The uprightness of her motives, and the holiness of her dispositions in entering the marriage state, ought, we naturally imagine, to have secured her at least the average amount of its happiness. But for the purification of her soul and the perfecting of her virtue, God permitted that her garland of bridal flowers should soon be turned into a wreath of thorns, and thorns all the sharper, that they were pointed by the hand to which she might have expected to look as her shield against trouble. It is difficult to explain this singular phase of her diversified career. Her husband is represented as eminently endowed with the richest gifts of mind and person; he fully appreciated the value of the treasure which he possessed in her, and did ample justice to her admirable qualities, impressed most of all, perhaps, by the calm patience which no annoyance could ruffle; the steady love which no trial could shake; the Christian heroism which gathered new courage from each new shock;—yet it is nevertheless quite certain that the bitter sufferings of her married life originated, though unintentionally, with him. They rendered her duty in his regard all the more arduous, yet it was not on that account the less perfectly fulfilled. In uniting her destiny with his, she believed that she was carrying out an arrangement of the admirable providence of God; hence from the first moment of their union, she looked on him as holding to her the place of God. In thus adopting the supernatural principles of faith as the guide of all her relations towards him, she cut off the thousand sources of trouble and temptation which are sure to arise whenever nature, and not grace, holds rule,—so it happened, that among the sorrows of her wedded life, domestic disunion, at least, never found a place, and it followed too, that her spiritualized affection stood tests, which purely human love would not have borne. She was never known to fail in the respect or obedience due to her husband; her constant study was to promote his comfort; her unceasing aim not only to defer to, but even to anticipate his slightest wishes, and all was done with the winning sweetness and rare prudence which were among her characteristics.
Nature had indeed dealt bountifully with her, and grace developing, refining and spiritualizing the gifts of nature, had produced one of those dispositions, which, to include all praise in a single word, are sometimes termed angelic. Her temper was sweet and gentle, but it was a gentleness as much removed from languid apathy and insensibility, as from impulsive quickness and impetuosity. It was the serenity of a soul which, possessing God, is happy in Him, and has no desire beyond Him, and it excluded neither firmness in decision, nor courage and resolution in difficulty, nor promptitude and energy in action. Her nature was so placid and docile, that we never hear, even in her childhood, of the least of those ebullitions of anger or manifestations of self-will, usual in ordinary children. It was so enduring and forgiving, that while inoffensive herself, she was incapable of taking offence, and absolutely inaccessible to resentment. It was so kind and tender, that sympathy for the troubles of others, especially the poor, was among the very first of the features which her childish disposition revealed, and which, like all her great qualities, strengthened with time. There was nothing rigid in her piety, repulsive in her manner, austere in her ideas, or contracted in her mind. She served the Lord with joy, and so, her interior peace was reflected in an external cheerfulness, tempered ever by a sweet, modest gravity that imparted dignity to her demeanour and commanded universal respect. Her heart's history might be epitomized in one word,—self- sacrifice,—and truly it was the quality of which she had most need. Her charity has drawn an impenetrable veil over the precise nature, as well as the painful details of the trials which lasted all through her short union with Mr. Martin. Alluding to them in later life, in one of her confidential letters to her son, she says "The only comfort of my married life was that I was able to consecrate you to God before your birth, and that your father, who possessed a good heart, and had the fear of God, not only sanctioned, but even approved of my devotions. Regarding certain occurrences with which you are acquainted, and which are to be imputed to inadvertence, he regretted them most heartily, and often asked my pardon for them with tears,"—tears, she might have added, not only of self- reproach, but of admiration for the meek endurance of the gentle sufferer.
To the perfect fulfilment of her duty to her husband, she added the exact discharge of her obligations to her household. Mr. Martin was at the head of a silk manufactory which gave employment to a number of workmen, and these at once became the objects of the zeal and charity of their good mistress. Her first aim was to secure influence over them, that she might gain their hearts, and then bring their hearts so won, to God. For this end, she attended to their wants as carefully as if they had been her own children, devoting her chief solicitude to the concerns of the soul. Dreading beyond all evils, an offence against the God whom she loved supremely, she induced them to go regularly to confession, that its protecting grace might be their preservative from sin. To animate them to virtue, she gave them occasional exhortations, repeating the instructions which she had heard in sermons, and adding her own reflections; but prudent in her zeal, she took care not to intrude her lessons at unseasonable times, generally selecting for them the hours of meals, and by this means at once feeding the souls of her hearers with the word of God, and cutting off frivolous, or perhaps sinful topics.
A living model of the virtues which she inculcated, she encouraged her dependents even more by example than by precept, to love and serve God faithfully. Always calm and self-possessed, affable and kind, she practically illustrated the beauty of peace and union. Patient and self- controlled, she taught the heroism of Christian endurance. As solicitous for the interests and as intent on the happiness of others, as if her own heart had not been wrung with anguish, and oppressed with care, she exemplified the unselfishness of true charity. Enlightened and judicious in her views, orderly and systematic in her arrangements, active and energetic in the practical details of business, she taught by her conduct, more forcibly than by any words, that "piety is good for all things." It need not be added that she won the love of her domestics, who looking on her more as a gentle mother than as a mistress, sympathized in her sorrows as if they had been personal, and manifested on all occasions their compassion for her afflictions, their admiration of her fortitude, and their reverence for her person. Knowing that well-ordered charity begins at home, she took care never to devote herself so entirely to the salvation of others, as to neglect her own soul. In order to secure time for the requirements of both, she avoided unnecessary visits and idle amusements, and having fully complied with her domestic duties, she retired to her oratory, there to find in prayer and spiritual reading repose from past fatigues, and courage for new labours.
Thus passed her first probation in the world. The death of her husband brought it to a close at the end of only two years, but they were years so rich in every virtue of her condition, that the married woman who would lead a sanctified and useful life, is sure of attaining the holy end by following her example. She was indeed the model of a faultless wife; so assiduous in prayer, that it would seem as if she considered prayer her only obligation; so devoted at the same time to the interests of all connected with her, that it would appear as if her domestic responsibilities were her absorbing concern, and through all, so utterly forgetful of self, that chance observers could never have suspected how those cheerfully discharged duties involved the living sacrifice of her bleeding heart.
In this second page of the life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation, we read a continuance of the work of grace in her soul. We meet the same virtues with which the opening page has made us familiar, but now expanded on a wider sphere, and strengthened by severer conflicts, and still, at every step, we note for our own instruction the action of the Spirit of God, and her docile correspondence, the two necessary and inseparable agents in the sanctification of man. In the biography which he has left us of his saintly mother, her son particularly directs attention to the solidity of the foundation which she prepared for the edifice of her future holiness. Guided by the Divine Director, who since early childhood had undertaken the formation of her soul, she adopted as the four fundamental principles of her spiritual life, fidelity to the duty of prayer, careful avoidance of every deliberate sin, the frequent reception of the holy sacraments, and punctual attendance at divine service, as well as at sermons, and all public observances and ceremonies of the Church. By thus steadying the foundation, she ensured the permanent stability of the building, and by similar means only will any one else secure the same end. Prayer and the sacraments purify the soul; purity of soul prepares for union with God; union with the Church at once forms and cements the bonds of union with God. Sanctity, as so often observed, is primarily the work of grace, but grace will come to us only through the appointed channels. If we cut off the channel, we cut off also the supply, deprived of which, far from advancing in the ways of God, we shall but languish and lose ground. "Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." (Ps. cxxvi. 1).
CHAPTER III.
WIDOWHOOD.—LIFE OF SOLITUDE AND PRAYER.
The young wife was but nineteen when a new scene in life's great drama was opened before her by the death of her husband. Although, through God's permission, he had caused her very bitter sorrows, her naturally warm heart was not the less grieved at the separation. She had fully appreciated his good qualities; had found excuses in her charity for his shortcomings, and had loved him with sincere affection, but as she had seen and accepted an arrangement of the divine will in the formation of the marriage tie, so did she recognise and adore a dispensation of the same Almighty will in the. breaking of the bond, and this one consideration sufficed to reconcile her to the trial, and to give rest to her soul. At the period of her widowhood, her prospects were no doubt cheerless enough. Her pecuniary affairs had been left in a state of great embarrassment; she had an infant of six months old to provide for, and as she remarks, her comparative youth and inexperience seemed to unfit her for a struggle with the difficulties of her position, but here, as ever, her beautiful trust in God supported her, and with a firm, filial reliance on His promise to be with those who are in tribulation, she took up her new crosses with resignation and abandonment so perfect, that neither loss of fortune, nor anticipation of absolute poverty, nor anxiety for the fate of her little child could disturb her serenity or shake her confidence.
The virtue and amiability which she had evinced during her first matrimonial engagement, soon procured her new and far more advantageous offers, while the capacity and integrity which had marked her business transactions, led to very promising proposals for re-embarking in commerce. Prudence seemed in favour of acceptance; natural inclination was opposed to it. In weighing the question, however, it was not to natural inclination that she appealed for a decision; this never had been her guide, nor should it now. If it were, the remembrance of the miseries of her married life would have been quite sufficient reason to deter her from risking a repetition of them, but faith had taught her to see in those past crosses, only valuable opportunities of practising virtue and acquiring merit, therefore she gave the apprehension of their renewal no place in her deliberations. The interior attraction which sweetly but irresistibly urged her to devote herself all to God,—this it was which determined her to embrace a life of entire seclusion in the world, as soon as her affairs should be arranged. In forming her plans, she can scarcely have refrained from casting a wistful glance at the attractive solitude of the cloister, but knowing that its entrance was for the present closed to her by her duty to her child, she resigned herself to wait for the promised land, until she should first have crossed the intervening desert. Referring to this period in one of her after letters to her son, she speaks of the transports of her gratitude at finding herself free to follow her call to solitude, where without distraction or division she could think of and love her Lord, while she watched over the babe whom He had committed to her keeping. The death of her mother-in- law, in about a month after that of her husband, removed the last obstacle to the accomplishment of her project.