Illuminating Grace

“Oh, how narrow-minded is this world at bottom after all, in spite of its pretenses and in spite of appearances! It cannot by a stretch of imagination conceive that anything exists, of which it has not cognizance in its own heart. It will not admit into its imagination the mere idea that we have faith, because it does not know what faith is from experience, and it will not admit that there is anything in the mind of man which it does not experience itself, for that would be all one with admitting that there is such a thing as a mystery. It must be the measure of all things, and so in self-defense it considers us hypocritical, as professing what we cannot believe, lest it should be forced to confess itself blind. ‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him’ (1 Jn 3:1).

What thankfulness should be ours that God has brought us into the Church of his Son! What gift is equal to it in the whole world in its preciousness and in its rarity? To find ourselves where we can use every faculty of the mind and affection of the heart in its perfection, to find ourselves in the possession of certainty, consistency, stability, on the highest and holiest subjects of human thought, to have hope here and heaven hereafter, to be on the Mount with Christ, while the poor world is guessing and quarrelling at its foot: who among us shall not wonder at his own blessedness? Who shall not be awe-struck at the inscrutable grace of God, which has brought himself, not others, where he stands?”

~St. John Henry Newman (from The Tears of Christ: Meditations for Lent)