To the idea that non-Catholics are thus needlessly prejudiced against the faith, I reply, that this assertion is wholly unproved. That they do, as a matter of fact, laugh and attack such biographies, I fully admit; but they laugh at them on grounds which we cannot admit without giving up the Christian revelation itself. They scoff at them, not because they think them not supported by credible testimony, but because they are not what they call dignified, refined, and just such as they should have supposed all things to be that come from God. That such a temper of mind is indicative of pure Deism, it needs no words to prove. A man who derides a miraculous event merely as trifling, thereby asserts that he himself is the judge of what is great and what is little in the sight of God. He lays down laws for the guidance of the Almighty. He is adopting the identical reasoning of professed infidels, who on this very ground reject Christianity itself. And it is obvious that nothing can be more perilous than the encouragement of so fatal a principle of judgment. Once let the acute and logical Protestant perceive that you move one step backwards in deference to this objection, and he will press you with fresh consequences of the very same admission until he lands you in undisguised scepticism, if not in the blackest Atheism.
Can any single instance, in fact, be named in which a mind that was apparently determined to seek salvation at all costs, has been actually deterred from entering the Catholic Church by meeting with these extraordinary histories? Are they not a butt for determined and obstinate Protestants, and for such Protestants only? Ask any convert whether, on looking back, he can say that the knowledge of these peculiarities in Catholic hagiology ever practically held him back for four-and-twenty hours in his journey towards the Church. That the world is angry, and that the world vents its spleen and its contempt in bitter jests, is true enough; but pious souls are not made to sin, or kept away from their Saviour, by any thing of the kind. And that the rage and mocking of man afford not the slightest reason for inducing the Church to turn out of her natural path, I shall not dishonour my readers by attempting to prove to them.
That it is her natural course to make these histories public, for the practical edification of her children, is clear from one fact alone,—they are precisely parallel to the life of our blessed Lord, as narrated in the four Gospels. The whole question resolves itself into this: If such lives as that of St. Frances, and many others, recently published in England, are not edifying to the ordinary Christian, then the life of Jesus Christ is not edifying. The Gospels, as well as the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, must be rigorously expurgated and cut down to the type of the common domestic life of the present day. Nothing can be further removed from the circumstances of most men than the records of our Lord's miracles and supernatural acts in general. What has the temptation, the transfiguration, the driving the devils into the swine, the turning the water into wine at what we should now call a "wedding-breakfast," and, in fact, almost every act in our blessed Lord's life, in common with our amusement, our business, our society, our whole experience? Yet, to say that a devout soul can meditate on these transcendently mysterious events, and not derive from them practical instruction to enable her to fulfil her little trivial earthly duties with Christian perfection, is nothing short of blasphemy. The Son of God incarnate, all glorious, all awful, all unfathomable as He was even in the days of His sojourning on earth, was yet our example, our model, our embodied series of precepts. The eye of the simplest regenerate child cannot be turned for an instant upon His Divine glories and ineffable sufferings without drawing light therefrom to guide it even in its play with its fellows, or in the most trivial of the duties towards its parents and teachers.
And such, I am convinced, is the experience of Catholics of all ranks, of every age and every degree of intellectual cultivation, who study religiously the miraculous lives of the Saints, believing them to be, on the whole, correct histories. It is not needful that they should regard them to be literally true in all their details, as the Bible is true. We have but to regard them as we regard other authentic human narratives, with the addition of that veneration and confidence which is due to such portions of them as have been formally sanctioned by the Church, to derive from them unceasing spiritual comfort and instruction. Doubtless, if we are so ignorant as to fancy that all Saints' histories are to be alike in details, and that therefore we ought to wish that the circumstances of our lives were the same as theirs, we shall be doing ourselves great mischief. But let us study them with a true knowledge of the mere elements of the Christian faith, and they will be to us what St. Paul desires his disciples to seek for in his life, namely, a continuation, as it were, of the life of Jesus Christ, carried on through all the successive ages of His Church on earth. They will impress upon our minds with an intensity peculiarly their own, the reality of the invisible world and the ensnaring tendencies of every thing that we possess. Weak and ignorant as is the imaginative and sensitive portion of our nature, it needs every possible help that it can find to counteract the paralysing effects of the worldliness of the world, of the lukewarmness of Christians, and of the enthralling nature of the universe of sight and sense. Our courage is wonderfully strengthened, and our love for things invisible is inflamed, by every thing that forces us, as it were, to see that this visible creation is not the only thing that is real, mighty, and present. The general precepts and the dogmatic statements of religion acquire a singular and living force when we perceive them carried out and realised in the actual affairs of life in a degree to which our personal experience is a stranger. Influenced as human nature is by example, these unpretending narratives, whose whole strength lies in the facts which they record, and not in the art of the biographer, undeniably strike the mind with an almost supernatural force. They enchain the attention; they compel us to say, Are these things true? Are these things possible? Is religion, after all, so terribly near to us? Are this life and this world so literally vain and worthless, so absolutely nothing worth? Are suffering and awful bodily anguish blessings to be really coveted? Are the maxims which I daily hear around me so hopelessly bad and accursed? Are angels and devils so near, so very near, to us all? Is purgatory so terrible and so inevitable to all but the perfect, that these fearful visions of its pains are in substance what I myself shall endure? And if I fall from grace and die in sin before one of the innumerable temptations that hourly beset me, is it true that nothing less than an eternity of such torments, the very reading of which even thus represented makes me shudder with horror, will be my inevitable lot? And is the bliss of the Saints and the joy of loving God so inexpressibly sweet to any souls here on earth? Is it possible that any one should escape from a state of coldness, deadness, worldliness, and unwilling performance of his religious duties, and positively come to lose all taste for bodily and mere intellectual pleasures through the absorbing of his whole being into the love of Jesus and of Mary, and through a burning thirst for the beatific vision of the Eternal Trinity?
And who will venture to say that it is not good for us all to have such thoughts frequently pressed upon our attention? If there is any meaning in the command that we are to aim at being perfect, whatever be the state of life in which we are called to seek perfection, surely it is no ordinary advantage thus to have the essentially supernatural character of our religious life forced again and again upon our attention. For, be it never forgotten, this very supernaturalness is one of its essential features. There are innumerable varieties in our vocations. The earthly circumstances in which we are to serve God are almost innumerable in their variety; but the supernatural element appertains to them all alike. Our actual relationship to the awful and glorious realities of the unseen world is precisely the same in kind as that of the most miraculously endowed Saints. The only difference is this, that in their case that relationship was perceived and visibly manifested in a peculiar mode, to which we are strangers. Heaven, purgatory, and hell are as near to us as if we beheld the visions of St. Frances. The cross is as literally our portion, in its essential nature, as if the five sacred wounds were renewed physically in our agonising frame. Our angel-guardian is as incessantly by our side, as if our eyes were opened to behold his effulgent radiance. Satan strikes the same blows at our souls, whether he shows himself to our sight or not. The relics of Saints, which we carefully look at or criticise, may be at any moment the vehicles of the same miraculous powers as the handkerchiefs from the body of St. Paul. Who would say to a blind man, "Forget the tangible realities of this life, because you cannot see them"? Who would not rather say, "Bear constantly in mind what is the experience of those who can see, that you may practically remember their ceaseless nearness to you"? And just such is the experience of the Saints, in whose histories faith has partly merged into sight, and the veil which blinds our eyes has been partially and at certain seasons withdrawn. It tells us, as few things else can tell, of the reality of the objects of our faith.
I add a word or two on the question, how far the actual conduct of the extraordinary persons whose lives are here related is to serve as a model for practical imitation by ordinary Christians. To the well-instructed Catholic, it would be an impertinence in me to suggest that they are not in every detail thus to be followed. It is the duty of a Christian to follow the rules for daily life which it has pleased Almighty God to lay down in the Gospel, and not to imagine that those exceptional cases of conduct to which He has supernaturally prompted certain individuals are to be imitated by those who have only the ordinary graces of the Holy Spirit.
The general reader, however, may be reminded that Catholics believe, that as the Creator of the universe occasionally interrupts the order of the laws of nature, so He at times interrupts the relative order of the laws of duty; not, of course, the essential laws of morality, but those positive laws which are obligatory simply because they are enacted by competent authority. No person, indeed, can be justified in acting on such an idea in his own case, unless guided by supernatural light, beyond the usual spiritual illumination given to all Christians. This supernatural light is rarely vouchsafed, and it is accordingly in the highest degree presumptuous in any person to overstep the ordinary routine of distinctly ordered duty, under the idea that he is called by God to break the rules given for the guidance of mankind in general. In all such supposed cases, the Catholic Church has the proper tests to apply, by which the soul can learn whether she is led by a Divine afflatus, or betrayed by her own disordered imagination, or the deceits of an invisible tempter.
J.M.C.
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