Image of Cross
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LIFE OF FATHER IGNATIUS OF ST. PAUL, PASSIONIST.
BOOK I.
F. Ignatius, a Young Noble.
CHAPTER I.
His Childhood.
Saint Paul gives the general history of childhood in one sentence: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child." The thoughts and ways of children are wonderfully similar; the mind is not sufficiently developed to give direction to character, and the peculiar incidents that are sometimes recorded to prove "the child the father of the man," seem more the result of chance than deliberation. With all this, we like to bask our memory in those sunny days: we love to look at our cradles, at where we made and spoiled our little castles, and we recall the smallest incidents to mind, as if to try and fancy we could be children again. This natural sentiment makes us anxious to know all about the infancy and childhood of those whose life has an interest for us; although knowing that there can be nothing very strange about it; and even, if there be, that it cannot have much weight in moulding the character of our hero, and less still in influencing our own. The childhood of Father Ignatius forms an exception to this. It is wonderful; it shaped his character for a great part of his life. Its history is written by himself, and it is instructive to all who have charge of children. Before quoting from his own autobiography, it may be well to say something about his family; more, because it is customary to do so on occasions like the present, than to give information about what is already well known.
His father was George John, Earl Spencer, K.G., &c., &c. He was connected by ties of consanguinity and affinity with the Earl of Sunderland and the renowned Duke of Marlborough; was successively member of Parliament, one of the Lords of the Treasury, and succeeded Lord Chatham as First Lord of the Admiralty on the 20th of December, 1794. This office he retained until 1800, and, during his administration, the naval history of England shone with the victories of St. Vincent, Camperdown, and the Nile. Perhaps his term of office was more glorious to himself from the moderation and justice with which he quelled the mutiny at the Nore, than from the fact of his having published the victories that gave such glory to his country. He married, in 1781, Lavinia, the daughter of Sir Charles Bingham, afterwards Earl of Lucan. Five sons and three daughters were the issue of this marriage. Two of them died in infancy. The oldest, John Charles, Lord Althorp, succeeded his father in 1834, and died childless in 1845; the second, Sarah, is the present Dowager Lady Lyttelton; the fifth, Robert Cavendish, died unmarried in 1830; the sixth, Georgiana, was married to Lord George Quin, son to the Marquis of Headfort, and died in 1823; the seventh, Frederick, father of the present earl, succeeded his eldest brother in 1845. The youngest, the Honourable George Spencer, is the subject of the present biography.
He was born on the 21st of December, 1799, at the Admiralty in London, and baptized according to the rite of the Church of England, by the Rev. Charles Norris, prebendary of Canterbury. Whether he was taken to Althorp, the family seat in Northamptonshire, to be nursed, before his father retired from office in 1800, we have no means of knowing; but, certain it is, that it was there he spent his childhood until he went to Eton in 1808. We will let himself give us the history of his mind during this portion of his existence: the history of his body is that of a nobleman's child, tended in all things as became his station:—
"My recollections of the five or six first years of my life are very vague,—more so by far than in the case of other persons; and whether I had any notions of religion before my six-year-old birthday, I cannot tell. But it was on that day, if I am not mistaken, that I was taken aside, as for a serious conversation, by my sister's governess, who was a Swiss lady, under whose care I passed the years between leaving the nursery and being sent to school, and instructed by her, for the first time, concerning the existence of God and some other great truths of religion. It seems strange now that I should have lived so long without acquiring any ideas on the subject: my memory may deceive me, but I have a most clear recollection of the very room at Althorp where I sat with her while she declared to me, as a new piece of instruction, for which till then I had not been judged old enough, that there was an Almighty Being, dwelling in heaven, who had created me and all things, and whom I was bound to fear. Till then, I believe, I had not the least apprehension of the existence of anything beyond the sensible world around me. This declaration, made to me as it was with tender seriousness, was, I believe, accompanied with gracious expressions, which have never been, in all my errors and wanderings, obliterated. To what but the grace of God can I ascribe it, that I firmly believed from the first moment this truth, of which I was not capable of understanding a proof, and that I never since have entertained a doubt of it, nor been led, like so many more, to universal scepticism; that my faith in the truth of God should have been preserved while for so long a time I lived, as I afterwards did, wholly without its influence?