Lastly, then, in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both these
passions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into pain
and suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joy
and exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than the
Majesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of the
Eternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternal
united with Man, and both suffering and rejoicing through that union. It
is His bliss which she at once experiences and extends, in virtue of her
identity with Him; and in the midst of a fallen world it is the
supremest bliss of that Sacred Heart to suffer pain.




V

LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN


_Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy
neighbour as thyself_.--LUKE x. 27.


We have already considered two charges brought against Catholicism from
opposite quarters; namely, that we are too worldly and too otherworldly,
too much busied with temporal concerns to be truly spiritual, and too
metaphysical and remote and dogmatic to be truly practical. Let us go on
to consider these same two charges produced, so to speak, a little
further into a more definitely spiritual plane; charges that now accuse