Page:AManualOfCatholicTheology.djvu/69

 our supernatural end. To reach this end we must tend towards it supernaturally while we are here on earth (in statu viæ), and this supposes the knowledge of the end and of the means thereto. As both are supernatural, both must be made known by means of a direct communication from the Author of the supernatural order. And the necessity is absolute, because it extends to every truth of this order and arises from the very nature of man; physical, because of man’s physical incapacity of knowing God as He is in Himself; and categorical, because God cannot substitute any other means for it.

III. Positive Revelation is always a supernatural act as far as its form is concerned, because, in making it, God is acting beyond and above His ordinary activity as Creator, Conservator, and Prime Mover of nature, and out of purely gratuitous benevolence. This supernatural character belongs to it even when it merely supplements Natural Revelation. But it is purely and simply supernatural in all respects only when it manifests supernatural truths and is the means to a supernatural end.

I. We learn from the preceding section that Supernatural Revelation gives us knowledge of truths unrevealed by Natural Revelation. These truths constitute the specific and proper contents of Supernatural Revelation. As, however, this Revelation is by word of mouth, and not, as in the Revelation of Glory, by the vision of its object; as it does not entirely lift the veil from revealed things: it leaves them in obscurity, entirely withholding their reality from the mind’s eye, and only reproducing their essence in analogical concepts taken from the sphere of our natural knowledge. This peculiar character of the contents of Supernatural Revelation is called Mystery, or mystery of God; that is, a truth hidden in God, but made known to man by a free communication.

II. Mystery in common parlance means something hidden or veiled, especially by one mind from another.