It is the very same story, only read in the light of a different age. The key-note to these harmonious lives is the same—love. Love, simplicity, humility, poverty of self, and devotion to others, form the common chord of this heavenly music, vary the movements as we may.
With merely technical or dogmatic theology neither the mediæval nor the modern saint has much to do. Religion forms an integral part of daily life. Love to God—accepted in His appointed channels, and for His appointed ends—is the sum and substance of this creed. The life of our modern worker had its roots deep down in the love and life eternal, as is seen by its fruits. One who knew her best—her eldest brother—says of her, “All through her life she acted on the highest principle—as a loving Christian. Out of this came, as the natural fruit, her large-hearted charity, her help she gave ever willingly to all who needed assistance.” This love interpenetrated all her being and expressed itself in service, in deeds, not words. “Don’t preach, but be; your actions will do more than your words!” she was wont to say to her pupils.
It must all come back again to the key-note—love. And we notice as the special quality of the modern, as opposed to the mediæval saint, a certain humanness which stoops to the smallest things, and, so stooping, lifts them to highest uses. We read of one of the typical saints of the olden days how she pressed into the seclusion of her convent, stepping over the prostrate body of her old father, whose prayers had failed to move her. “Heaven is the price,” she would have said, in the favourite words of another such saint of our own century, the Mère Angélique, who, lying pillowless on the bare ground, spent her last dying breath in sending from her the one human creature for whom she had a human love, a young novice, who obeyed her, broken-hearted. The inevitable outcome of the ascetic ideal—of pain for pain’s sake—has always been and must be inhumanity. The distinctive outcome of the wider grasp of God’s love which in our day says instead, pain for love’s sake only, is the exact opposite—an ever deepening humanity, in which human love is lifted up into the Divine, gathering into its embrace not only every race of mankind, but the brute creation too.
That this was characteristic in a most remarkable degree of her whom we are glad to recognize as one of our foremost teachers, remarkable especially in her power of loving and of inspiring love, we see most clearly in the word which seems by common consent to be that chosen to describe her—motherly, the most human as it is the most Divine word of mortal speech.
Few things are more delightful than the effort to trace the process by which a great personality is fitted for a great work. We may rejoice that we possess sufficient indications of her childhood to show how this child grew up to make life different for the children of after times.
Frances Mary Buss, born August 16, 1827, was the eldest child—and only daughter who survived infancy—of parents who were both persons of exceptional force of character. Her father was not only an artist of skill far beyond the average, but was a man of cultivated literary and scientific tastes. His influence was a powerful factor in the training of the child who was his joy and pride in her public career, as well as the most obedient and devoted of daughters.
The mother, almost adored by her children, was one of those strong loving souls whose silent lives are eloquent beyond all speech, who are enshrined in the hearts of all within their sphere as very ideals of love and loyalty.
Mrs. Septimus Buss thus writes of—
“the large-hearted loving Mother, whose motherliness was not only for her own, but for all children. It was a family joke that she came home from her walks penniless, as she could never see a poor child looking longingly into a cake-shop without sending it happily away in possession of a ‘goody.’ Many of us remember how we naturally went to her for comfort, and always felt the trouble lightened by some brave or kind word, or personal help, if possible. What merry, cheerful, little impromptu parties there were in her ever hospitable house, among her own children and others who, having finished their work, remained to play!