Christ is no exception to the great law of finality, which seems an inherent element of human life. How, then, are we to view this prolonged existence of Christ on earth? How are we to view that endless repetition of His sacrifice from sunrise to sunset, on the altars of the Church, to the end of the world? The measure of our redemption was full when Christ had shed the last drop of His blood; how then this repetition in millions and milliards? It will seem a paradox, yet it is the truest way to state the matter. The eucharistic renewing of Christ's death is a result of that infinite fulness of redemption that is in Christ's mortal life. Because Christ merited infinitely, merited and atoned with a luxuriant superabundance, we have the real Presence, we have the daily sacrifice of the Christian altar. For we ought to remember that the Eucharist itself is the result of Christ's merits, that through the sanctity of His life and death He gained for us the wonder of wonders: the Eucharistic Transubstantiation and its inherent sacrifice.

The Eucharist is the Christian's greatest privilege simply because It enables Him to enter into direct and physical communion with Christ's life and death. And this privilege Christ merited for His faithful, through the excess of His atoning love. To detach the Eucharist from Christ's mortal life would be the greatest aberration in the things of Christ. From the very beginning

of the controversies about Christ's Divine Personality, the orthodox theologians challenged Nestorius to explain the Christian Eucharist without Divine Personality. How could we eat the flesh of one who is not God? Between Hypostatic Union and Transubstantiation the relation is most intimate, and most likely it implies contradiction that a human organism that has not Divine Being should be the physical food of spirits, in the supernatural order of things. After all, it is merely the instrumentum conjunctum Divinitatis in its highest manifestation.

But though we know little as to the aptitude which Christ's humanity gained to be the Eucharist of the Christian people through its life and death, yet the whole genius of our theology warrants the supposition that Christ became fit most eminently for this rôle through His life and death. His mortal career gave Him consummate fitness, in every sense, to be the author of life to souls.

Now, as 'life' is essentially a personal relation with Him, the great object of all the meritoriousness of His sanctity was union with Himself; He merited this, that we should be in Him, and He in us. The Eucharist is the grandest and truest result of His holiness, as it is the grandest and truest union with the Person of Christ. All sacraments derive their spiritual powers from Christ's death. That one of them, instead of

merely containing Christ's grace, contains Christ Himself only goes to show the efficacy of Christ's death. In the Eucharist, the Personality, which is the pivot of Christianity, has become not only a centre and a source of grace, but a means of grace.

The protestant argument against the Eucharist in general, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in particular, based on the all-sufficiency of the sacrifice of Calvary, would be best met by emphatic insistence, not only on the all-sufficiency, but on the infinite superabundance of it. All-sufficiency in the protestant mind applies to the work of Christ; it never means to the protestant all-sufficiency of mystical contact of souls with the great sacrifice. We grant him the all-sufficiency he knows of; we grant it more liberally than the protestant does; we grant an all-sufficiency of work so great that it breaks its limits, and from an all-sufficiency of work it becomes an all-sufficiency of contact of a most real nature.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE MAJESTY OF THE EUCHARISTIC PRESENCE

PRESENCE means the existence of a being in a given part of the material universe. When we speak of presence, we must of necessity imply a certain position or attitude with regard to a material world.

If there were no matter, but only spirits, there could be no question of either presence or absence; there would be question only of distinct spiritual individualities, which would be neither near nor distant with regard to each other, but would exist each one by itself, having power to admit co-existing spirits into communication with its own intellectual life, or exclude them.

Presence and absence are essentially and radically connected with space, and space is connected with matter.

Now, though a spirit could not be said to be present or absent, with regard to a fellow spirit, if they remained both outside the material world, they are present or absent from each other on

account of the material world. For one spirit may be in one part of the material world, and another spirit in another part of the material world, and then there is real distance between the two.

But how and why is a spirit in the material universe when his nature is so very immaterial?

The answer is this. A spirit is said to be in a certain place of the material universe, simply and solely because he exerts certain activities, produces certain effects, in that place, or on the material thing of that place, or even on the spiritual thing already connected, in a similar way, with that place.

If the spirit stops exerting his activity in the way mentioned, this very cessation of activity is in itself infinite distance from the spot where he was truly the instant before. The spirit comes and goes, not through movement, as a bodily thing, but through action or cessation of action on a bodily thing.

God and the angels are present in this way. Therefore, if a spirit can exert his activities on various parts of the universe at the same time, he is truly present at the same time to those various parts of the universe.

The more perfect a spirit, the more numerous are the points of the universe to which he can be present at the same time.

God, who is a spirit of infinite perfection, is accordingly present at the same time to every