The one end in view had survived through all, despite man’s ignorance, infirmity, and sin; and that end once attained, the sinless Mother clasping to her bosom the Infant God who was from all eternity in the bosom of the Father, from that moment all that was human had a new and divine element in it. All creation, all life, all we have and are, became in a special way “holy to the Lord.” “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God? If any man violate the temple of God, him will God destroy. All things are yours, the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come: all are yours: and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”[62] Through long centuries man had failed to comprehend even while he felt the underlying mystery of creation. He looked on the fair fields of nature with undiscerning eyes. He hardly guessed at the enigma of the outer world as leading upwards to something nobler; and therefore he dragged the image of God down into the mire of his own existence. He even sought the Deity in what was below himself, worshipping, not men and heroes, but beasts and creeping things; because, being dominated by the idea of the great and all-pervading force of the laws of life and nature, the lower creation presented a more simple and abstract image of their potency. The idea of the principle of life haunted him like a dark and perplexing riddle. Its magnitude weighed upon him. Its universality perplexed him. He had not the light of truth in its plenitude to illumine the dark places of the earth. He could only make guesses at the typical meaning of creation; and as the whirr of life rushed ceaselessly around him without bringing any answer to his questionings, it became a relief to embody the idea which obseded him in the obscurity of inarticulate being, as affording, if not some solution, at least an absolutely simple and vulgar manifestation of the great fact, until the very scarabei became sacred; and with inverted moral sense, in lieu of seeking for transcendent and pellucid truth in what was above him, he dug down into the very miseries of his own degradation in his attempt to describe the incomprehensible, and that to a degree which we cannot pollute these pages by expressing. Thus had man covered over with the veil of his iniquities and the thick darkness of his ignorance all the sanctities of life, until the church of God revealed to him that Christ is the head of the church, as the husband is the head of the wife, and placed matrimony among the sacraments; because as a sacrament only is it holy to the Lord, and because, as a sacrament, it is typical of that highest and most divine union of Christ with his church—that union which is her strength, her inviolability, her guarantee, and her ever-enduring and indisputable infallibility.[63]