ONE is at first startled to be told that only in the Mystical
Body can man be fully and satisfactorily himself. The real
difficulty about the doctrine of the Mystical Body, as we have
seen, is not to grasp it but to believe that the Church really
means it. It is not hard to believe in the Catholic Church as an
organization established by Christ to which its members go for
Christ's gifts of life and truth; but, about the idea of the Church
as an organism into which we are built that we may live in the
full stream of Christ's life as members of Christ, there is an
extraordinariness which dazzles or baffles by seeming so utterly
out of scale with us. The ordinary Catholic's first reaction on
being told that that is his condition in the Church is an in-
credulous "What, me!" He feels not only that the thing is beyond
his powers, but that it is rather beyond his desires. Our meagre-
ness would have been satisfied, -- even, as we feel in this first reac-
tion, better satisfied -- by something less. Some less ardent context,
we feel, would suit our ordinariness better.

We have already considered this difficulty in the mind. Here
we may look at it again from a rather different angle. Man must
grasp that man is extraordinary. He is extraordinary like all
creatures -- there is nothing prosaic about being held in existence
out of one's native nothingness by the continuing will of Omnipo-
tence; but he is more extraordinary than other creatures, both by
what God made him and by what he has made of himself.

Let us consider ourselves a little. We are made from nothing,
but we are not made for nothing and will never return into
nothing. Without God we should be nothing, but we are not

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