrection, the patient
teaching of those forty days when He spoke of the Kingdom of God
which He was setting up on earth, the Ascension, which did not
mean an end, but only the beginning of His work for men on earth.
At once there opened the wonderful stream of graces which flow
through the sacraments, and which therefore make continuous upon
the world till its consummation, His abiding presence, for the
tale of the Blessed Sacrament only adds to the wonders of the
tenderness and mercy of God. In Heaven, by ever trying to make
intercession for us, on earth, by holding out through the
sacraments countless ways of grace, It shows to us something at
least of the perfect character of God. Now it is against one so
perfect, so tender, so divine, that sin is committed, a wanton,
brutal outrage against an almost overfond love. Ingratitude,
treachery, disloyalty, united in the basest form.
2. God is just, as well as merciful, so that there had to be an
immediate result of sin. Man might see no difference between
himself before and after he had sinned; but for all that a great
difference was set up. His soul had been on terms of friendship
with God, for it had turned irresistibly to Him, as a flower
growing in a dark place turns irresistibly to where the hardy
daylight makes its way into the gloom. That friendship is at once
broken, for sin means that the soul has deliberately turned its
back upon God and is facing the other way, and thus it has been
able by some fatal power to prevent God's everlasting love having
any effect upon it. God cannot hate; but we can stop His love from
touching us. At once, then, by grievous sin the soul becomes
despoiled of its supernatural goods: sanctifying grace, which is
the pledge and expression of God's friendship, naturally is
banished; charity, which is nothing else than the love of God, the
infused virtues, the gifts, are all taken away. Faith only and
hope survive, but emptied of their richness of life. Externally no
difference, but internally friendship with God, the right to the
eternal heritage, the merits heretofore stored up--all lost. Even
God Himself goes out from the midst of the soul, as the Romans
heard the voice crying from the Temple just before its
destruction: _Let us go hence. Let us go hence_.
3. Grace, then, operates to restore all these lost wonders. Sin
itself is forgiven, all the ingratitude and disloyalty put one
side; not simply in the sense that God forgets them, or chooses
not to consider them, but in the sense that they are completely
wiped away. It is the parable of the Good Shepherd where the sheep
is brought back again into the fold, and mixes freely with the
others who have never left the presence of their Master. It is the
parable of the prodigal son taken back into his father's embrace.
That is what the forgiveness of sin implies. God is once more back
again in the soul. He had always been there as the Creator without
Whose supporting hand the soul would be back in its nothingness;
but He is now there again as Father, and Master, and Friend. Not
the saints only who have been endowed with a genius for divine
things, but every simple soul that has had its sins forgiven,
comes at once into that embrace. We are far too apt to look upon
forgiveness as a merely negative thing, a removal, a cleansing,
and not enough as a return to something great and good and
beautiful, the triumphant entrance into our souls of the Father,
the Son, and the Spirit.