The Catholic World
Chapter 190 : She had a value for everything as it was, as well as for the idea it included. There w

She had a value for everything as it was, as well as for the idea it included. There was a minuteness as well as a largeness about her.

These qualities probably belonged to that pellucid simplicity which kept her all her life like a child. This childlike instinct would of itself have constantly stimulated her colloquies with him who was the end of all her thoughts. In the spiritual as in the intellectual life, the powers seem augmented through this dramatic process, as though fecundated from sources not their own. The thoughts thus originated seem to come half from the mind with which the colloquy is held, and half from native resources.

Let us now pa.s.s to another cavil. Devotions such as those of St.

Gertrude have sometimes been censured because they are full of love.

There {412} is here a strange confusion. Most justly might dislike be felt for devotions in which love is not supplemented by a proportionate veneration. Among the dissenting bodies devotions of this sort are to be found, though we should be sorry rudely to criticise what implies religious affection, and is a recoil from coldness. The fault is not wholly theirs. An age may be so characterized that it cannot be fervent, even in its prayers, without being earthly; but such an age is not religious, and may not judge those that were. In them reverence and love are inseparable. G.o.d reigns in man's heart through love and fear. True devotion must, therefore, have at once its fervid affection and its holy awe. Thus much will be conceded. It does not require much penetration to perceive also that the more it habitually possesses of awe, the more it admits of love. If the expression of divine resembles that of human affection, this results by necessity from the poverty of language.

Those who object to the use of the word "wors.h.i.+p" in connection with G.o.d's saints as well as with G.o.d (though of course used in a different sense) see nothing to surprise them in the circ.u.mstance that the terms "love" and "honor" possess equally this double application. Yet when expressions of real and zealous love are addressed to Almighty G.o.d, they are sometimes no less scandalized than when wors.h.i.+p (that is, honor and veneration) is addressed in a subordinate sense to the saints! In both cases alike they labor under misconceptions which may easily be removed.

To abolish the resemblance between the expression of divine and human affections, it would be necessary to break down the whole of that glorious const.i.tution of life by which human ties, far from being either arbitrary things or but animal relations improved upon, are types of divine ties. The fatherhood in heaven is admitted to be the antetype of human parentage; and the adoptive brotherhood with Christ, the second Adam, to be the antetype of the natural brotherhood. Can any other principle prevail in the case of that tie which is the fountain whence the other domestic charities flow? Not in the judgment of those who believe, with St. Paul, that marriage is a type of that union which subsists between him and his Church. If there be an a.n.a.logy between divine and human ties, so there must be between the love that goes along with them and the blessedness that is inseparable from love.

In such cavils as we have referred to there is a latent error that belonged to the earliest times. The caviller a.s.sumes that an element of corruption must needs exist in religious affections which betray any a.n.a.logy to human affections, whereas it is but a Manichean philosophy which affirms the necessary existence of corruption in the human relations themselves. Human relations are not corrupt in themselves either before or since the fall; but human beings are corrupt and weak, and do but little justice to those relations.

Praise, both in heaven and on earth, is held out to us in Holy Scripture as one of the rewards of virtue. It may not be the less true, on that account, that few orators have listened to the acclamations that follow a successful speech without some alloy of self-love. Possessions are allowable; it may be, notwithstanding, that few have had "all things" as though they "had nothing." It is not in the human relations that the evil exists (for they retain the brightness left on them by the hand that created them), but in those who abuse them by excessive dependence on them, or by disproportion.

It is mainly a question of due subordination. Where the higher part of our being is ruled by the lower, or where the lower works apart from and in contempt of the higher, there evil exists. Where the opposite takes place--where a flame enkindled in heaven feeds first upon the spiritual heights of our being and descends by due degrees through the {413} imagination and the affections--there the whole of our being works in a restored unity, and there proportionately the senses are glorified by the soul. This has ever been the teaching of that Church which encircles the whole of human life with its girdle of sacraments.

It has naturally come to be forgotten in those communities which admit the legal subst.i.tution of divorce, and polygamy for the sanct.i.ty and inviolability of Christian marriage.

That those who do not understand the relation of human to divine ties should not understand the devotions of saints is far from strange. The expressions of the saints are bold because they are innocent. They have no part in that a.s.sociation of ideas which takes refuge in prudery. The language of St. Gertrude is that of one on whose brow the fillet had dropped when she was a child, and who had neither had any experience of earthly love nor wished for any. It is indeed the excellence of the domestic ties that they are indirect channels of communication with heaven. But in her case the communication was direct and immediate--a clear flame rising straight from the altar of perpetual sacrifice. The beautiful ascent of affections from grade to grade along the scale of life had in her been superseded by a yet diviner self-devotion. She had not built upon the things that are lawful within due measure, but upon those counsels the rewards of which are immeasurable. She had reaped immortal love in the fields of mortification. She had begun where others end. She had found the union of peace with joy. Had there been added to this whatever is best in the domestic ties, it could to her have been but a rehearsal, in a lower though blameless form, of affections which she had already known in that highest form in which alone they are capable of being realized in heaven.

Expressions a.s.sociated with human affections are to be found in St.

Gertrude's devotions, because she _had_ human affections. In the monastic renunciation the inmost essence of them is retained; for that essence, apart from its outward accidents, is spiritual. What is the meaning of the incarnation, if G.o.d is not to be loved as man? To what purpose, without this, the helpless childhood, the fields through which he moved, the parables so homely, the miracles of healing, the access given to sinners, the tears by the grave of him whom he was about to restore to life, the hunger and the weariness, the reproach for sympathy withheld? These domestic memories of the Church are intended to give the higher direction to human affections before they have strayed into the lower, in order that the lower may receive their interpretation from the higher. Nothing is more wonderful than to see the natural pa.s.sing into the supernatural in actual life; nothing more instructive than to see this in devotions. It is not the presence of a human element in them, but the absence of a divine element, that should be deplored. The natural may be shunned where the supernatural is not realized. It can only be realized through love; and love is perfected through self-sacrifice, the strength and science of the saints.

It is easy to distinguish between devotions that are really too familiar and those of the saints. The latter, as has been remarked, are as full of awe as of love. Their familiarity implies the absence of a servile fear; but everywhere that filial fear, the seat of which is in the conscience, reveals itself. Again, if they regard our Lord in his character of lover of souls, they regard him proportionately in his other characters, as brother and as friend, as master and as Lord, as creator and as judge. The manhood in Christ is ever leading the heart on to his divinity; and the incarnation, as a picture of the divine character, is the strongest preacher of Theism. Again, the love that reveals itself in them has no pettiness, no narrowness; it exults in the thought of that great army of the elect, each member of {414} which is equally the object of the divine love, as a single drop reflects the firmament no less than the ocean of which it is a part.

Once more: in such devotions the thirst after the divine purity is as strongly marked as that for the divine tenderness; and death is ever welcome, that G.o.d may be seen in the spirit.

"But in these devotions," it is said, "we trace the yearnings of a woman's heart." And why not? With what else is woman to love G.o.d? May not the devotion of a child be childlike, and of a man be manly? Why are female affections alone to strain themselves into the unnatural, instead of advancing to the supernatural? In such sneers there is as little philosophy as charity. The whole structure of our being--together not only with all its experiences, but with all its capacities--is that which, yielding to divine grace, const.i.tutes the mould in which our devotion is cast. It is not religion alone, but everything--art, science, whatever we take in--that is colored by whatever is special to the faculties or the dispositions of the recipient. Religion is the only thing that holds its own in spite of such modification. It does so on account of its absolute simpleness.

But it does much more than hold its own. It is enriched. Religion is as manifold as it is simple. The faculties and instincts of the mere isolated individual are too narrow to allow of his fully accepting the gifts which it extends to us. But fortunately our incapacities balance each other; the characteristics of religion least appreciated by one being often those which will most come home to another. Not only individuals but nations and ages, both by what they have in common and by what they have of unlike, unconsciously help to make up the general store. Christianity has become in one sense to each of us what it was to an a Kempis as well as what it was to an Aquinas; and why not also to what it was to a Gertrude or a Theresa? All things subserve this vast scheme. How much we are enriched by those different aspects of religion presented to us by the chief authentic architectures! In the Gothic, which is mystic, suggestive, infinite, it is chiefly the spirituality of religion that is affirmed. In the Roman basilica, orderly and ma.s.sive, it is the "law" that is insisted on. In the Byzantine style, precious marble and beaming gold, and every device of rich color and fair form, preach the inexhaustibility of Christian charity and the beauty of the Eden it restores. These aspects of religion are all in harmony with each other. The mind that embraces them is not endeavoring to blend contradictions into a common confusion, but to reunite great ideas in the unity from which they started. Still more is the manifold vastness of religion ill.u.s.trated by those diversities of the _religious sentiment_ which result from diversities in the human character.

All modern civilization rests on reverence for woman, both in her virginal and maternal character; the Mother of G.o.d, from whom that reverence sprang, being in both these relations alike its great type.

In the restored, as in the first humanity, there is an Eve as well as an Adam; and it has been well remarked, that among the indirect benefits derived from this provision is the circ.u.mstance that there thus exists a double cord, by which the two great divisions of the human family are drawn to the contemplation of that true humanity.

From the beginning woman found herself at home in Christianity; it was to her a native country, in which she fulfilled her happiest destinies, as paganism had been a foreign land, where she lived in bondage and degradation. In the days of martyrdom the virgins took their place beside the youths amid the wild beasts at the Coliseum. In the days of contemplative monasticism the convents of the nuns, no less than those of the monks, lifted their snowy standards on high, and, by the image of purity which they had there exalted, rendered intelligible the {415} Christian idea of marriage--thus refres.h.i.+ng with ethereal breath those charities of hut and hearth which flourished in the valleys far down. In those convents, too, the scholastic volume, and the psalm sustained by day and night, proved that the serious belonged to woman as well as the soft and bright.

Since the devastations of later times womanhood has won a yet more conspicuous crown. Through the active orders religion has measured her strength with a world which boasts that at last it is alive and stirring. By nuns the sick have been nursed, the aged tended, the orphan reared, the rude instructed, the savage reclaimed, the revolutionary leader withstood, the revolutionary mob reduced to a sane mind. There are no better priests than those of France; yet they tell us that it has been in no small part through the Sisters of Charity that religion has been restored in their land. In how many an English alley is not the convent the last hope of purity and faith? On how many an Irish waste does not the last crust come from it?

The part of woman in Christianity might have been antic.i.p.ated. For it she is strengthened even by all that makes her weak elsewhere. In the Christian scheme the law of strength is found in the words, "When I am weak, then I am strong." It is a creaturely, not self-a.s.serting strength; it is not G.o.dlike, but consists in dependence on G.o.d. In proportion as self is obliterated, a Divine Presence takes its place, which could otherwise no more inhabit there than the music which belongs to the hollow sh.e.l.l could proceed from the solid rock. To woman, who in all the conditions of life occupies the place of the secondary or satellite, the attainment of this selflessness is perhaps more easy than to man. Obedience is the natural precursor of faith; and to those whose hands are clean the clearer vision is granted.

Moreover, religion is mainly of the heart; and in woman the heart occupies a larger relative place than in man. Paganism, with the instinct of a clown, addressed but what was superficial in womanhood, and elicited but what was alluring and ign.o.ble. Christianity addressed it at its depths, and elicited the true, the tender, and the spiritual. The one flattered, but with a coa.r.s.e caress; the other controlled, but with a touch of air-like softness. In pagan times woman was a chaplet of faded flowers on a festive board; in Christian, it became a "sealed fountain," by which every flower, from the violet to the amaranth, might grow. Even the chosen people had forgotten her claims;--but "from the beginning it was not so." Christianity reaffirmed them; it could do no less. It addresses distinctively what is feminine in man, as well as what is manly. It challenges, at its first entrance, the pa.s.sive, the susceptive, the recipient in our nature; and it ignores, as it is ignored by, the self-a.s.serting and the self-included.

That which Christianity claims for woman is but the readjustment of a balance which, when all merit was measured by the test of bodily or intellectual strength, had no longer preserved its impartiality.

Milton's line,

"He for G.o.d only: she for G.o.d in him,"

is more in harmony with the Mohammedan, or at least the Oriental, than with the Christian scheme of thought. It is as represented both by its stronger and its gentler half, that man's race pays its true tribute to the great Creator. The modern poet gives us his ideal of man in the form of a prophecy:

"Yet in the long years liker must they grow: The man he more of woman--she of man."

[Footnote 61]

[Footnote 61: Tennyson's "Princess."]

Singularly enough, this ideal of humanity was fulfilled long since in the conventual life. The true nun has left behind the weakness of her {416} s.e.x. The acceptance of her vocation, implying the renunciation of the tried for the untried, the seen for the unseen, is the highest known form of courage--

"A soft and tender heroine Vowed to severer discipline."

[Footnote 62]

[Footnote 62: Wordsworth's "Ode to Enterprise," ]

Her vow is irrevocable; and thus free-will, the infinite in our nature, stands finally pledged to the "better part." In her life of mortification, and her indifference to worldly opinion, she reaches the utmost to which fort.i.tude may aspire; yet she perfects in herself also the characteristic virtues of woman--love, humility, obedience.

The true monk also, while more of a man than other men, includes more of the virtues that belong least often to man. It is pre-eminently the soul within him that has received its utmost development, and become the expression of his being. The highest ideal of the antique world, _mens sana in corpore sano_, implied, not the subordination of the body to the mind, and of both to the soul, but the equal development of the former two, the soul being left wholly out of account. Such a formula, it is true, rises above that of the mere Epicurean, who subordinates the mind to the body, and makes pleasure the chief good.

It leaves, however, no place for the spiritual. By the change which Christianity introduced, virtues which paganism overlooked or despised became the predominant elements in man's being. Purity, patience, and humility bear to Christian morals a relation a.n.a.logous to that which faith, hope, and charity bear to theology. The former, like the latter, triad of virtues will ever present to the rationalist the character of mysticism, because they rest upon mysteries--that is, upon realities out of our sight, and hidden in the divine character.

The earthly basis upon which they are sometimes placed by defenders that belong to the utilitarian school is as incapable of supporting them as the film of ice that covers a lake would be of supporting the mountains close by. These are Christian virtues exclusively, and it was to perfect them that the convents which nurtured saints were called into existence.

We know the hideous picture of monastic life with which a morbid imagination sometimes amuses or frightens itself. Let us frankly contrast with it the true ideal of a monastic saint. No ideal, of course, is fully realized; but still it is only when the ideal is understood that the actual character is appreciated. The monastic life is founded on the evangelical counsels, the portion of practical Christianity most plainly _peculiar_ to the Christian system. It is obedience, but the obedience of love. It is fear, but the fear of offending, far more than the fear of the penalty. It is dependence glorified. It is based on what is feminine as well as on what is masculine in our nature; on a being which has become recipient in a sacred pa.s.siveness. It lives by faith, which "comes by hearing;" and its att.i.tude of mind is like that indicated by the sweet and serious, but submitted, face of one who listens to far-off music or a whisper close by. In the stillness of devout contemplation the soul, unhardened and unwrinkled, spreads itself forth like a vine-leaf to the beam of truth and the dews of grace. In this perfected Christian character we find, together with the strength of the stem, the flexibility of the tendril and the freshness of the shoot. For the same reason we find the consummate flower of sanct.i.ty--a Bernard or a Francis--and with the flower the fruit, and the seed which has sown Christianity in all lands; for monks have ever been the great missionaries. The soul of the monk who has done most for man has thus most included the womanly as well as the manly type of excellence. It has unity and devotedness. It has that purity which is not only {417} consistent with fervor, but in part proceeds from it. It shrinks not only from the forbidden, but from the disproportionate, the startling, and the abrupt. It is humble, and does not stray as far as its limit.

It regards sin, not as a wild beast chained, but as a plague, and thinks that it cannot escape too far beyond the infection. It has a modesty which modulates every movement of the being. It has spontaneity, and finds itself at home among little things. It is cheerful and genial, with a momentary birth of good thoughts, wishes, and deeds, that ascend like angels to G.o.d, and are only visible to angels.

Nor is this all. It is in the conventual life that the third type of human character--that of the child--is found in conjunction with the other two. In the world even the partial preservation of the child in the man is one of the rare marks of genius. In the cloister the union is common. Where the character is thus _integrated_ by harmoniously blending the three human types--viz., man, woman, and child--then man has reached his best, and done most to reverse the fall. It is among those who have most bravely taken the second Adam for their example that this primal image is most nearly restored. We see it in such books as the "Imitation," and the "Confessions" of St. Augustine. We see it in the old pictures of the saints, where the venerable and the strong, the gracious and the lovely, the meek and the winning, are so subtly blended by the pencil of an Angelico or a Perugino. We see it within many a modern cloister. It has its place, to the discerning eye, among the evidences of religion.

In the north the world now finds it more difficult than in the south to appreciate such a character as St. Gertrude. If it is sceptical as to visions and raptures, still more is it scandalized by austerities and mortification. The temperament of the south tends too generally to pleasure; but the great natures of the south, perhaps for that reason, renounce the senses with a loftier strength. They throw themselves frankly on asceticism, leaving beneath them all that is soft, like the Italian mountains which frown from their marble ridges over the valleys of oranges and lemons. The same ardor which so often leads astray, ministers, when it chooses the soul for its residence, to great deeds, as fire does to the labors of material science. In the north, including the land of St. Gertrude, many of the virtues are themselves out of sympathy with the highest virtue. Men can there admire strength and industry; but they too often believe in no strength that is not visible, no industry that is not material.

Mortification is to them unintelligible. Action they can admire; in suffering they see but a sad necessity, like the old Greeks, to whom all pain was an intrusion and a scandal.

Christianity first revealed the might of endurance. It was not the triumph over Satan at the temptation that restored man's race; though Milton, not without a deep, unintended significance, selected that victory as the subject of his "Paradise Regained." It was not preaching, nor miracle, but Calvary. Externally, endurance is pa.s.sive; internally, it is the highest form of action--the action in which there is no self-will, the energy that is one with humility. The moment the Church began to live she began to endure. The apostles became ascetics, "keeping the body under," and proclaiming that between spirit and flesh, between watching and sloth, between fast and feast, there was not peace but war. While the fiery penance of persecution lasted, it was easy to "have all things as though one had nothing." There then was always a barrier against which virtue might push in its ceaseless desire to advance, and to discipline her strength by trial. When the three centuries of trial were over, monasticism rose. In it again was found a place for mortification-- for that detachment which is {418} attachment to G.o.d, and that exercise which makes Christians athletes. There silence matured divine love, and stillness generated strength. There was found the might of a spiritual motive; and a fulcrum was thus supplied like that by which Archimedes boasted that his lever could move the world.

It is difficult to contemplate such a character as that of St.

Gertrude without straying from her to a kindred subject--that wonderful monastic life, with its rapturous visions and its as constant mortifications, to which we owe such characters. Without the cloister we should have had no Gertrudes; and without the mortification of the cloister the ceaseless chant and the incense would have degenerated into spiritual luxuries. It is time for us to return, and ask a practical question: What was this St. Gertrude, who found so fair a place among the wonders of the thirteenth century, and whom in the nineteenth so few hear of or understand? What was she even at the lowest, and such as the uninitiated might recognize? She was a being for whom nature had done all nature could do. She was a n.o.ble-minded woman, pure at once and pa.s.sionate, more queenly and more truly at home in the poverty of her convent than she could have been in her father's palace. Secondly, she was a woman of extraordinary genius and force of character. Thirdly, she was one who, the child of an age when the dialectics of old Greece were laid on the altar of revealed truth, dwelt habitually in that region of thought which, in the days of antiquity, was inhabited by none, and occasionally approached but by the most aspiring votaries of the Platonic philosophy. This was the human instrumentality which sovereign grace took to itself, as the musician selects some fair-grained tree out of which to shape his lyre. There was in her no contradictory past to retrieve. Without a jar, and almost without consciousness, she pa.s.sed with a movement of swanlike softness out of innocence into holiness.

Some have fought their way to goodness, as others have to earthly greatness, and won the crown, though not without many a scar. But she was "born in the purple," and all her thoughts and feelings had ever walked with princely dignity and vestal grace, as in the court of the great King. Her path was arduous; but it stretched from good to better, not from bad to good. She did not graduate in the garden of Epicurus, nor amid the groves of Academus, nor amid the revel of that Greek society in which the glitter of the highest intelligence played above the rottenness of the most corrupt life. She had always lived by faith. The spiritual world had been hers before the natural one, and had interpreted it. Man's supernatural end had ever for her presented the clue to his destinies, and revealed the meaning of his earthly affections. Among these last she had made no sojourn. She had prolonged not the time, but done on earth what all aspire to do in heaven: she had risen above human ties, in order to possess them in their largest manifestations. The faith affirmed that we are to have all things in G.o.d, and in G.o.d she resolved to have them. Her heart rose as by a heavenward gravitation to the centre of all love. A creature, and knowing herself to be no more, her aspiration was to belong wholly to her Creator. To her the incarnation meant the union of the human race, and of the human soul, with G.o.d. Her devotions are the endless love-songs of this high bridal. They pa.s.sed from her heart spontaneously, like the song of the bird; and they remain for ever the triumphant hymeneal chant of a clear, loving, intelligential spirit, which had renounced all things for him, and had found all things in him for whom all spirits are made.

{419}{420}

From The Lamp.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

BY BESSIE RAYNER PARKES.

Christmas comes, Christmas comes.

Blessing wheresoe'er he roams; And he calls the little children Cl.u.s.ter'd in a thousand homes.

"Stand you still, my little children, For a moment while I sing, Wreath'd together in a ring, With your tiny hands embracing In a snowy interlacing.

And your rich curls dropping down-- Golden, black, and auburn-brown-- Over bluest little eyes; Toss them back in sweet surprise While my pretty song I sing.

I have apples, I have cakes, Icicles, and snowy flakes.

Hanging on each naked bough; Sugar strawberries and cherries, Mistletoe and holly-berries, Nail'd above the glorious show.

I have presents rich and rare.

Beauties which I do not spare, For my little children dear; At my steps the cas.e.m.e.nts lighten, Sourest human faces brighten.

And the carols--music strange-- Float in their melodious change On the night-wind cold and drear.

Listen now, my little children: All these things I give to you, And you love me, dearly love me (Witness'd in your welcome true).

Why do I thus yearly scatter.

With retreating of the sun.

Sweetmeats, holiday, and fun?

There must be something much the matter Where my wine-streams do not run.