It has been the fashion of our days to think lightly of legends and traditions of saints, to ridicule their so-called inventors, and pity their supposed victims. On the other hand, we see families clinging to certain versions of certain facts relative to their long descent and the doughty deeds of their world-famed forefathers; we see nations dwelling complacently on marvellous explanations concerning their origin, and proudly pointing to distant feats of knightly prowess performed by northern Viking and Frank or Vandal chief; we see tradition already growing up like irrepressible vines around the memory of great men buried perchance but yesterday, and even around the persons of living men to whom the wheel of fortune or the rarer gift of genius has given a temporary prominence; and is it strange that Catholics should love to repeat similar legends concerning their forefathers, the founders of their spiritual nation, their forerunners in the kingdom of heaven? We, too, have in our faith a family pride, a national pride, and a pride born of personal friendship and attachment for some of God's living saints, his yet uncrowned champions. We are all one family, we all call to God "Abba," that is, Father; we are "the sons of God" and the "joint heirs with Christ." We cannot help rejoicing over the glory of one of our brethren or sisters; we cannot help being proud of their virtues and seeking to perpetuate and honor their memory. We are all one nation, too, for there is but one Head, one Lord, one Christ; and in the history of the saints we learn the history of the church, our state, our country, our kingdom. And among our great men, whom no wheel of fortune but the divine decree of Providence has lifted to pre-eminence among us, and with whom, for the most part, holiness and humility take the place of genius—is it strange we should single out some of whom, having known them, we willingly speak and hear little details told, and treasure them up, and weave them into heart-poems for our children's children? So grows tradition, and a mind that has no place in it for tradition's evergreen vines to spread their beautiful network is but a misshapen likeness of the mind that God created in Adam, and endowed with sympathetic tenderness and appreciative discrimination.
Some among us have had the happiness to be brought into contact with men greatly favored by God. And who that had daily seen his humble, hidden convent-life, that sweet soul-poet and child-like priest, Frederick Faber, could fail to accumulate concerning him loving traditions, and what our descendants may hereafter call fond and vain legends? And who that had once heard the voice of Henry Newman, the leader of the school of thought of our days in the simple converse he loves best, or in the plain instructions to his school-children at catechism, could help treasuring up such a recollection as more precious by far than a token of royal friendship, or the memory of some unexampled intercourse with state minister or powerful diplomat? There are others who have lived or are living in the same cold, beliefless days as ourselves, and whose presence, either tangible through personal acquaintance or reflected through their sermons or their books, is a perpetual fragrance, which we seek ever to keep alive in the garden of our hearts by heaping up and stowing away in our minds all manner of details belonging to their useful and everyday lives.
Pius IX. and Montalembert, and the Curé d'Ars, and Father Ignatius Spencer, and the Père de Ravignan; Lacordaire and the convert Jew, Hermann, the musician and Carmelite who has but lately passed away, and will be remembered, let us trust, even as the Fra Angelico of the nineteenth century; Mother Seton and the Sœur Rosalie; Thomas Grant, the saintly Bishop of Southwark, who meekly laid down his burden in the City of the Catacombs when his Lord called him from the Council of the Vatican to the foot of the throne; and Henry Manning, and John Hughes, and others yet whose names are known only to a few friends on earth, but widely known among the hosts of heaven, sons of Benedict and daughters of Scholastica, all these are among the chosen ones whose names cannot but be speedily wreathed in legendary and traditional history. And even if it happens that some detail lovingly told comes to be exaggerated, and have accessories linked to it by earnest—if indiscreet—zeal, shall that be accounted as a crime and a malicious distortion of truth? An error of love can be surely forgiven by mothers who are proud of their battle-stained sons; by children who worship the mother that taught them, and the father who guided and corrected them; by soldiers who tell round the camp-fire of the iron men who led them to victory, or who bore with them and for them an equally glorious captivity and defeat; by sick men who do not forget the "Sister's" care; by all, in a word, who have a heart wherewith to be grateful, a mind wherewith to admire, a memory wherewith to give honor.
What is true of the saints of to-day is so, and was so from the beginning, of the saints of long ages ago. And if their history has come down to us woven of fact and legend both, it is thus only the more historical to us, for it tells us the history of the church's love for her glorified children, as well as the record of the real life of those children themselves. Santa Restituta has thus led us far from Ischia's scarcely known beauties and simple island shrine, but she now leads us back to her own sanctuary by the thought here suggested, that, even as many hidden saints walk among us now, so there are many hidden nooks of the earth, like her sea-girt home, where faith is still the daily bread of the people, and where an almost primeval innocence reigns under the protection of that happy, childlike ignorance which, according to modern civilization, is the root of all evil.
Hidden saints are like to these little inclosed gardens of faith; their hearts are valleys sequestered from the glare of the world's unbelief and the world's selfishness; their souls are as rock-bound creeks where lilies grow and wavelets ripple over golden sands; with them, too, the sunset of life is ever the most glorious hour, as it is with Ischia's myrtle-clad rocks and vine-crowned cottages.
Santa Restituta, pray for us, and, if we are not worthy to be of the number of the saints ourselves, suffer us to be the historians, the biographers, the poets of such saints as those who are known only by name in one remote corner of God's universe, or of such other saints of whom glimpses are now and then revealed to us by the very simplicity and utter unguardedness of their sweet and undefiled nature.
A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT OF A COLLEGE.
[We have received and publish the following letter with great pleasure, and it is to be hoped that others will take up the same subject, and express their views upon it. Perhaps we may even venture to suggest the project of a convention or congress of heads of colleges under the auspices of the prelates, in order to discuss and resolve on useful measures connected with Catholic education.]