"But," the caviller will object, "unassisted genius has visions of its own." What then? Does that circumstance discredit all visions that claim to be supernatural? Far from it; the visions of genius are elevated by virtue. They are not only purified thus, but edged with insight and enriched with wisdom. Has virtue, then, nothing of the supernatural? or would Dante have "seen" as much if, instead of following her voice, he had followed that of the siren? Again, simplicity of character, and what Holy Scripture calls "the single eye," have a close affinity with genius; for which reason the poor possess many characteristics of it denied to the rich—its honest apprehension of great ideas, for instance, and the inspiration of good sense; its power of realizing the essential and of ignoring the accidental; its freshness in impressions and loyalty in sentiment. But simplicity is a divine gift. Above all, faith communicates often what resembles genius to persons who would otherwise, perhaps, have narrow minds and wavering hearts. It appears, then, that the whole of our moral and spiritual being—which is of course under supernatural influence—admits of such a development as is favorable to genius, and may eminently promote that natural "vision" which belongs to it. Education and life may do the same. What disperses the faculties over a vast field of heterogeneous knowledge saps genius; what gives unity to the being strengthens it. It evaporates in vanity; it is deepened by humility. Society dissipates its energies and chills them; solitude concentrates and heats them. Indulgence relaxes it; severity invigorates it. It is dazzled by the importunate sunshine of the present; its eyes grow wider in the twilight of the past and the future. All the circumstances, exterior and interior, that favor genius are thus indirectly connected with grace or with providence. What, then, is not to be thought in a case like that of St. Gertrude, in which we find, not genius trained on toward sanctity, but sanctity enriched with genius?
It is, however, to be remembered that we in no degree disparage the claim to a divine character possessed by St. Gertrude's visions in admitting that some of them may not claim that character. In one favored with such high gifts, it is not unphilosophical to suppose that the natural qualities, as well as supernatural graces, which lend themselves to visions would probably exist in a marked decree. We have no reason, indeed, to conclude that the Hebrew prophets, to whom visions were sent by God, never possessed, when not thus honored, anything that resembled them—anything beyond what belongs to ordinary men. They, too, may have had unrecorded visions of a lower type, in which the loftiest of their thoughts and deepest of their experiences became visible to them; and if so, they had probably something ancillary to vision in their natural faculties and habits, independently of their supernatural gifts. Among the peculiar natural characteristics of St. Gertrude may be reckoned an extraordinary literalness of mind, strangely ignited with a generalizing power. She had a value for everything as it was, as well as for the idea it included. There was a minuteness as well as a largeness about her. These qualities probably belonged to that pellucid simplicity which kept her all her life like a child. This childlike instinct would of itself have constantly stimulated her colloquies with him who was the end of all her thoughts. In the spiritual as in the intellectual life, the powers seem augmented through this dramatic process, as though fecundated from sources not their own. The thoughts thus originated seem to come half from the mind with which the colloquy is held, and half from native resources.
Let us now pass to another cavil. Devotions such as those of St. Gertrude have sometimes been censured because they are full of love. There [{412}] is here a strange confusion. Most justly might dislike be felt for devotions in which love is not supplemented by a proportionate veneration. Among the dissenting bodies devotions of this sort are to be found, though we should be sorry rudely to criticise what implies religious affection, and is a recoil from coldness. The fault is not wholly theirs. An age may be so characterized that it cannot be fervent, even in its prayers, without being earthly; but such an age is not religious, and may not judge those that were. In them reverence and love are inseparable. God reigns in man's heart through love and fear. True devotion must, therefore, have at once its fervid affection and its holy awe. Thus much will be conceded. It does not require much penetration to perceive also that the more it habitually possesses of awe, the more it admits of love. If the expression of divine resembles that of human affection, this results by necessity from the poverty of language. Those who object to the use of the word "worship" in connection with God's saints as well as with God (though of course used in a different sense) see nothing to surprise them in the circumstance that the terms "love" and "honor" possess equally this double application. Yet when expressions of real and zealous love are addressed to Almighty God, they are sometimes no less scandalized than when worship (that is, honor and veneration) is addressed in a subordinate sense to the saints! In both cases alike they labor under misconceptions which may easily be removed.
To abolish the resemblance between the expression of divine and human affections, it would be necessary to break down the whole of that glorious constitution of life by which human ties, far from being either arbitrary things or but animal relations improved upon, are types of divine ties. The fatherhood in heaven is admitted to be the antetype of human parentage; and the adoptive brotherhood with Christ, the second Adam, to be the antetype of the natural brotherhood. Can any other principle prevail in the case of that tie which is the fountain whence the other domestic charities flow? Not in the judgment of those who believe, with St. Paul, that marriage is a type of that union which subsists between him and his Church. If there be an analogy between divine and human ties, so there must be between the love that goes along with them and the blessedness that is inseparable from love.
In such cavils as we have referred to there is a latent error that belonged to the earliest times. The caviller assumes that an element of corruption must needs exist in religious affections which betray any analogy to human affections, whereas it is but a Manichean philosophy which affirms the necessary existence of corruption in the human relations themselves. Human relations are not corrupt in themselves either before or since the fall; but human beings are corrupt and weak, and do but little justice to those relations. Praise, both in heaven and on earth, is held out to us in Holy Scripture as one of the rewards of virtue. It may not be the less true, on that account, that few orators have listened to the acclamations that follow a successful speech without some alloy of self-love. Possessions are allowable; it may be, notwithstanding, that few have had "all things" as though they "had nothing." It is not in the human relations that the evil exists (for they retain the brightness left on them by the hand that created them), but in those who abuse them by excessive dependence on them, or by disproportion. It is mainly a question of due subordination. Where the higher part of our being is ruled by the lower, or where the lower works apart from and in contempt of the higher, there evil exists. Where the opposite takes place—where a flame enkindled in heaven feeds first upon the spiritual heights of our being and descends by due degrees through the [{413}] imagination and the affections—there the whole of our being works in a restored unity, and there proportionately the senses are glorified by the soul. This has ever been the teaching of that Church which encircles the whole of human life with its girdle of sacraments. It has naturally come to be forgotten in those communities which admit the legal substitution of divorce, and polygamy for the sanctity and inviolability of Christian marriage.
That those who do not understand the relation of human to divine ties should not understand the devotions of saints is far from strange. The expressions of the saints are bold because they are innocent. They have no part in that association of ideas which takes refuge in prudery. The language of St. Gertrude is that of one on whose brow the fillet had dropped when she was a child, and who had neither had any experience of earthly love nor wished for any. It is indeed the excellence of the domestic ties that they are indirect channels of communication with heaven. But in her case the communication was direct and immediate—a clear flame rising straight from the altar of perpetual sacrifice. The beautiful ascent of affections from grade to grade along the scale of life had in her been superseded by a yet diviner self-devotion. She had not built upon the things that are lawful within due measure, but upon those counsels the rewards of which are immeasurable. She had reaped immortal love in the fields of mortification. She had begun where others end. She had found the union of peace with joy. Had there been added to this whatever is best in the domestic ties, it could to her have been but a rehearsal, in a lower though blameless form, of affections which she had already known in that highest form in which alone they are capable of being realized in heaven.
Expressions associated with human affections are to be found in St. Gertrude's devotions, because she had human affections. In the monastic renunciation the inmost essence of them is retained; for that essence, apart from its outward accidents, is spiritual. What is the meaning of the incarnation, if God is not to be loved as man? To what purpose, without this, the helpless childhood, the fields through which he moved, the parables so homely, the miracles of healing, the access given to sinners, the tears by the grave of him whom he was about to restore to life, the hunger and the weariness, the reproach for sympathy withheld? These domestic memories of the Church are intended to give the higher direction to human affections before they have strayed into the lower, in order that the lower may receive their interpretation from the higher. Nothing is more wonderful than to see the natural passing into the supernatural in actual life; nothing more instructive than to see this in devotions. It is not the presence of a human element in them, but the absence of a divine element, that should be deplored. The natural may be shunned where the supernatural is not realized. It can only be realized through love; and love is perfected through self-sacrifice, the strength and science of the saints.
It is easy to distinguish between devotions that are really too familiar and those of the saints. The latter, as has been remarked, are as full of awe as of love. Their familiarity implies the absence of a servile fear; but everywhere that filial fear, the seat of which is in the conscience, reveals itself. Again, if they regard our Lord in his character of lover of souls, they regard him proportionately in his other characters, as brother and as friend, as master and as Lord, as creator and as judge. The manhood in Christ is ever leading the heart on to his divinity; and the incarnation, as a picture of the divine character, is the strongest preacher of Theism. Again, the love that reveals itself in them has no pettiness, no narrowness; it exults in the thought of that great army of the elect, each member of [{414}] which is equally the object of the divine love, as a single drop reflects the firmament no less than the ocean of which it is a part. Once more: in such devotions the thirst after the divine purity is as strongly marked as that for the divine tenderness; and death is ever welcome, that God may be seen in the spirit.
"But in these devotions," it is said, "we trace the yearnings of a woman's heart." And why not? With what else is woman to love God? May not the devotion of a child be childlike, and of a man be manly? Why are female affections alone to strain themselves into the unnatural, instead of advancing to the supernatural? In such sneers there is as little philosophy as charity. The whole structure of our being—together not only with all its experiences, but with all its capacities—is that which, yielding to divine grace, constitutes the mould in which our devotion is cast. It is not religion alone, but everything—art, science, whatever we take in—that is colored by whatever is special to the faculties or the dispositions of the recipient. Religion is the only thing that holds its own in spite of such modification. It does so on account of its absolute simpleness. But it does much more than hold its own. It is enriched. Religion is as manifold as it is simple. The faculties and instincts of the mere isolated individual are too narrow to allow of his fully accepting the gifts which it extends to us. But fortunately our incapacities balance each other; the characteristics of religion least appreciated by one being often those which will most come home to another. Not only individuals but nations and ages, both by what they have in common and by what they have of unlike, unconsciously help to make up the general store. Christianity has become in one sense to each of us what it was to an à Kempis as well as what it was to an Aquinas; and why not also to what it was to a Gertrude or a Theresa? All things subserve this vast scheme. How much we are enriched by those different aspects of religion presented to us by the chief authentic architectures! In the Gothic, which is mystic, suggestive, infinite, it is chiefly the spirituality of religion that is affirmed. In the Roman basilica, orderly and massive, it is the "law" that is insisted on. In the Byzantine style, precious marble and beaming gold, and every device of rich color and fair form, preach the inexhaustibility of Christian charity and the beauty of the Eden it restores. These aspects of religion are all in harmony with each other. The mind that embraces them is not endeavoring to blend contradictions into a common confusion, but to reunite great ideas in the unity from which they started. Still more is the manifold vastness of religion illustrated by those diversities of the religious sentiment which result from diversities in the human character.