Speak it truly and each word of thine shall be a fruitful seed;
Live it truly and thy life shall be a grand and holy creed!
Macaulay has left us in his masterly description of Ignatius Loyola a vivid picture of the power of a belief and its independence of material surroundings.
‘On the road from the Theatine convent in Venice might have been seen once a poor crippled Spaniard, wearily but as fast as his injured limbs can carry him making his way toward Rome. His face is pinched, his body shrunken, from long fast and vigil. He enters the City of the Cæsars without money, without patrons, without influence! but there burns a light in his eye that recks not of despair. In a frequented portion of a busy street he stops and mounts a stone, and from this rude rostrum begins to address the passers by in barbarous Latin. Lo, there is contagion in the man! He has actually imparted of his spirit to that mottled audience! And now the same fire burns in a hundred eyes, that shone erewhile from his. Men become his willing slaves to do his bidding even unto the ends of the earth. With what courage, what zeal, what utter self-abnegation, with what blind devotion to their ends regardless of means do they preach, teach, write, act! Behind the thrones of kings, at the bedside of paupers, under every disguise in every land, mid pestilence and famine, in prisons oft, in perils by land and perils by sea, the Jesuit, undaunted, pursues his way.’
Do you seek to know the secret charm of Ignatius Loyola, the hidden spring of the Jesuit’s courage and unfaltering purpose? It is these magic words, “I believe.” That is power. That is the stamping attribute in every impressive personality, that is the fire to the engine and the motor force in every battery. That is the live coal from the altar which at once unseals the lips of the dumb—and that alone which makes a man a positive and not a negative quantity in the world’s arithmetic. With this potent talisman man no longer “abideth alone.” He cannot stand apart, a cold spectator of earth’s pulsing struggles. The flame must burst forth. The idea, the doctrine, the device for betterment must be imparted. “I believe,”—this was strength and power to Paul, to Mohammed, to the Saxon Monk and the Spanish Zealot,—and they must be our strength if our lives are to be worth the living. They mean as much to-day as they did in the breast of Luther or of Loyola. Who cheats me of this robs me of both shield and spear. Without them I have no inspiration to better myself, no inclination to help another.
It is small service to humanity, it seems to me, to open men’s eyes to the fact that the world rests on nothing. Better the turtle of the myths, than a perhaps. If “fooled they must be, though wisest of the wise,” let us help to make them the fools of virtue. You may have learned that the pole star is twelve degrees from the pole and forbear to direct your course by it—preferring your needle taken from earth and fashioned by man’s device. The slave brother, however, from the land of oppression once saw the celestial beacon and dreamed not that it ever deviated from due North. He believed that somewhere under its beckoning light, lay a far away country where a man’s a man. He sets out with his heavenly guide before his face—would you tell him he is pursuing a wandering light? Is he the poorer for his ignorant hope? Are you the richer for your enlightened suspicion?
Yes, I believe there is existence beyond our present experience; that that existence is conscious and culturable; and that there is a noble work here and now in helping men to live into it.
“Not in Utopia,—subterraneous fields,—
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in this very world, which is the world