THERE IS LOVE AND HATE in the world of the Angels, love and hate that separates Angels into the world of Heaven and the world of Hell, bringing home to us the humbling lesson that even the greatest of God's creatures can fail, it is only God who cannot. There is among the Angels an evil love which was the undoing of the very best, the most perfect of them, a love that was hatred of self by its very refusal to look beyond the staggering beauty that was God's gift to the Angels. That hating self-love gave birth to unremitting hatred of God, the Giver of the gifts that so blinded the vision of these evil Angels; a hatred of their fellow Angels who saw beyond the gift to the splendor of the Giver; and a hatred of men and of all the things that God had made. There is in the world of the Angels a glorious love, an utterly unselfish love that ushered Angels into the family of God and the life of Heaven for all eternity, the love that fulfilled even Angelic desires and completed their imaging of the magnificence of the Godhead.

THE WORLD OF THE ANGELS was not always so rent asunder by the brutal violence of sin. From all eternity, and beyond all time, the intense life of the Trinity filled up the infinite measure of the Godhead before ever there was a creature to image that boundless perfection. When, in God's generosity, the time came to share that goodness, God made the world; all of it, not a part here and a part there, but all of it, the Angels along with the rest of creatures. As they came from the hand of God in that bright morning of the world, the Angels were as clean as a dawn at sea; sin was an unknown stranger in a world that God looked upon and saw that it was good.

WITHIN THE LIMITS OF NATURE, there was nothing more that could be given to the Angels in natural resources had been tapped to their utmost, natural capacities for happiness had been exhausted, natural joy could not bear the slightest increase. But God, who made nature, is not imprisoned by His creation, He is not held within natural limits. All that had been given to the Angels was still not enough for the generosity of God. Divine wisdom devised a way to give infinitely more than the fullest cup of natural happiness, to give a share in the life, the action, and the goal of God. For the Angels, that same first instant of fullest natural happiness was also the first instant of their supernatural life; they were created in sanctifying grace.

ON THIS LEVEL OF DIVINE LIFE, there was indeed much still to be had, there were steps to be taken, a goal to be won. By this gift of shared Divine life, the Angels faced the terrific risks of virtue and vice, of merit and demerit, of Heaven and Hell; for Heaven is natural only to God Himself. To all the rest of us, Angels included, the glory of Heaven is the final fruit of the seed of grace, the reward to be merited by our own actions flowing from the life-giving principle of grace. It does not belong to us, it is not thrust upon us, but by the kindness of God it can be had for the taking. The Angels had the same terrifying responsibility of a final choice between Heaven and Hell, between God and creatures; not all of them chose well.

THE NATURAL HAPPINESS of all the Angels was a possession impregnably secure; if they had been created in glory, it would have been impossible for them to lose Heaven. The goodness and beauty of God, once seen face to face, suffers no rival, it cannot be rejected; and it is only by a creature's deliberate rejection that God can be lost. Some of the Angels, we know, did reject God. Like us, all of them had the gift of grace and with it the Divine virtues of faith, hope and charity; these were the instruments by which they were to build their eternal mansions in Heaven. Without them, they would be utterly helpless to advance towards God, as would we; with them they could know God as He knows Himself, love Him as I He loves Himself, and walk confidently home in the strength of His strength. The point is that they faced a moment of trial and assumed full responsibility for the outcome of that trial.

IT NEED ONLY HAVE BEEN A MOMENT. Unlike us, there was no necessity in the Angels for the long period of trial that makes Heaven so uncertain to our flickering strength. We fall and, by the grace of God, rise again only to find our stumbling hearts tripping us up again; perhaps the greatest splendor of our long fight comes from the unyielding courage that is willing to try again and again despite the testimony of the years to the feebleness of our defenses. The Angels suffer none of the obscurity of ignorance, none of the violence of passion, none of the inconstancy of will which so weaken our strongest efforts. In them, as in us, grace is the perfection of nature; their supernatural life is the story of the Divine perfection of their natural powers. Their supernatural love then is too an instantaneous, complete, irrevocable embrace. For them one act of charity is decisive for all eternity; there is no dallying by the Angels in the face of a choice of Heaven. In that one instant, the time of their trial was over; one instant marked the end of their merit; in one blinding flash of love, their place in heaven was fixed forever.

PROBABLY THE PATTERN of supernatural splendor in the Angelic world parallels the natural, though this is guessing at the gifts of God; the lowest Angel could, receiving greater gifts of grace, easily surpass the Seraphim. But since each of the good Angels rushed to the embrace of God unhindered and with all the intensity of its being, it can be reasonably Supposed that the Divine design matched the splendid variety of the Angelic natures with proportionate perfections of the Divine life of grace. Here there would be no question of laggards and enthusiasts; according to the degree of grace given, each Angel, with the full fury of its nature, rushed wholeheartedly to the welcome of God or, in the same kind of headlong plunge, spurred Him utterly to concentrate wholly on itself and so to destroy itself.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF THIS SINGLE MOMENT of trial of the Angels are staggering. There is no such thing as a second chance for an Angel, no period of contrition and penance. Their freedom from ignorance and passion, their instantaneous grasp of truth removes all possibility of a change of will for them. They love or hate at once and beyond recall; as fixed by that instant as we are by death. When the moment had passed, the sinless Angels were securely at home with God, and forever sinless. God, once seen, shrinks all rivals to their proper insignificance. It is not only true that the Angels will not sin, they cannot sin now that Heaven has been attained; and in that very impossibility they are most wholly free. To choose what defeats the deepest desires of the will, to turn from goodness to evil, is not liberty but its abuse; a truth that needs no argument for the sinner as he writhes in the chains his sins have forged for him yet goes in shamed disgust to sin again.

THE EVIL ANGELS, in that first instant of their abuse of liberty, rejected God. Caught in a deliberate fascination of their own beauty, they refused to look to that beauty's source, refused to seek for happiness outside their own satisfying self; and so attempted to find in themselves what can be found only in Go-----the answer to the will's Divinely given desire for goodness without limit. These devils can now sin all they like, and know themselves less free with every sin; the abuse of liberty mounts with each sin, the chains grow more galling, the self-imposed slavery more bitter, and the hatred more consumingly intense. Their choice was freely made, abusing liberty; and it is eternally confirmed to make up Hell's most despairing torment.

UNKEMPTNESS IS A COMMON NOTE of all sin! they are all born in disorder, rollick through disheveled days, to a climax of shabby disintegration that can no longer keep up the pretense of self-respect. Dirt and decay are steadily more familiar; companions from which only darkness gives a momentary escape in forgetfulness. This unkempt note is particularly evident in the sin of the Angels, not only because disorder is in such marked contrast to that superbly ordered world, but fundamentally because the Angels face the psychological impossibility of choosing evil. They cannot make the fatal error of seeing good where none exists, and so taking evil to their hearts. To sin at all, the Angel has to take an embraceable good, but in a disorderly fashion, with a deliberate uprooting of that loved good from its proper place. It is no exaggeration to say that the bad Angels introduced chaos into the Divine neatness of the universe, and that darkness and disarray are the atmosphere of Hell.

To EXCLUDE EVIL as a possible choice of Angelic sin seems to limit the Angelic horizons of sin extremely. Actually the limits are much narrower than this would indicate. None of the wide fields of sin opened up by the seductiveness, fear, or violence of the passions were possible to the Angels; as pure spirits, without bodies, the appeal of the senses which is passion's domain is outside the world of the Angels.

The only avenues of rebellion for them were the purely spiritual ones of pride and envy. When we stop to realize that only a fool is envious of a good infinitely beyond his reach, we see that the Angels would sin by pride or they would not sin at all. Surely they had such to be proud of, and there was more reason for pride as the scale of Angelic perfection soared to the highest of the Seraphim. The very perfection of the Angels, in other words, exposed them to the constant danger of the gifted, the danger of enchantment with the splendor of the gifts to the denial of the Giver.

GRANTED THAT FIRST SIN of pride in the Angels, envy is ceaselessly busy in all directions. Pride hurled them down, and in their fall they passed rank after rank of less perfect Angels, down past the best of men, beneath the feeblest infant barely clinging to life, even below the most hardened sinner who still has the breath of life in him. All these are still recipients of the gifts of God; all of them have Heaven either in their grasp or still within their reach; yet all of them are so much less than what these Angels could once have been.

THAT A MERE MAN, the lowest of intellectual creatures and so far beneath the devils in natural gifts, should, by the grace of God, go beyond the limits of nature to eternal life in the home of God is galling to the devil and a constant prod to his envy. That this particular soul should reach such heights triumphing over Satan's diabolic genius is a bitter humiliation and added fuel to the fire of his hatred of God. Both that envy and hatred are fed by the devil's disgust with the sins of men. True, he knows that he is guilty of all the sins he induces men to commit; but that guilt is a far cry from any affection for the things that so easily enslave a man. A man surrendering to the allure or violence of passion, immersing himself in the world of sense, playing the slave to things designed to serve him-----all this is revolting to the devil's purely spiritual nature even when he is playing the principal part in bringing about such a degradation of a man. His utter disgust with the depths to which man can sink is still more reason for his envy that such creatures can still aspire to heaven while Satan himself must grovel eternally in Hell.

ALL THESE GROUNDS for envy and hatred would hold if only the least of the Angels had sinned. According to the probable view of theologians, we must start not with the least but with the greatest of the Angels in reading the story of evil. It was Lucifer, the highest of the Seraphim, the most perfect image of God in all creation, who took the road of pride to eternal misery. By his example and exhortation, some of every Angelic hierarchy joined him in the self-sufficiency that would exclude God. Not that there was a rousing campaign for evil in the Angelic courts. Time is our burden, it is for us to deliberate and proceed by argument. The Angelic sin was an affair of a moment, enduring eternally, with a leadership of brilliant intelligence. Our Lord has told us of the "everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his Angels," indicating a leadership in Hell. "The order of Divine justice," says St. Thomas, "exacts that whosoever consents to another's evil suggestion, shall be subjected to him in his punishment; according to 2 Pet. 2, 19: 'By whom a man is overcome, of the same also he is the slave.' " The greatest creature God created spurned his Creator; those who followed him are his slaves, not catering to his comfort but augmenting his misery.

BY FAR THE GREATER PART of the Angels won their their way to Heaven; for the rejection of God is too violent a perversion of nature to achieve a wholesale victory without such allies as ignorance and passion. It is a different matter with us. We grow up so reluctantly, so easily slip back into the irresponsibilities of immaturity; and all our sins have an air of the immature, the incomplete, the underdone about them. We start all our actions from the senses. stopping at that starting point, refusing the labor and responsibility of going beyond that to the strong domain of reason, is the general story of most of men's sins. Because it is so much easier to start a thing than to finish it, much of men's lives never get beyond the level of the senses; so sin is easily common to the majority of men, but a shocking exception in the world of the Angels.

THERE ARE DEVILS ENOUGH to make the working out of our salvation a task to be approached in fear and trembling. These are enemies from whom we can expect no quarter. Hatred has put the full force of the splendid perfection of Angelic nature to work for our destruction, for the sin of the Angels took nothing away from their natural perfection. They still have that encompassing knowledge; that power to affect and penetrate our senses, our memory, our imagination; that movement swift as thought; that ageless experience; that unwearying vitality, that shrewd intelligence so far above our own. What they have lost only serves to make them more dangerous enemies, for it is the supernatural that has been stripped from them: the supernatural love with its blossoms of peace, joy, mercy, kindness; the supernatural knowledge of the mysteries of faith with its revelation of the nobility of man in the light of the splendor of God; the supernatural hope that keeps despair, and all its collapse of the defenses of virtue, safely at bay. Only the mercy of God restrains the violence of the devil's hate of us.

THERE IS NOTHING OF JOY in the devil's enduring natural perfection. Take the matter of his great knowledge as an example. There is no happiness in a creature's grasp of what is on its own level or beneath it; that happiness is to be found only in reaching to what is above the creature. With ourselves, this is clear, though the embrace of the opposite error is a modem tragedy on a huge scale. The fact remains that there is no more than a passing exhilaration in our knowledge of the details of the world about us; there is a more lasting satisfaction in what knowledge we can gather of the Angels, for they are above us in the scale of perfection. But it is only in our knowledge and love of God that we can rest; at every other level, we must substitute the pursuit for the goal to ease the gnawing discontent of our empty hearts and heads. For the devils, there is no happiness in knowing others of their kind; no happiness in their profound knowledge of men and of the world. None of these is above them, and they have forever excluded God.

JOY IS A STRANGER TO HELL, not because it primarily avoids so evil a place but because, paradoxically, the miserable in Hell will not tolerate its presence. All the inhabitants of the infernal regions are there by their own free choice; and the essential step in the process of gaining admission there was the deliberate exclusion of the sources of joy. There is a kind of sorrow that, too, is barred from Hell by unanimous agreement. It is the sorrow unknown to the innocent and impossible to the damned, the sorrow that pours its bitter waters over our soul to kill every least sprig of joy and make a desert waste out of our hearts; yet if the flood be deep enough, it will deposit new, rich, soil for an even more abundant growth. This is the sorrow of remorse, the sorrow for the guilt of the sins we have committed. That guilt turns all the world gray and changes every ordinary source of joy into an escape route for the impossible flight from ourselves. If we are sorry enough, sorry to the length of perfect contrition, the sun shines again and joy beats at our hearts for the smiling welcome which is its right. We can be forgiven and guilt can be destroyed. There is no such prospect on any of the horizons of Hell.

THE SORROW THAT RULES the skies of Hell is hopeless, despairing, as cold and barren as a leaden sky in November. The sorrow that belongs in Hell is a sorrow for punishment, not a sorrow for guilt. The devils are bitterly sorry that happiness is forever lost to them, bitterly resentful of the limitations that punishment places on their Angelic natures. There is nothing they can do about remedying that sorrow; indeed, there is a violent rejection of the very notion of doing the only thing that would remedy such sorrow-----contrition, repentance of the sins that brought it about. Their bitterness turns penetratingly on themselves, leaving them without even that small, fictitious comfort of putting the blame on someone else.

WE THINK OF THE DEVILS as being in Hell, and W so we should for that is where they belong because of the guilt that destroyed God's life within them. But there is another count on which the devils, some of them, are to be found not in Hell but wandering the earth; that is the divinely ingenious purpose of exercising men in virtue. Even by their sin the devils did not become altogether useless in the working out of the purposes of the universe. It is God's wise and universal plan that inferiors be led to their perfection by their superiors; that responsibility rests on the whole angelic world and is accomplished directly and joyfully by the good Angels leading men to God, indirectly and in spite of themselves by the bad Angels in their testing, and strengthening by that exercise, of the virtues of men. It is a further humiliation to these sinfully proud spirits, that they should be reduced to little more than exercise boys to the conditioning of the race they so envy and for which they have the utmost disgust.

THE DEVILS IN THE WORLD are by no means on vacation from Hell. Wherever they are, that fundamental and unending sorrow of Hell which consists in the loss of God is their close companion. Wherever they are, they are keenly aware that the humiliation of a spirit's limitation by so material a thing as fire awaits them; the infernal fence of fire that supernaturally marks the narrow boundaries of their eternal cell is as galling a memory and a forecast on earth as it is an actuality in Hell itself.

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