Besides casual attacks of illness brought on by his want of care or great labours, he suffered during the latter part of his life from chronic ailments. His heart often troubled him, and medical men told him that he would very likely die of disease of the heart. He had an ulcer in one of his ancles for a number of years, and was often obliged to keep his bed on account of it. No one ever heard him complain, and yet his sufferings must have been very acute. We never remarked him rejoice so much over this painful sore, than when one of the fathers, who respected him much, and wanted to test his mortification, became a Job's comforter. He said: "You deserve to be lame, Father Ignatius, you made such use of your feet in the days of your dancing and sporting, that Almighty God is punishing you now, and the instruments of your pleasure are aptly turned into instruments of pain." He said it was quite true, and that he believed so himself, and that his only wish was that he might not lose a particle of the merit it would bring him, by any kind of complaint on his part. He got a rupture in 1863, and he simply remarked, "I have made another step down the hill to-day."
Whilst labouring under a complication of sufferings he never abated one jot of his round of duties, though requested to do so by his subjects. He was Superior, and exercised his privilege by doing more than any other instead of sparing himself. He did not take more rest nor divide his labours with his companions. During the time of his rectorship in Sutton, he used to preach and sing mass after hearing confessions all morning; attend sick calls, preach in some distant chapel in the evening, return at eleven o'clock, perhaps, and say his office, and be the first up to matins at two o'clock again. The only thing that seemed to pain him was a kind of holy envy. He used to say to the young priests: "Oh, how well it is for you that are young and buoyant, I am now stiff and old, and must have but a short time to labour for Almighty God; still I hope to be able to work to the last." This was his ordinary discourse the very year he died, and the young fathers were much struck by the coincidence between his wishes and their completion.
Father Ignatius Paoli, the Provincial, gave the cook orders to take special care of the indefatigable worn-out Rector. He was not to heed the fasts of the Rule, or at least to give the Superior the full supply of meagre diet. Father Ignatius took the indulgence thankfully for two or three days after returning from a mission; but when he saw a better portion served up for himself oftener than was customary for the other missionaries, he remonstrated with the brother cook. Next day he was served in the same manner, he then gave a prohibition, and at last scolded him. The good brother then told him that he was only carrying out the Provincial's orders. Father Ignatius was silent, but, after dinner, posted off to the doctor, and made him give a certificate of good health and ability to fast, which he forwarded to the Provincial. Father Provincial did not wish to deny him the opportunity of acquiring greater merit, and, at the same time, he would prolong so valuable a life. To save both ends he placed him under the obedience, as far as regarded his health, of one of the priests of his community, whom he strictly obeyed in this matter thenceforward.
Once he went on a sick-call in very wet weather, and either a cramp or an accident made him fall into a dirty slough, where he was wetted through and covered with mud. He came home in this state, and finding a friend of his at the house, who more or less fell into his way of thinking, he began to converse with him. The good father began to speak of the conversion of England, and sat in his wet clothes for a couple of hours, and likely would have stayed longer, so thoroughly was he engrossed with his favourite topic, if one of the religious had not come in, and frightened him off to change garments by his surprise and apprehension.
He seemed indifferent to cold; he would sit in his cell, the coldest day, and write until his fingers became numbed, and then he would warm them by rubbing his hands together rather than allow himself the luxury of a fire. He went to give a retreat somewhere in midwinter, and the room he had to lodge in was so exposed that the snow came in under the door. Here he slept, without bed or fire, for the first night of his stay. It was the thoughtlessness of his entertainers that left him in these cold quarters. In the morning some one remarked that very probably Father Ignatius slept in the dreary apartment alluded to. A person ran down to see, and there was the old saint amusing himself by gathering up the snow that came into his room, and making little balls of it for a kitten to run after. The kitten and himself seem to have become friends by having slept together in his rug the night before, and both were disappointed by the intrusion of the wondering visitor.
His humility was as remarkable to any one who knew him as was his zeal; and on this point also he was well tried. It is not generally known that in the beginning of his Passionist life he adopted the custom of praying before his sermons that God's glory would be promoted by them and himself be humiliated. At the opening of Sutton Church in 1852, he was sent for from London to preach a grand sermon in the evening. A little before the sermon he was walking up and down the corridor; the Provincial met him and asked more in joke than otherwise: "Well, Father Ignatius, what are you thinking of now?" "I am praying," he replied, "that if it be for the glory of God my sermon may be a complete failure as far as human eloquence is concerned." We may imagine the surprise of his Superior at hearing this extraordinary answer; it is believed that this was his general practice to the end. Contrary to the common notion that prevails among religious orders, he wished that the Order would receive humiliations as well as himself. He wished it to come to glory by its humiliations. On one occasion, he expected that the newspapers would make a noise about something that might be interpreted as humiliating to the community of which he was Superior. Father Ignatius addressed the community nearly in these words: We shall have something to thank God for tomorrow; the Protestants will make a great noise in the papers about this affair, and we must be prepared for a full feast of misrepresentations. Let us thank God now in anticipation." He was disappointed, however, as the papers were content with a bare notice of the matter.
Many persons did not give him credit for great humility; they thought his continual quoting of himself, and his readiness to speak about his doings, was, if not egotism, at least inconsistent with profound humility. We cannot answer this imputation better than by giving Father Faber's description of simplicity, which every one knows to be the very character of genuine humility:—
"But let us cast an eye at the action of simplicity in the spiritual life. Simplicity lives always in a composed consciousness of its own demerit and unworthiness. It is possessed with a constant sense of what the soul is in the sight of God. It knows that we are worth no more than we are worth in His sight, and while it never takes its eye off that view of self, so it does not in any way seek to hide it from others. In fact it desires to be this, and no more than this, in the eyes of others; and it is pained when it is more. Every neighbour is, as it were, one of God's eyes, multiplying His presence; and simplicity acts as if every one saw us, knew us, and judged us as God does, and it has no wounded feeling that it is so. Thus, almost without direct effort, the soul of self-love is so narrowed that it has comparatively little room for action; although it never can be destroyed, nor its annoyance ever cease, except in the silence of the grave. The chains of human respect, which in the earlier stages of the spiritual life galled us so intolerably, now fall off from us, because simplicity has drawn us into the unclouded and unsetting light of the eye of God. There is no longer any hypocrisy. There is no good opinion to lose, because we know we deserve none, and doubt if we possess it. We believe we are loved in spite of our faults, and respected because of the grace which is in us, and which is not our own and no praise to us. All diplomacy is gone, for there is no one to circumvent and nothing to appropriate. There is no odious laying ourselves out for edification, but an inevitable and scarcely conscious letting of our light shine before men in such an obviously innocent and unintentional manner that it is on that account they glorify our Father who is in Heaven."—Blessed Sacrament, Book II., c. vii.
The secret by which Father Ignatius arrived at this perfect way of receiving trials was his thanking God for everything. When some one objected to him that we could not thank God for a trial when we did not feel grateful, "Never mind," he would say, "you take a hammer to break a big stone; the first stroke has no effect, the second seemingly no effect, and the third, and so on; but somewhere about the twentieth or hundredth the stone is broken, and no one stroke was heavier than the other. In the same way, begin to thank God, no matter about the feeling, continue, and you will soon break the hardest difficulties." His maxims and sayings on resignation would fill a good-sized volume were they collected together. We shall conclude this chapter with one picked by chance from his letters: