I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that Jesus
Christ was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in the
Bosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave the
Father's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and Jerusalem
and Gethsemane and Calvary He was always the _Word that was with God_
and _the Word_ that _was God_. Next, that the eyes even of His Sacred
Humanity looked always and continuously upon the Face of God, since His
union with God was entire and complete: as He looked up into His
Mother's face from the manger, He saw behind it the Face of His Father;
as He cried in Gethsemane, _If it be possible_, even in His Sacred
Humanity He knew that it could not be; as He groaned out on Calvary that
God had forsaken Him, He yet looked without one instant's intermission
into the glory of heaven and saw His Father there.

Yet simultaneously with these truths it is also true that His cry of
dereliction was incalculably more of a reality than when first uttered
by David or, since, by any desolate sinner in the thickest spiritual
darkness. All the miseries of holy and sinful souls, heaped together,
could not approach even afar off the intolerable misery of Christ. For
of His own will He refused to be consoled at all by that Presence which
He could never lack, and of His own will He chose to be pierced and
saturated and tormented by the sorrow He could never deserve. He held
firm against the touch of consolation every power of His Divine and
Human Being and, simultaneously, flung them open to the assaults of
every pain. And if the psychology of this state is altogether beyond our
power to understand, we may remind ourselves that it is the psychology
of the _Word made Flesh_ that is confronting us.... Do we expect to
understand that?...

II. There is a human phrase, however, itself a paradox, yet