DIVINE GRACE (in English)

[InHocSignoVinces]

The second condition which we must fulfil in order to be saved is to keep the commandments of God. "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." 1 If we wish to go to heaven, it is not enough to believe ; we must also keep the commandments which God has made for us. We cannot reasonably expect that God will make us eternally happy, merely because we believe what He says, if we refuse to do what He commands us. To be saved we must do His holy will, we must be obedient to Him, we must keep His commandments. Our catechism teaches us this in the question : "Is it enough to belong to God's Church in order to be saved? It is not enough to belong to God's Church in order to be saved, but we must also keep the commandments of God and of the Church." We belong to the Church through faith; this is not enough, we must also obey God by keeping the commandments which He has given us, and those which the Church makes by His authority. We will therefore be good Catholics, believing all that God teaches through the Church, and obeying cheerfully His holy will, as we know it through His commandments.

TBC...

1 Matt. 19. 17.

[InHocSignoVinces]

Can we believe and keep the commandments
of God? This most important question
may be answered in two ways. We
may answer, Yes; with the help of God, we
can believe and keep His commandments;
or, we may answer, No ; of our own strength
we can do nothing to deserve the kingdom
of heaven. Both answers, though at first
sight opposite, are true. With God's help
we can do all things. "I can do all things
in Him that strengtheneth me." 1 Without
that help of God we can do nothing.
"Without Me," says our Lord, "you can do nothing."
2 All therefore depends on the help
of God ; if we have Him with us, all things
become easy to us. This help of God,
which is_so necessary to believe and to keep
the commandments of God, and hence to be
saved, we call Divine Grace. If we rely on
our own strength, we shall not be able to
comply with the conditions which our Lord
has laid down for salvation ; if, however, we
rely upon the help of God, that is, upon
His grace, then we shall be able to believe
and obey in a manner worthy of eternal life.

TBC....

1 Philip. 4. 13.
2 John 15. 5

[InHocSignoVinces]

You may often have experienced this
yourselves. Perhaps you had some evil habit,
lying, disobedience, or cursing and at
confession you were really sorry for your
fault ; you promised God faithfully to amend
and to do better for the future, but after a
few days you fell back into your old sin,
and were perhaps even worse than before
confession. What was the reason of this ?
You were sincere when you promised to
avoid this sin, but you depended on your
own strength, and neglected to pray for the
help of God. The consequence was that
your strength failed you, and you fell back
into your old ways. Had you prayed, instead
of depending on yourself, and said: O my
God, I recognize my fault, and wish to
avoid sin for the future ; but of myself I
am weak and miserable. Give me the help
of your holy grace, strengthen my will, help
me, save me. Had you prayed in this
manner, instead of trusting in yourself, you
would have overcome your fault, or, at least,
you would have improved remarkably and
not fallen so frequently. God often permits
one who trusts in himself to fall into sin
that he may learn his own weakness and
so acquire humility. "God resisteth the
proud and giveth grace to the humble." 1
God assists them that trust in Him, and
confounds them that are self-sufficient and
act as though they did not need His grace
to avoid sin. Hence the Psalmist sings,
"O God, come to my assistance ; O Lord, .
make haste to help me." 2

TBC....

1 James 4. 6
2 Psalm 69. 1

[InHocSignoVinces]

Grace is therefore necessary to believe and
to keep the commandments. To obtain this
grace for us Jesus suffered and died. His
Passion and death satisfied the justice of
God for the sins committed against Him,
and hence St. John the Baptist calls Him
the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of
the world. 3

His Passion and death merited
for us grace so that we might again be able
to enter the happiness of heaven. "Neither
is there salvation in any other. For there
is no other name under heaven given to
men whereby we must be saved." 1 He, Himself,
tells us that no man can come to the
Father except through Him. Without the
grace of God we cannot be saved; this
grace which is so necessary for our salvation
comes to us from Jesus, who merited it by
His Passion and death. Jesus is called on
this account the second Adam. Just as we
have all fallen in the first Adam, and are
descended from him as sinners, so we must
be freed from sin and descend from the
second Adam as saints. We will, therefore,
earnestly pray for the help of God's grace ;
we will not trust in our own strength, but
rather put our trust in God.

TBC....

3 John I. 29.
1 Acts 4. 12

[InHocSignoVinces]

We answered the question whether we
could believe and keep the commandments
by saying that, although of ourselves we are
unable to do anything, we could believe and
keep the commandments of God with His
help. This answer shows us that grace is
necessary, but it also shows us that grace
alone will not make us believe and keep the
commandments, since we say that with the
help of His grace we can believe and keep
the commandments. We, too, must do something;
God helps us, true, yet He does not
want us to stand by idle ; but rather to work
with His grace in believing and doing what
is good. St. Paul says, "I can do all things
in Him that strengtheneth me." God's help
will not be wanting if only we have the
good will to use His grace and perform
good works. God has given us free will
because He desires a free service: He
wishes us to serve Him out of love - not
because we are compelled to serve Him, and
cannot avoid doing so. In this way the sun,
moon, and stars, the animals and plants,
serve Him. "The heavens show forth the
glory of God, and the firmament declareth
the work of His hands." 1 Man, however, is
to serve God as a rational creature ; he is
to serve Him by submitting his intellect to
faith and his will to obedience.

TBC....

1 Psalm 18. I.

[InHocSignoVinces]

We have seen that we are created for
heaven, and that after heaven was lost by
sin, Christ, the second person of the Blessed
Trinity became man, and by His death
atoned, i.e. made satisfaction, for sin; that
through the Passion and death of Jesus
Christ heaven was again opened to man,
and grace, necessary to obtain the possession
of heaven, was given us. In the tenth
lesson of the catechism, which we are
about to study, we shall learn what grace is,
how many kinds of grace there are, and
how necessary it is for salvation. We will
endeavor to be very attentive, so that we
may understand rightly the teaching of the
Church on this most important subject. "O
merciful Lord, incline Thine ears to our
prayers, and enlighten our hearts by the
grace of Thy Holy Spirit; that we may
worthily receive Thy holy mysteries, and
love Thee with an everlasting love."

TBC....

[InHocSignoVinces]

II - NATURE AND DIVISION OF GRACE

NATURE OF GRACE

What do you mean by grace ?
By grace I mean a supernatural gift of God bestowed
on us, through the merits of Jesus Christ, for our salvation.



If we meet a great man who is above us
in social position, one to whom we look up
and whom we honor, and he receives us
kindly, speaks to us, gives us some valuable
present, we say of him that he is very kind
and gracious. Grace can signify kindness,
but it may also be taken to signify a present
or gift by which we recognize the kindness
of the giver. In this second sense it is used
in our catechism. Grace is, therefore, a present
or a gift which we receive from One who
is higher than we are. A gift is something
that we receive without having earned or
deserved it. If we work for a man for a
certain sum of money, and he gives us this
money at the end of the time we worked for
him, we do not receive a gift — we receive
our wages. Because a man pays us our
wages we do not need to consider him as
especially kind and gracious. If, however,
someone gives us something which we have
not worked for and which consequently we
did not earn, then we receive a gift. Grace
is not wages, but a gift.

TBC....

[InHocSignoVinces]

Grace is a supernatural gift. A gift such
as we described above is a merely natural
gift. The catechism says that grace is a
supernatural one. What does this mean ?
Let us illustrate by a few examples. Someone
is sick, and God gives him back his
health ; or a boy has received special talents,
quickness of understanding, a good memory,
so that he learns quickly and retains easily
what he has learned ; or we might take the
example of Solomon who received extraordinary
wisdom. All these things are gifts of
God, but they are not supernatural gifts.
They confer only what one might have by
nature, or they strengthen the natural powers
of the soul or body. Health is something
natural, so is understanding and memory, so
also is wisdom. Grace is something higher
than these things; it has to do with our
eternal salvation. It is a gift which is to
help us reach heaven and be eternally happy;
it is a gift which is to help us reach the end
for which we were created ; it is a gift which
does not belong to this world but to the
next; it is a gift which brings us to God.

When Solomon received from God great
wisdom he obtained a natural gift, because
he might have been the wisest of men and
yet not obey the commandments of God and
so lose heaven. When, however, a boy recites
a prayer before confession, and asks
God to give him true sorrow for his sins and
the help to avoid them for the future, then
he prays for a supernatural gift. Likewise
we pray for a supernatural gift when we say,
"Jesus, have mercy on us," because then we
ask for the mercy which is necessary for
the forgiveness of our sins. When Solomon
received wisdom, it was the wisdom to rule
his people well. This was only a natural
gift, intended for his own temporal welfare
and that of the Jewish people. On the contrary,
when we read in the Sacred Scriptures
the words of Solomon, "And as I knew that I
could not otherwise be continent, except God
gave it, and this was also a point of wisdom,
to know whose gift it was; I went to the
Lord, and besought Him, and said, with my
whole heart, etc," 1 we see that
here he asked for a supernatural gift, since continence
consists in overcoming nature. It was also a
supernatural grace to know that it was a gift
of God, and that we must pray for it. The
gift of God which we call grace is not a
natural but a supernatural one, that is, it
is a gift which helps us to obtain eternal
salvation.

1 Wisd. 8. 21.

TBC....

[InHocSignoVinces]

The supernatural gift of grace is given us
through the merits of Jesus Christ. In the beginning
God created man for eternal happiness in heaven,
and gave him all the grace necessary to reach this end.
Man, however, did not remain faithful but sinned, and so
lost the supernatural gift he had received. By this sin
Adam brought misery on himself and on his descendants.
No one could have obtained grace for himself or for others,
had not a Redeemer been promised and sent by God.
This Redeemer was the only-begotten Son of God the Father.
All grace given to man before His coming was given
because God had promised to send Him, and
foreknew that by His suffering and death
He would obtain for mankind a superabundance of grace.
The Son of God became man, and shed His blood for the redemption
of the world; His blood "that speaketh better than Abel" 1
washed out the sins of the world and merited grace for men.
Abel's blood cried to heaven for vengeance, but the
blood of Jesus cries to heaven for forgiveness and grace.
Grace is bestowed on man on account of
the merits of Jesus Christ ; but it does not
cease to be grace because God is moved to
grant it to us through the merits of His Divine Son.
It still remains undeserved on our part, as well as a gift of
mercy on the part of God, because even His
Son was a gift of His mercy. Love does
not destroy God's freedom in giving us His
grace, for God is all-free and "God is love." 2

1 Heb. 12. 24.
2 I John 4. 16

TBC...

[InHocSignoVinces]

The supernatural gift of grace, bestowed
on us through the merits of Jesus Christ, is
given us for our salvation. God made us
for heaven; He wishes us to be forever
happy with Him. This is the reason why
He gives us His holy grace. By grace He
acts continually on our souls, giving us the
light of His truth, that we may believe firmly
all that He has revealed, moving our will, that
we may avoid sin and do good.
If we are faithful to Him, He will lead us through
life and crown us with the crown of glory.
This is the purpose of grace and its perfection.
Heaven seems far off ; how can we
reach it? Of our own strength we can
never obtain it, but by God's grace its
possession will be easy. "No man can come
to Me, except the Father, who hath sent
Me, draw him." 1 Let us rejoice to know
that God has not only made us for heaven,
but also gives us the means of reaching it.
He, as it were, says to us : I have prepared
unspeakable joys for you in heaven; take
courage. I Myself will help to obtain them
if only you do not resist Me. I will give
you the necessary strength by My grace.
"My grace is sufficient for thee." 2

1 John 6. 44.
2 2 Cor. 12. 9.

TBC...