Father Faber was doing an immense amount of labor at this time, preaching, visiting the sick, giving retreats and missions, and conducting special devotions, besides employing some time in literary occupations; yet he was almost constantly a sufferer from disease, and was often obliged to cease for a while from all work whatsoever. He had long been subject to very severe and prostrating headaches, connected with which is the following remarkable incident which we shall give in his own words, written to the Countess of Arundel and Surrey on the 2d of December, 1850:
"And now I have so many things to tell you that I hardly know where to begin. Some time ago, a lady at prayer in our church thought it was revealed to her that St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi wished to confer some grazia on me in connection with my headache. Her director gave her permission to act upon this; whereupon she wrote to me, begging me when my headache came on to apply a relic of the saint to my forehead. Some days elapsed; I asked Father Francis, my director, for his leave to do this; as it was a merely temporal thing, he took some time to consider. I became ill, and had a night of great pain. I thought he had forgotten all about it, and that it would be a blameworthy imperfection in me to remind him of it. The morning after, he came to confession, and found me ill in bed; he was going away, but I knew he was going to say Mass, and so I made him kneel down by my bedside, while I put on my stole, and with considerable pain heard his confession; when he rose, I gave him the stole, and asked him to hear my confession, which he did. Afterward he said, 'Well, now, I think it would be well to try this relic.' I answered, 'Just as you please.' I was in great suffering, and very sick besides. He gave it me, and walked away to the door to say Mass. I applied the relic, a piece of her linen, to my forehead; a sort of fire went into my head, through every limb down to my feet, causing me to tremble; before Father Francis could even reach the door, I sprang up, crying, 'I am cured, I am quite well!' He said I looked as white as a sheet; I was filled with a kind of sacred fear, and an intense desire to consecrate myself utterly to God. I got up and dressed, without any difficulty, or pain, or sickness. This was on the Wednesday. On the Saturday I had another headache, but I had not asked Father Francis's leave about the relic, and felt I ought to take no steps to get rid of my cross. In the afternoon he told me I might apply it. Fathers Philip and Edward were in the room. I was on my bed; I took the relic and applied it; there was the same fire in a less degree, but no cure. I then said to the saint, 'I only ask it to go to the novena and benediction.' The cure was instantaneous; while Father Philip had such an impression that the saint was in the room, that he was irresistibly drawn to bow to her. Well, I said my office; then in an hour or so came the novena and benediction; and as soon as I returned to my room, I was taken so ill again I was obliged to go to bed. Meanwhile I had totally forgotten what the others reminded me of afterward, that two years ago Michael Watts Russell wrote to me from Florence, and said, 'The children send their love, and desire me to say they have just come from the tomb of St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi, whom they have been asking to cure Father Wilfrid's headache.'
"After all this, I am sure I shall lose my soul if I do not serve God less lukewarmly; so please pray for me."
God had not given him, however, the favor of a permanent restoration to health. He was never well in London. "I have two vocations," he wrote to Father Bowden, "one for my body and one for my soul; and they happen to be incompatible, so the body must do the best it can, and the soul must rough-ride it for another sixty years, which is supposed to be the term of incessant headache still left me. When you and I sit toothless together, shaking our palsied heads at recreation, we shall look down upon the junior fathers who have been only thirty or forty years in the congregation with an ineffable contempt; and when my dotage comes on, I shall fancy myself still novice-master and you a refractory novice, and I shall trip you up on your crutches for mortification." For the sake of his health he was persuaded to start on a journey to Palestine; but he fell very sick on the way, and went no further than Italy. He reached Naples on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, (1851,) and entered the Oratorian church just as benediction was about to be given, "which," he says, "was jolly." In the same letter (to Father Hutchinson) he writes, "If I can get one, I will bring one of the rum things they put on the altar in Advent and Lent, when flowers are forbidden; they take my fancy hugely." He came home far from well enough to resume his work; but there was a great deal to be done, and he never had any mercy on himself. There was a country house for the congregation to be built at Sydenham Hill, and the fine new Oratory at Brompton to be erected in place of the little establishment in King William street, which the community had long ago outgrown. They took possession of the Brompton house in March, 1854. The vast cost of this great institution had been defrayed principally from the private means of the individual members, but there had been several donations—£10,000 toward the purchase of the site from a lady who wished her gift to be anonymous; £4000 from the Earl of Arundel and Surrey; and £700 collected by a committee for the erection of the church. The current expenses of the house were also defrayed from the pockets of the fathers, it being a rule of the congregation that the receipts from their churches should not contribute in any way to the support of the house, and indeed at Brompton the income of the church did not equal its expenditure.
It was while the Brompton building was under way that Father Faber began with his All for Jesus, or the Easy Ways of Divine Love, that remarkable series of spiritual works which made his name so widely known and loved throughout Europe and America. All for Jesus appeared in 1853; Bethlehem, the eighth and last of the series, was published in 1860. In the mean time, he had collected a volume of his earlier and later poems; completed his poem of Prince Amadis; published a collection of his hymns, many of which have become exceedingly popular, and finished a great deal of minor literary work. He made preparations for other books, on Calvary, The Holy Ghost, The Fear of God, and The Immaculate Heart of Mary, fragments of which appeared after his death under the title, Notes on Doctrinal and Spiritual Subjects. These various writings are too well known and too fondly esteemed, especially in the United States, for any criticism to be called for here, and we can do nothing better than copy the just eulogy which Father Bowden cites from The Dublin Review:
"We know of no one man who has done more to make the men of his day love God and aspire to a higher path of the interior life; and we know no man who so nearly represents to us the mind and the preaching of St. Bernard and St. Bernardine of Siena in the tenderness and beauty with which he has surrounded the names of Jesus and Mary."
All these exquisite works were written in the midst of the most awful physical suffering. "It is plain," he writes in 1858, "that life can't be lived at this rate. But my mind is now like a locomotive that has started with neither driver nor stoker. I can think of nothing but being seized, put on board one of her majesty's ships of war as compulsory chaplain, and carried round the world for two years. If I was on land, I should jib and come home." Bright's disease of the kidneys, gout, neuralgia—a complication, in fact, of numerous disorders, left him hardly an hour of ease, hardly a night of rest. Soon after Easter, in the year 1863, the hope of checking his disease or even notably relieving his sufferings was finally given up. He seems to have been conscious of his condition even before the physicians had pronounced their opinion. During the month of April he made one or two short journeys, but without experiencing any relief. By the middle of June he was so much worse that the last sacraments were administered. On the 28th—his forty-ninth birthday—he saw all the members of the community, one by one, recommending himself to their prayers, and leaving with each some parting gift. He rallied a little after this, and was even well enough to take one or two short drives, and to enjoy farewell visits from Cardinal Wiseman, and Dr. Newman, and many of his other friends. His mind continued perfectly clear and calm until some time in September, when attacks of delirium became frequent, and the sedatives which had been used to produce sleep lost their soothing effect. He received holy communion daily up to and including the 24th of that month. The next day his attendants were able to put him into bed, which had not been done since June; he had passed day and night in his chair, propped up with pillows. He now lay quite still, gazing at a large crucifix, and moving his eyes from one to another of the five wounds. When told that his death was near, he only repeated his favorite exclamation, "God be praised!" On the morning of the 26th, Father Rowe told him that he was going to say Mass for him. He showed by his face that he understood what was said; and just as the Mass must have ended, he turned his head a little and opened his eyes with a touching expression, half of sweetness and half of surprise. So his spirit passed away, as if in the act of realizing the picture which he had drawn in All for Jesus: "Only serve Jesus out of love, and while your eyes are yet unclosed what an unspeakable surprise will you have had at the judgment-seat of your dearest Love, while the songs of heaven are breaking on your ears and the glory of God is dawning on your eyes, to fade away no more for ever!"
We have already alluded in the first part of this article to Father Faber's elegance of appearance and manner, and from a portrait prefixed to the biography it seems that he retained his advantages of person to a late period of his life. He was remarkable for his habits of order and neatness, and once, when a father remarked upon the tidiness of his room, he replied, "The napkin in the sepulchre was found folded at the resurrection." As might be imagined from the narrative of his life, he was always distinguished for gentleness; and Father Bowden remarks that he never was severe in the manner of correcting the faults of his spiritual subjects, except possibly in matters connected with the ceremonial of divine worship. Any defect of demeanor during service, or inattention to the requirements of the rubric, he rebuked with marked severity. In the church he would have every thing of the best, whether it could be seen by the congregation or not. When the new high altar of marble was put up in the Oratory, he was much dissatisfied because the back was not finished like the front, and he found fault with the altar rails for the same reason, complaining that "the side next our Lord" was not ornamented. He was very fond of children, and his correspondence contains some striking evidences of his tenderness to them. We have already spoken of his love of humor—a sense which seems naturally to accompany the poetic instinct. His room was at all hours the frequent resort of his brethren who looked upon it as a renewal of St. Philip's "School of Christian Mirth." Father Bowden quotes the language of an old friend, who wrote at the time of Father Faber's death of "the indescribable charm of his private intercourse, of that wonderful brilliancy of conversation in which he excelled all those whose social powers have made them the idols of London society as far as they have excelled ordinary men, of the magic play of his countenance and of his voice, of the unprecedented combination of tenderness in affection, unearthliness of aim, and worldly wisdom, which characterized his private intercourse, and of his power of attracting little children and learned men, one as much as the other."
Father Bowden has told the story of this beautiful life with appreciation and affection, and with no mean literary ability. His style is direct and unaffected, and he is not given to the superfluity of pious reflection with which the biographers of religious men are so apt to retard their narratives. The volume contains a very copious selection from Father Faber's private correspondence, so that it may be considered in many portions virtually an autobiography.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF CONRAD VON BOLANDEN.