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By Jean Pierre Camus
You ask me a question which would be hard for me to answer had I not the
mind of our Blessed Father to guide and assist me in the matter.
You say: Whence comes it that Almighty God treated the rebel Angels with so
much severity, showing them no mercy whatever, and providing for them no
remedy to enable them to rise again after their fall; whereas to men He is
so indulgent, patient towards their malice, waiting for them to repent,
long suffering, and magnificent in His mercy, bestowing on them the copious
Redemption of the Saviour?
Well, He tells us in his Treatise on the Love of God [1] that: "The
angelic nature could only commit sin from positive malice, without
temptation or motive to excuse, even partially. Nevertheless, the far
greater part of the Angels remained constant in the service of their
Saviour. Therefore God, who had so amply glorified His mercy in the work
of the creation of the Angels, would also magnify His justice; and in His
righteous indignation resolved for ever to abandon that accursed band of
traitors, who in their rebellion had so villainously abandoned Him."
On man, however, He took pity for several reasons. First, because the
tempter by his cunning had deceived our first father, Adam; secondly,
because the spirit of man is encompassed by flesh and consequently by
infirmity; thirdly, because his spirit, enclosed as it is in an earthly
body, is frail as the vessel which enshrines it, easily overbalanced by
every breath of wind, and unable to right itself again; fourthly, because
the temptation in the Garden of Eden was great and over-mastering; fifthly,
because He had compassion on the posterity of Adam, which otherwise would
have perished with him; but the sixth, and principal cause was this:
Almighty God having resolved to take on Himself our human nature in order
to unite it to the Divine Person of the Word, He willed to favor very
specially this nature for the sake of that hypostatic union, which was
to be the masterpiece of all the communications of Almighty God to His
creatures.
Do not, however, imagine that God so willed to magnify His mercy in the
redemption of man that He forgot the claims of His justice. No, truly; for
no severity can equal that which He displayed in the sufferings of His Son,
on whose sacred Head having laid the iniquities of us all, He poured out a
vengeance commensurate with His Divine wrath.
If, then, we weigh the severity displayed by God towards the rebel Angels
against that with which He treated His Divine Son when redeeming mankind,
we shall find His justice more abundantly satisfied in the atonement made
by the One than in the rigorous punishment of the others. In fine here, as
always, His mercy overrides His judgments, inasmuch as the fallen Angels
are punished far less than they deserve, and the faithful are rewarded far
beyond their merits.
[Footnote 1: Bk. ii c. iv.]
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