To any believer in God it may be taken as a truism that all existing things are as he, the Creator, made them. There is a permanent and vital link between all created beings and the divine intelligence and will—which is only another way of saying that God is the first and universal cause. Nothing which exists escapes the divine causality. As the philosophers know, first among the causes is the final cause; the end hi view decides the course of action. God in creating had an end or purpose. Every creature exists for a purpose and this purpose is achieved by the attainment of its end, by the realization in each individual of his own nature.

This is true in a special way with regard to human nature. The end for which human nature exists is the knowledge and the love of God. Hence there is an ordering of human beings to God as to their final end. St Thomas speaks of this as a contemplation of divine things: ‘aliqua contemplatio divinorum’, and sees it as the natural perfection of human intelligence.

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Were mankind committed to this order, the order of human nature and the natural knowledge of God, there would be no question of the life of faith. But man has been translated from die order of his own nature to a new order by which he is made, in St Peter’s words, a sharer in the divine nature. He is lifted into a new order of being which is so much above his own nature that it is a super-nature, and the order in which this activity takes place is known to us as the super-natural order.

This is the order of grace in which we are favoured by God— by which we are in a state of grace.