FALSE VIEWS OF SAINTSHIP.
We often hear the saints spoken of as men of another race and stature than ourselves, splendid masterpieces of perfection meant to be admired from a distance, but certainly not to be copied with loving and minute care.
Now, this is a mistake—the most fatal mistake for ourselves; for we thus tie down our faculties to commonplace life, and refuse to give them the wider scope that nature herself meant for their exercise; the most unfortunate mistake for religion, because in making her heroes inaccessible and almost unnatural, we deter others from laudable efforts, and attach to our faith the stigma of present sterility.
Not only can each one of us become a saint, and that by a simple and ordinary course of life, but the canonized saints themselves bear witness that they reached heaven in no other way, and attained their crowns by no other means. The saint, be assured of it, is the truest gentleman, the pleasantest companion, and most faithful friend.
He is no morose misanthrope, no disenchanted cynic; he is a man with all the natural feelings of humanity, all the amiable traits of good-fellowship, all the nameless graces of good society. There is no pleasing, amenity of human intercourse, no rational exchange of human sentiments, no harmless relaxation of a refined mind, that need be foreign to his nature, and a stranger to his heart.
All men prize honor and straight-forwardness; they welcome cheerfulness and vivacity; they admire a strong will; love of nature and art, sympathy with suffering and with poverty, zealousness in the cause of learning, are all passports to their favor, and incline them to seek the friendship and trust the advice of those in whom these qualities shine.
Now, if we show them that canonized saints and great men well known in the annals of the church have always been distinguished by these traits, will they refuse to admit that the more a man loves his God, the fitter he is to win human sympathy and command human imitation?
The saints have not seldom been unfairly treated, and chiefly by their overzealous biographers; for their holiness has been distilled into such ethereal and miraculous abstractions that we no more dream of grasping it as a means of encouragement than we do of seizing for nourishment upon the summer clouds whose lovely shapes entrance our eyes in the western heavens.
Every one of the saints had an individual character, touching weaknesses of disposition and innocent partialities of nature. Every one of them went to heaven by a separate road, and his specialty of human and natural character alone determined that road. Some were kings and emperors, princes and popes, and great men of the earth; they had to wear soft garments and ermine robes, and spend much time in the display their state required. Now, many sanctimonious persons would have us believe that such display is absolutely and in itself wrong, and can under no circumstances be allowable. The church thinks otherwise, and more generously, and has canonized these men.
Some were beggars or servants, mechanics or husbandmen; passed their days in menial pursuits, and apparently had their minds occupied only by the sordid necessities of their humble degree. Many presumptuous people like to tell us that servile work deteriorates the mind, that beggary is invariably a criminal state, that poverty dwarfs the understanding and hardens the heart. The church thinks otherwise, and more charitably, and these too she has canonized.
Again, some were statesmen and scholars, and the wranglings of courts, the tumult of embassies, the disputes of universities, were the daily atmosphere they breathed. Some officious persons tell us plainly that solitude is the only nurse of holiness, and that, with these surroundings, it is impossible to live unbewildered by the world's noise and untainted by the world's corruption. The church thinks otherwise, and more liberally, and has canonized these men also.
No station in life is too low or too high for God to look upon, and therefore not too low nor too high for God's saints to thrive in.
The secret of saintship lies in the power of a man to fashion his surroundings, and mould the circumstances attendant on his lot in life, till he makes them into a ladder wherewith to climb to heaven.
Suppose a man is born to high destinies, and a great fortune: they are ready-made instruments in his hand for the glory of God and the good of his neighbor. Let him recollect that Jesus was of a royal race, and was visited by Eastern kings.
Suppose, on the contrary, he is born poor, and sees no means of future advancement all his life: there again are his weapons chosen for him to fight the good fight. Let him remember that Jesus was born in a stable, and lived in a carpenter's shop.
If a man is clever, intellectual, talented, his road to heaven lies in the good use he makes of these gifts of mind; if he is cheerful, good-humored, well-bred, his road to heaven lies in the charitable use he makes of his natural attractiveness; if he is placed in circumstances that grievously try his temper and his patience, long-suffering, resignation, and gentleness will be the evident path for him; if surrounded by difficulties and occupying a responsible position, discretion and delicacy will be his appointed road.
There is no forcing the spiritual life; it grows out of the natural life, and is only the natural life, shorn of self and self-love, supernaturalized.
Life is a battle; we all have to fight it, but even in a material combat, what general would arm all his soldiers alike? Are there not cavalry and infantry, lancers and riflemen? Do not some wield the sword, others man the guns? So in the combat whose promised land is paradise; we fight each with diverse weapons, and our one thought should be, not to envy others their arms, but do effectual service with our own. Men fight one way, women another. Both can fight as well; but only by using their own weapons.
There is an old French fable that speaks of the frog who sought to swell himself to the size of the ox, forgetting that he could be as happy and as useful in his small fish-pond as the larger animal in his spacious meadow. He would not be a frog, but of course he could not become an ox, so he died of his effort, and the world counted one worker less. Just so do some of us act when we sigh over the life of some great saint of old, and, putting down the book in sentimental admiration as barren as it is useless, cry out, "If only I could be an Augustine, a Theresa, a Thomas Aquinas!" To such might we answer: "Do you know why they were saints? Because they acted up to the lights they had. If you act up to your inferior but no less true lights, you too will be a saint." If Augustine, and Theresa, and Thomas Aquinas had spent their lives in sterile sentimentality, calling upon the dead saints before them, where would they have been, and who would have heard of their names? At that rate, there would have been no saints at all after the twelve apostles, and even they would have sat down in profitless discouragement because their holiness could not equal that of the Son of God!
Did not the Creator say to all things living, vegetable or animal, "Increase and multiply," and "Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit-tree bearing fruit after its kind"? In that one commandment lies the secret spring of the energy and fruitfulness of every created thing, spiritual no less than temporal. Let each one of us bear fruit according to his kind, and God will be satisfied. Augustine and Gregory, Thomas and Bonaventure, Francis of Assisium and Francis of Sales, Charles Borromeo and Vincent of Paul, Philip Neri and Ignatius Loyola, were men, very men, and, had they not been men, they could not have been saints. We mean, their sanctity would have been other than it actually was; it would have been even as the holiness of the angels, the untempted steadfastness of pure spirits. Had they been born as the Blessed Virgin, immaculate in the very initial moment of existence, they would not have been the saints they are, the imitable, human, weakling beings we yearn over and love with a natural and sympathetic love.
Nature, whatever people may say of her, is not contrary to grace: not in this sense at least, that she is the field, and grace the plough. The plough does not alter the earth it furrows; it only prepares it, stirs it, turns its better surface uppermost, and displays its richest loam to receive the grain. As neither rain, nor dew, nor manure can turn one soil into another, so can no efforts of overstrained piety, no devices of ambitious perseverance, re-create the soul and portion it anew. As God made us, so we stand: by taking thought, we cannot add to our stature one cubit, neither can we force a foreign growth to bloom on the low-lying lands of our soul. One sort of grain grows best in one sort of earth. Would any husbandman dream of planting the wrong grain in it? God is a husbandman, and shall he do less well than mortal man, and shall he endeavor to force one soil to bear the crop it cannot nourish? No, no! God gave us one nature as well as the graces he plants therein, and we may trust to him to see the harvest reaped. It is men, it is ourselves, who interfere with our sowing and reaping time; it is ourselves, who ambitiously seek to grow grain we can never rear, or it is others who maliciously sow tares in a soil they too quickly overrun. Then the world will see in us her saints, men going simply through the round of their daily duties, very unostentatiously, very quietly, never boasting, because to have time to boast they must needs leave off their work; never lamenting, because to lament they would have to leave off their prayer; but letting their nature fill itself to the brim with God, and, when it is full, letting it quietly overflow to their neighbor.
That sounds very simple, does it not? Yes, because everything that belongs to God is simplicity itself, and the more simple a man is, the nearer God he is.
All the great men and women whose names stud the calendar of the church owed their greatness to their simplicity, and the words of the greatest saint that ever lived, the words of her, were they not the simplest ever found on record: "Be it done unto me according to thy word"?
Saints of our timid generation, saints of our half-hearted century, saints of our hitherto barren civilization, start up, and fill the plains and the valleys of all lands, fill the offices of the city and the homes of the citizens, fill the church, the courts, the universities, fill the lowly serried ranks of the poor, fill the more burdened and more responsible phalanx of the noble and the rich!