The Kingship of

ACCORDING TO
THE PRINCIPLES OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

BY
REV. DENIS FAHEY, C.S.SP., B.A., D.Pa., D.D.
Professor of Philosophy and Church History, Senior Scholasticate, Blackrock College,
Dublin 1931
With Nihil Obstat and Imprimi Potest

MAN'S FALLEN STATE

AS man is historically, he has never been destined by God to be endowed with merely natural life. God poured supernatural life into the soul of Adam, with a view to drawing the whole human race into the cycle of His Inner Life in Three Divine Persons. Having done so, He treated our first Parents in accordance with their rational nature, by asking them to answer freely His loving question: Do you accept My Inner Life for yourselves and your descendants? That question they could have easily answered in the affirmative, for their whole being was in order, their reason being subject by grace to God and consequently their sense-life to their reason and their bodies to their souls (Ia. P. Q. 95 a. I). The revolt of the passions against reason, disease, and death would have been unknown to us if they had
assented.

Their refusal to accept God's plan meant that we all come into the world in disorder, deprived of our most Real Life, the supernatural life of grace, exposed to moral corruption and subject to physical decay. God, however, undid the evil in His own sublime way, through the Incarnation, Passion and Death of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man. The Word, Who was God and is God, became man, like unto us in everything except disorder of any kind. The Supernatural Life in Person, True God and True Man, walked the earth, met in perfect order and with perfect love all the consequences of the disorder introduced 'by the first Adam, and by His death became for the human race the second Adam. Through Our Lord, Crucified and Risen from the dead, God again pours His Inner Life into us.

The following diagrammatic representation of God's plan for man's return to Him may help to a better understanding of what has been said in this section and of what follows:

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