And while it is true that such content can only be ascertained by work, it is not true that the work is a specially difficult one.  The Revelation of God’s mind made through Holy Scripture and through the life of His Incarnate Son is an open book that any one can study; and to any objection that such study has led chiefly to difference of opinion and darkness rather than light, the answer is that such disaster follows for the most part only when the guidance of the Catholic Church is repudiated; when, that is, we pursue a course in this study which we should not pursue in relation to any other.  If we were studying geology we should not regard it as the best course to scorn all that preceding students have done, and betake our unprepared selves to field work!  But that is the “Bible and the Bible only” theory of spiritual knowledge.  If we want to know the meaning of the Biblical teaching, we must make use of the helps which the experience of the Church has richly provided.

But the nature of the divine will and the particulars of our obligation are not merely, perhaps one ought to say, not chiefly, to be assimilated through our brains.  The best preparation for the doing of the will of God and the progressive entering into His mind, is an obedient life.  Purity of character will carry us farther on this path than cleverness of brains.  Our Lord’s own rule is:  He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine. In other words, we understand the mind of God and attain to the illumination of the conscience, through sympathetic response to the will so far as we have seen it.  And each new response, in its turn, carries us to a deeper and clearer understanding of the will.  That is to say, our conscience, by habitual response to God’s will, so far as it knows it, is so illumined as to be able to make trustworthy judgments on new material submitted to it.

This is, of course, to be otherwise described as the working of God the Holy Spirit.  He is the Spirit that dwelleth in us and directs us to right judgments if we will listen.  Our danger is that self-will constantly crops up and complicates the case by representing that the line suggested by the Holy Spirit is not in reality in accord with our interests.  This opposition between the seeming interests suggested by self-will, which indeed often contribute to our immediate gratification, and our true interests as indicated by the monitions of the Holy Spirit, constitutes the real struggle of the life during the period of probation.  The will of God in every circumstance is usually plain enough; but it is silenced by the clamour of the passions and desires demanding immediate gratification:  and we are all more or less children in our insistence on the immediate and our incapacity to wait.  But I must insist again that it is not knowledge that is wanting but sympathy with the course that knowledge directs.  We pursuade ourselves that we do not know, when the real trouble is that we know only too well.  One feels that much that is put forward as inability to understand religion is at bottom merely disinclination to obey it.