It was as if a door leading out of some gay ball-room, all lights and flowers and dance music, had suddenly been opened and I had passed through it from the things of time to those of eternity. Fifteen hundred years were wiped out—I saw St. Benedict, the “beloved, called from the cleft in the rock,” praying, rejoicing, hiding from men to be alone with God. And that seems to me the most wonderful thing in the lives of the great founders—they had not at first the smallest forethought of their mission. They only knew that they must save their souls in fear and trembling, and in blind humility they withdrew from all occasions of sin and prayed for purification.
It forms a curious contrast to the life led by most of us who consider ourselves pretty decent Christians in the eyes of the world. Our question is, “How much pleasure and amusement can I get in without actually falling into mortal sin?” and many a dangerous permission we grant ourselves or wring from our unwilling directors, that refused would have prevented, or at least delayed, a hundred falls. It is so terribly easy to do what all the rest are doing—to go and see the problem play, read the interesting bad book, pay the visit at the country house where the old admirer will meet us and spread the old snares for our destruction and his own! We know all about it; it has happened so often; but we go ahead, telling our hearts the lie they know so well—“Oh, it doesn’t matter! I know just where to stop!” Steeped in affection to sin—with, at the best, ages of Purgatory awaiting us—we add every straw we can gather to our already huge burden, and imagine we can lay it down with a good deathbed confession and slip into Paradise with the best!
Very different was the point of view of the great Saints. For one who was converted late in life, we read of scores to whom Perfection called in the very dawn of reason; and it is precisely these, who never committed a mortal sin in their lives, who were most severe with themselves—most nervous, as we should say, about their final salvation.
Their sight, never clouded by any consent to evil, saw even in the most trifling failings a heinous offence against the Divine Majesty, and its infinite purity, visible to them, made their own fallen nature black by contrast. So they took that nature in hand, these athletes (called Benedict, and Francis, and Anthony, and many another blessed name written in the libro d’oro of the recording angel), and thought a lifetime would not be too much to give to the task of subduing it. And the Heavenly Father bade them go on and be of good courage; and never, till the predestined moment came, did He let them dream that their years of prayer and fasting were just a preparation for generalship in His army, that in humbly striving to save their own souls they were fitting themselves to save millions and millions of others.
The first symptom one notices about them is their complete disregard of the natty little idol we call “respectability”—the Church calls it “human respect.” We quite understand that great men should kick it out of the way—who ever heard of Wellington or Kitchener asking “What are people going to say?” Their gifts and their calling place them above the reach of considerations by which we ordinary mortals are content to regulate our actions. We admire, rave over, their splendid carelessness. But when it comes to the Saints we take our shrunken measure, try to fit it to their conduct, and shake our heads. Their whole-heartedness is eccentricity, they thought nothing of inflicting most damaging shocks on public opinion—what a pity! And if we see any of our acquaintances beginning to follow in their steps we look the other way, as if the poor dears had come out into the street half-dressed.
I wonder how many of her friends cared to bow to the late Countess of Denbigh when, a few years ago, she took Bridget’s place at the crossing near Farm Street, and swept it diligently, and stretched out her blessed hand for the pennies, and never thought she was doing anything heroic—just keeping old Bridget’s crossing for her while she went to Mass! I believe the very angels wanted to throw down their shining mantles for her to walk over when she went to heaven—but I am sure some of her friends on earth thought she was putting them in a most embarrassing position.
Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in her “Life of Santa Francesca Romana,” has described very truly and sympathetically these—to us—puzzling stages in the development of saintship. They vary in degree, of course, in each individual case, but the same note runs through all. “Permission to labour first—the result far distant, but clear; the vision of that result when once He had said, ‘Begin and work.’ To tarry patiently for that signal, to obey it unhesitatingly when once given, is the rule of the Saints. How marvellous is their instinct! How accordant their practice! First, the hidden life, the common life; the silence of the house of Nazareth; the carpenter’s shop: the marriage-feast, it may be, for some; and at last ‘the hour is come,’ and the true work for which they are sent into the world has to be done, in the desert or in the cloister, in the temple or in the market-place, on Mount Tabor or on Mount Calvary; and the martyr or the confessor, the founder or the reformer of a religious order, comes forth, and in an instant, or in a few years, performs a work at which earth wonders and angels rejoice.”
CHAPTER IX PEOPLE OF THE HILLS
How much our Italy of Rome and Naples owes to the Apennines! How gratefully should lovers of romance and history regard that mighty chain that runs, an inland sea of crag and peak, forest and ravine, between shore and shore! Physically and morally, it is the backbone of the country, the fortress of tradition, the nurse of what our modern cant calls “plain living and high thinking.” Its hard yet beneficent climate, with sharp delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of her cities and plains will in the end be saved.
Faith is strong; morals, though often transgressed, still clear and commanding. New fads, make-believe religions, free love and race-suicide presented as twin benefits to humanity, the worship of materialism—all the old crimes that come dressed up as new virtues—find no foothold here. The “pale pink uplift” of these modern shams would be laughed to scorn by our people of Sabina and Abruzzi and Ciocciarìa. Their parish priests tramp round amongst them as friends and mentors. The parroco and the apothecary may be the only persons in a whole community who can read, but the child of ten knows the commandments of God and the Church, and the innovator who attempts to make little of these meets with a very cold reception. The people have many faults and many weaknesses, but they are all human ones, and, frankly, I would rather have to do with the man who has slain a rival or a sweetheart in a fit of jealous anger than with a railway magnate or a prophet of the Decadent! The murderer’s record is probably a good deal cleaner than theirs.