Than brightest transports, choicest prayers,
Which bloom their hour and fade.”[16]
It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be taught a psalm. Having learned the simple verse, “I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue,” he went away, saying that was enough if it was practically acquired. When asked six months, and again many years after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love and sympathy, even though he is not in the habit of exhibiting on his cards “J. Good Soul, Philanthropist,” and was never known to unfold his cambric handkerchief, with the words, “Let us weep.” On the other hand, nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,—to cheat one’s self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when no thought or feeling exists. It has been truly said that when good men who have no deep religious fervor use fervent language, which they have caught from others, or which was the natural expression of what they felt in other and better years,—above all, when they employ on mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been forged in the fires of affliction and hammered out in the shock of conflict,—they cannot easily imagine what a disastrous impression they produce on keen and discriminating minds. The cheat is at once detected, and the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions of religious earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep emotion commands respect; but intense words should never be used when the religious life is not intense. “Costing little, words are given prodigally, and sacrificial acts must toil for years to cover the space which a single fervid promise has stretched itself over. No wonder that the slow acts are superseded by the available words, the weighty bullion by the current paper money. If I have conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy, by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained its end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the ‘daily sacrifice!’ Devotion has found for itself a vent in words.”[17]
Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms. When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending the opera in Paris, he replied, “I am embarrassed at listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Germany, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side of me is a man shabbily dressed, but who feels the music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the gloss off my own impression,—if I have any.”
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Ulhorn’s “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism;” pp. 93, 94.
[14] Mill’s “Logic.”
[15] Sermons, by Rev. F. W. Robertson.
[16] Professor J. H. Newman.