Divine Grace in Human Lives

a) Meaning of Divine Grace

By divine grace we mean a supernatural gift which God bestows upon human souls (through the merits of the Redeemer, Jesus Christ) for their salvation. It is a help which God gives to men to enable them to get to Heaven. The help is twofold. There is a grace which constitutes a man in the state of holiness, a grace which excludes the state of sin and remains with a man until he expels it by his own deliberate and serious sin. This grace is called habitual or sanctifying grace. There is another grace which comes and goes, presenting itself as a man requires it to help him avoid particular evils and to perform particular good acts. This grace is called actual grace. Sanctifying grace may be compared to friendship, deep and devoted, which unites friends whether they be together or apart, neighbors or sundered by long distance, awake or asleep, at work or at play, while thinking of one another or while absorbed in other things. So sanctifying grace, once bestowed, endures, whether the person who has it be awake or asleep, at work or play, thinking directly of God and His service or absorbed in the business of this life. The friendship endures until one or all of those whom it unites break it off by quarrel, wilfulness, or utter neglect. Sanctifying grace endures until the person who has it drives it out by mortal sin. God never breaks, by any act of His own, this glorious bond of divine love and friendship. Actual grace may be compared to the help which a watchful mother gives to her toddling child. As long as the way is plain and smooth, the mother walks beside the child, observant and careful. But when the way becomes steep or rough, she reaches out a saving hand. And if the child, ignoring the proffered assistance, falls to the ground, the mother is quick to help it to its feet again. So actual grace, prepared by our watchful and loving Father in Heaven, is beside us, so to speak, in every circumstance of life. There is no temptation to sin, there is no opportunity of winning merit, but has its special grace which, like the outstretched divine Hand, offers the help a man needs to turn the occasion into spiritual success. If man ignores grace and falls—even if the fall be serious— the hand of actual grace is still ready to lift him up, if he will, to repentance and to help him recover sanctifying grace, which his serious fall has lost to him.

b) Existence and Influence of Divine Grace

It is impossible, of course, to present here a metaphysical proof for the existence of grace and its influence upon human lives. But it is entirely possible to suggest considerations which have power to convince honest minds, and which, taken fairly, amount

MAN’S SOUL 115 to positive proof of the existence and influence of divine grace. There is hardly a person to be found who can honestly declare that he has never experienced a conviction of support and of strength not wholly his own. No one can truly say that he has never been helped by sound counsel, by good example, by reaction against what is low and vile. Now, whence have these things power and influence ? In themselves they are but experiences of life, things to be listed with the “phenomena” of which pseudo-scientists like to talk. It will not do to declare that man’s appreciation of his character and dignity explains these experiences, for the question recurs: whence the appreciation of self and whence its power? These things, inasmuch as they are inspirational and a factor in conduct, are something other and something higher than the human being as such, for the human being as such, while still the image of God, is damaged by the primal sin and further debased by actual sin and repeated weaknesses of conduct. It may be saying too much to call the inspirational aids of which we speak by the full name of actual graces, and yet in one view of humanity they are certainly truly so called. It is a common experience—and St. Paul confesses that even one in the exalted office of Apostle is not immune from it—that there is “another law” in the members, which wars against “the law of the spirit.” There is in men, since the Fall, a weedy growth of pride which is never completely uprooted in this life; there is a tendency to selfishness, to unworthy ambition, to things of passion and sense. And what man but has felt in his life the aid of a power, not entirely of himself, which carried him to conquest in the recurrent wars he must wage with these weaknesses? Was it the thought of a pious mother; a sudden appreciation of ennobling ideals; a murmured prayer; the stimulus of a good word or good reading? And how can such things influence a merely animal man? These things are of the spirit, yet they are not wholly subjective; they are helps from without, and their character and influence show them to be helps from above. In a word, they are actual graces. The agnostic declares that the divine aid (i. e., grace) which one feels one has acquired—by prayer, for instance—is only a form of auto-suggestion. But the agnostic will find that he has a troublesome task on hand if he honestly tries to explain by that theory the lives of men as they are lived, and not as they are recorded in books of modern sociology. The type of person likely to be a consistent victim of autosuggestion is pretty readily recognized. Nor is autosuggestion a thing that, ordinarily speaking, can be very lasting or widespread in its effects. No one denies the existence of auto-suggestion. It is not uncommon, as an isolated phenomenon, and it very often arises from what psychologists of a generation ago liked

MAN’S SOUL 117 to call “expectant attention,” although they probably know it to-day by some more breezy and up-to-theminute name. In any case, and under whatever name, the thing does exist. But there is only a small part, a microscopically small part, of human conduct that auto-suggestion can adequately explain. When St. Paul was struck suddenly to the ground, and was told that his life and activities were all wrong and must be entirely changed, he received a grace, granted that it came in a most unusual manner. By the influence of that grace, his life was so completely transformed that in much it was flatly reversed. Autosuggestion will certainly not explain this conversion. Auto-suggestion implies a definite, and usually a very gradual and persuasive course of self-deception. It involves the will or the wish to do or to be a certain thing or a certain character. And this wish is engendered either by a series of external circumstances which affect the latent tendencies of the person who entertains it, or it is born of a confident faith in some voodooist or astrologer or Coue or like “medicine man.” Now, no one would dare to assert that St. Paul had latent leanings towards Christianity. His was an honest, earnest, and manly nature, and he certainly regarded Christianity as a false and dangerous religion. “Breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord,” he set out for Damascus, well fortified with writs and legal warrants for the apprehending of Christians. Nor was

St. Paul a character likely to be influenced by anyone who would work, however carefully, to bring about a gradual change in his views. St. Paul was not the man to take direction easily, and he was far too alert and clear-minded to be deceived by any subtle attack upon his convictions; he was a born leader who would tolerate no interference. And his change was not gradual. It was as sudden as the mysterious lightningstroke which felled him to the ground. He was converted instantaneously, and instantly he asked the humble question, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” Manifestly, auto-suggestion breaks down entirely when it is offered in explanation of the grace which converted St. Paul. Notice further, that his conversion was complete and life-long in its undiminished effects. Auto-suggestion is something that needs constant rebuilding and encouragement; it has to be supported by repeated processes of selfdeception. And even the agnostic must smile at the notion of the zealous St. Paul (undaunted by a thousand racking hardships) doing a spiritual daily dozen to keep himself up in the faith. We can readily imagine St. Paul praying, and asking for prayers, “lest he who had preached to others, should himself become a castaway.” But we cannot, however valiant the effort, envision this giant of God rousing himself to fervor by some process of auto-suggestion, such as murmuring over and over, “Every day in every way I’m becoming a better and better Christian.” The difference which even the agnostic will admit, if he is honest, between grace as the effect of prayer, and self-deception which comes of auto-suggestion, is well indicated in the normal and natural vision of the Apostle on his knees to God, and the wholly absurd and impossible envisionment of the same Apostle practising Coueisms. Manly, zealous, ardent, wholly admirable, the great Apostle of the Gentiles is a smashing refutation of the insidious “auto-suggestion” theory. After his conversion, and to gain its full fruits, St. Paul went in obedience to the command (which was a grace) to the house of retreat in Damascus. He prayed, and his prayer was answered with further grace. Not malice itself can interpret this grace with its marvellous and life-long effects in terms of auto-suggestion. The free-will of man can and does accept divine grace; human life can and does show the tremendous influence of grace. Sociologists, who have a way of completely ignoring God’s influence (by grace) upon His own children, are respectfully requested to take notice. When the Apostles came out of the upper chamber in which the marvel of Pentecost had been wrought, they came as new men, as men suddenly made new. And their newness was the consequence of their free correspondence with the divine grace which God the Holy Ghost had given them. Here we have a band of men, timid, conscious of their low social status, aware of their lack of education and qualification for leadership, suddenly proclaiming “Christ and Him crucified” to the whole unsympathetic and hostile population of Jerusalem. St. Peter, who had feared the whisper of a servant-girl, feared it so desperately that he turned traitor to the Lord he loved, now greeted the threatening assembly with these masterful words: “Ye men of Judea, and all you that dwell in Jerusalem, be this known to you, and with your ears receive my words.” He who was afraid to be known as a follower and friend of Christ, who trembled when the servant said, “Did I not see thee in the garden with him ?” and burst into a blasphemous denial of the truth—this same man now openly proclaimed his allegiance to Christ, and frankly told the Jews that Christ was God as well as man, whom “you, by the hands of wicked men, have crucified and slain.” And not only once, but repeatedly, did St. Peter speak in this manner: witness his declaration on the Temple steps a few days later: “You denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted to you. But the Author of life you killed.” And St. Peter is typical of the whole body of the Apostles. They went through the world, persecution and death ever at their side, and to the end they dauntlessly preached the truth. How does auto-suggestion, or any other forced theory, square with the facts here reviewed ? Will it do to say that the Apostles, trembling behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews,” had worked out a plan of campaign and had stirred up in

MAN’S SOUL 121 themselves a feverish belief in Christ and a willingness to suffer for His cause? It is needless to criticize so pitiful a suggestion. Fevers die out; bands of devotees who work up a corporate enthusiasm quickly lose it when their group is dispersed and they are individually persecuted. But the Apostles’ faith and zeal did not die out. Their enthusiasm did not disappear when they were scattered to the corners of the earth. Even if this little group of timid and retiring men could have nerved themselves by auto-suggestion to a sham bravery and the sudden facing of the mob —a supposition which the mind refuses to entertain— they would have been quickly shown up and their brief bravado would have been but the occasion for laughter. But these few men actually transformed the face of the earth! Now, if we face the facts honestly, we are compelled to confess that the Apostles were themselves transformed in that upper chamber. They were changed from weak men to strong, from sheeplike followers of a leader to the greatest masters of men that the world has known. And this transformation took place when God came upon them as tongues of fire, and the flames of divine grace were set ablaze in their weak but upright wills. Divine grace, therefore, can and does have an effect, and a most marvellous and powerful effect, upon the freewills of men. Divine grace can and does have a tremendous influence upon human lives. Sociologists who feel that there is nothing in religion but sentiment, nothing in prayer but auto-suggestion, and no powerful social influences but those listed in their materialistic manuals, have much to learn about the greatest of all influences for the shaping and directing of human lives—the influence of divine grace. The touching conversion of St. Mary Magdalen; the winning of the greedy capitalist Zachaeus; the sanctification of the woman taken in adultery—these are further scriptural examples of the imparting of divine grace and of its wondrous effect upon lives. And every Catholic who has made a sincere confession of his sins, with worthy sorrow and purpose of amendment, in the wonderful Sacrament of Penance, can offer direct and certain testimony of the effect of divine grace upon his own life. Nor can this testimony be brushed aside as sentimental or as involving only auto-suggestion. The list of refutations of this unworthy theory is endless. If there is any value whatever in personal experience—and it is admittedly a hard thing to set down in mere words—it has been shown to the world for two thousand years in the lives and testimonies of worthy sons and daughters of the true Church. And this not by moon-calves, by people who roll up their eyes and sigh with imagined rapture, but by the solid and sensible and unimaginative people who make up the strength of humanity. Endless testimony is available from young and old to the saving power of the grace that flows through the divine channels of the Sacraments.—

MAN’S SOUL I2Z Sociologists who seek to reform the world by legal ordinances, by programs for carving men up by sterilization, cutting men off by euthanasia, blocking men out by birth-control, breeding men up by eugenics, are recommended to some quiet meditation upon the subject of divine grace and its influence in human lives. No one is more ready than the Catholic philosopher and scientist to admit the powerful influence exercised upon human lives by associations and example—“environment” is the word in favor. But environment, even when wedded with its mysterious companion, heredity, cannot fully explain human conduct; these forces are always but a partial explanation. The child of drunken and obscene parents may grow up to be drunken and obscene; and again he may not. Grace and free-will may bring a saint out of a home where filth, moral and physical, abounds. No one who knows the inner lives of men, no one who has had the direction of souls, but will testify to the existence of such cases. We do not justify bad environment; on the contrary. But we deny the unscientific sociological assumption that a bad home necessarily means a bad product of the home (and, conversely, we deny that a good home necessarily means a good product). Free-will and divine grace are factors which the sociologist simply must take into consideration, else his work is not scientific; it does not deal with things as they are.

Summary of the Article

In this Article we have made a study of the meaning and nature of divine grace. We have learned what is meant by sanctifying (or habitual) grace and actual grace. We have presented examples and arguments to show that divine grace is a most important factor in human lives, one which the sociologist dare not omit to consider if he wishes his work to be scientific and his doctrines to square with fact.