Principles and Practices - February 5

Divine and Human Holiness

The Divine holiness serves as the first foundation, the universal exemplar and the one source of all created holiness. You understand that, necessarily loving Himself with infinite perfection, God also necessarily wills that every creature should exist for the manifestation of His glory, and that, remaining in the rank of creature, it should only act conformably to the relations of dependence and of end that the Eternal Wisdom finds in the Divine Essence.

Our holiness will be the higher according as there will be in us more loving dependence on God and conformity of our free will to our ultimate end (which is the manifestation of the Divine Glory). The more we adhere to God by detaching ourselves from all that is not God, the more this dependence, conformity, adhesion, and detachment are firm and stable.

-Marmion.
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From Principles and Practices
Compiled by Rev. J. Hogan of The Catholic Missionary Society
Published by Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., Publishers To The Holy See
Nihil Obstat; Eduardus J. Mahoney, S.T.D. Censor deputatus.
Imprimatur; Edm. Can. Surmont, Vicarius generalis.
First printed in 1930