Holy Love is a Gift of God

Holy beings are created after the divine model; but it is worthy of notice, here as elsewhere, that the existence, which stands for the model, is itself the creating power. — God is their Father. Man, in not being able to make himself, is not able to make that holy love, which is the center of himself. On the contrary, holy love is a gift, as divine in its source as it is divine in its nature. It is just as impossible for men to originate, by their own action, the principle of pure or holy love within them, as it is to originate their own existence, or the power of perception and memory. Pure love cannot be created on the basis of prudential calculations; nor can it be originated by any other human device. Device, calculation, cannot raise itself to that divine height. And the reason is, it is a constituent, something inherent and organic, something without which reason itself, in its pure and unbiased forms, could not have been brought into action; something which does not and cannot by any possibility exist, except as a nature. In God it is nature eternal; in all other holy beings it is nature given.

— A Treatise on Divine Union, Part 4, Chapter 4.