The Sabbaths of Eternity,
One Sabbath deep and wide—
A light upon the shining sea—
The Bridegroom with his bride.”
The student, before accepting Tennyson’s poetic or, more correctly, satiric picture of the hermits of the desert in the early centuries of the Church as represented in “St. Simeon Stylites,” would do well to study the condition of the Christian, or rather pagan, world at the time when the hermits fled to the desert. It is a remote period in the life of the world, and like all remote periods you must translate yourself into it if you would clearly and justly understand it. But we warn you that Kingsley’s “Hermits” will not enlighten you.
Catholics have no need to apologize for the life or policy of their Church during its reign of nineteen hundred years. It is a book open to the world, and every chapter in it is a record of the spiritual and intellectual progress of man. There have been, indeed, twilight epochs—spiritual eclipses—when man seemed to forget his divine destiny; but the Church of God still stood at her altars waiting for her people to kneel—waiting for the “Introibo ad altare Dei” to reach the heart of king and noble, peasant and slave.
Therefore as a student of history and literature we protest against every misrepresentation of Catholic truth, whether within the pages of history, fiction or poetry, no matter who may be its author—a professor in one of our New World universities, a Marie Corelli counting her gains as she kneels at the shrine of a publisher, a Tennyson striking the chords of falsehood and “looking down towards Camelot,” or a Browning constructing his little monologue chapel by the wayside to seduce from Catholic truth his poetic pilgrim—it is ever misrepresentation wearing the specious garb of truth, whether it be in history or fiction or poetry teaching falsehood.
THE STUDY AND INTERPRETATION
OF LITERATURE