Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/480



474 CHRIST OUR REDEEMER.

by the sacrifice of Christ, viz., the hfe of grace, the most blessed end of which is the life of glory, to which all our thoughts and actions should be referred. The whole meaning of Christian doctrine and precepts is that we being dead to sin, should live to justice ^ that is to say, to virtue and holiness, in which the moral life of the soul consists with the well-founded hope of everlasting happi- ness.

But justice in its true and proper sense, the justice which attains to salvation, is fed by Christian faith, and by that alone. The just man liveth by faithf loithout faith it is impossible to please God? It follows that Jesus Christ, who is the author and parent and upholder of faith, maintains and supports our moral life chiefly by the ministry of the Church. To her administration, in keeping with His benign and most provident purpose. He has committed the appropriate means of generating and preserving the virtue of which We speak, and of reviving it when dead. The force, then, which generates and conserves the virtues necessary to salvation disappears when morality is divorced from divine faith; and, truly, those who would have morals directed in the path of virtue by the sole authority of reason, rob man of his highest dignity, and most perniciously deprive him of his supernatural life and throw him back on the merely natural. Not that man is unable to recognize and observe many natural precepts by the light of reason, but even if he recognize and observe them all without stumbling for the whole of his life, which without the grace of Our Re- deemer helping him, he could not do, yet vain would be his confidence of obtaining eternal salvation if destitute of faith. // any one abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch and shall wither, and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.* He that believeth

' 1 Peter ii. 24. Â» Heb. xi. 6.

Â»Gal. iii. 11. *John xv. 6.