love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee.”  Love such as that must draw men, not only in this world, but in all worlds.  If it can draw men out of sin to God, it must create an enduring bond.  If it can draw God to men, it must be the revelation of a permanent attitude of God to man.  It is a love that goes out beyond the world, that love of which S. Paul says:  “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Our instinctive thought of the Judgment seems to be of it as condemnation, or, at best, as acquittal.  But why not think of it as consummation?  Why not think of it as setting the seal of God’s approval upon our accomplishment of His will and purpose for us?  The final Judgment is surely that,—­the entrance of those who are saved into the full joy of their Lord.  There once more will our humanity be complete because it is the whole man, not the soul only, but the soul clothed with the body of the resurrection, once more clothed upon with its “house from heaven,” which is filled with the joy of the Beatific Vision.  The thought of the particular judgment may fill us with dread; but if we are able to look beyond that to the general Judgment at the last day, we shall think only of our perfect bliss in the enjoyment of God.

The belief in the Assumption of our Lady is a belief that in her case that which is the inheritance of all the saints, that they shall rise again with their bodies and be admitted to the Vision of God, has been anticipated.  In her, that which we all look forward to and dream of for ourselves, has been attained.  She to-day is in God’s presence in her entire humanity, clothed with her body of glory.

This teaching, one finds, still causes some searching of hearts among us, and is thought to raise many questions difficult to answer.  And it may be admitted at the outset that it is not a truth taught in Holy Scripture but a truth arrived at by the mind of the Church after centuries of thought.  Unless we can think of the Church as a divine organism with a continuous life from the day of Pentecost until now, as being the home of the Holy Spirit, and as being continuously guided by Him into all the truth; unless we can accept in their full sense our Lord’s promises that He will be with the Church until the end of the world, we shall not find it possible to accept the assumption as a fact, but shall decline to believe that, and not only that but, if we are consistent, many another belief of the Christian Church.  But if we have an adequate understanding of what is implied in the continuity of the Church as the organ of the present action of the Holy Spirit, we shall not find that the fact that a given doctrine is not explicitly contained in Holy Scripture is any bar to its acceptance.  We shall have learned that the revelation of God in Christ, and our relation to God in Christ, are facts of such tremendous import and inexhaustible content that it would be absurd to suppose that all their meaning had been understood and explicitly stated in the first generation of the Christian Church.