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THE FINDING OF 
 THE CROSS 
 
 E. HERMAN 
 

 
/ 
 THE FINDING OF 
 THE CROSS 
 
 / BY 
 
 / 
 E. HERMAN 
 
 Author of “The Meaning and Value of 
 Mysticism”, “Creative Prayer”, “The 
 Secret Garden of the Soul’, ete. 
 
 NEW GP vom 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
Copyright, 1926, 
 By George H. Doran Company 
 
 THE FINDING OF THE CROSS 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
TO 
 tad yd te 
 AND 
 CAB. 
 in Gratitude 
 
 M. H. 
 
ve 
 ash) 
 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 WHEN these consecutive Lenten studies first 
 appeared in the Church Times, it was felt by 
 an ever-increasing number of people who 
 looked to my late wife for light and guidance 
 that they embodied some of her best and ripest 
 thought and were of singular and lasting value, 
 and a desire was expressed in many quarters 
 that they should be issued in permanent form. 
 With the exception of a few minor verbal cor- 
 rections, they now appear exactly as she left 
 them. 
 
 The title, “The Finding of the Cross,” is 
 taken from the heading of Chapter VII. I 
 think it may most appropriately stand for the 
 volume as a whole, inasmuch as one of the 
 chief objects of Lent is to help us towards a 
 fresh discovery of the Cross and its implica- 
 tions for daily life, and all the seven chapters 
 treat of the way along which we are to travel 
 in order to reach that goal. 
 
 9 
 
Preface 
 
 The tributes rendered to my wife reveal that 
 thousands of men and women in many lands 
 have been enlightened in mind and stimulated 
 in heart by a study of her writings, and this 
 book is sent forth in the hope and with the 
 prayer that many more, in all sections of the 
 Church Catholic, may by this her final mes- 
 sage—so profound, yet so practical—be helped 
 in their search for spiritual reality and in their 
 endeavour to reach a higher standard of noble 
 and holy living. 
 
 My warmest thanks are due to the Editor 
 of the Church Times for his kind permission to 
 reprint these studies, 
 
 M. HERMAN. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Tue Joy or PENITENCE . 
 
 II. Tue Mystery or MorTIFICATION . 
 Ill. Tue TreAsureE oF SILENCE 
 IV. THe Gory or PATIENCE 
 
 V. THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THOUGHT . 
 VI. Tue ADVENTURE OF ENDURANCE 
 VII. Tuer FINDING OF THE Cross 
 
 CONTENTS 
 

 
THE FINDING OF THE CROSS 
 
ih 
 
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 YN x 
 
 es 
 Mae S" 
 
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 Naat h 
 he bb te Sey 
 Wy ad 1 Oy met 
 
 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE JOY OF PENITENCE 
 
 Remember, O man! To the youthful heart, 
 the threshold of Lent is chill with the breath 
 of decay. Ashes for remembrance—with that 
 the reluctant soul enters Lent’s grey precincts 
 and prepares for long, sunless days of peniten- 
 tial duty. As the days go on, their steady dis- 
 cipline acts as a bracing tonic, but the first 
 touch of Ash Wednesday is spectral and men- 
 acing to many in whom the love of sunshine 
 and laughter is strong. But to those who have 
 lost their first hot grasp upon life, it is not the 
 thought of mortality that makes the call to 
 remembrance unwelcome. For then the sting 
 of memory is not death but sin, and their only 
 fear of Lent is that it may pass without having 
 taught them that art of remembering well 
 which is the A B C of repentance. 
 
 I 
 
 We know from experience how unsanctify- 
 ing the remembrance of sin can be, and how 
 13 
 
14 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 alarmingly its echoes may awaken a whole 
 black cavernful of hurtful emotions. We know 
 the impure passion of remorse that doubles the 
 soul back upon itself in gnawing impotence; 
 the self-torturing shame whose blush leaves a 
 stain; the blighting dejection born of wounded 
 self-esteem; the weary melancholy and sterile 
 regret that drain the spirit; and, at the last, the 
 dull paralysis that follows vainly-spent ener- 
 gies. And so we have, again and again per- 
 haps, run through the whole gamut of self- 
 regarding emotion without having felt peni- 
 tence or achieved repentance. Begun in un- 
 fruitful sorrow, our Lent ended in dull per- 
 functoriness; and Easter brought a sense of 
 relief, eloquent, not of the joy of the forgiven, 
 but rather of the boredom of the self-dis- 
 illusioned. 
 
 It does not take us long to recognize that 
 the root of our failures in repentance is self- 
 love. It is our self-love that breeds that de- 
 structive sadness which contracts the mind and 
 warps the soul. Past acts of indiscretion and 
 folly, committed without malice aforethought, 
 fester into present sins of pride, as they are 
 brooded over by our outraged self-respect. We 
 
~The Joy of Pemtence 15 
 
 seek self-knowledge by peering into our own 
 darkness, instead of holding up our souls to 
 the Divine light, and are vexed but remain 
 uncontrite. We are scorched by ignoble shame, 
 but its fire leaves our meannesses unconsumed. 
 Our defections sting us to self-contempt, but 
 though we bite the dust in humiliation, we 
 come no nearer humility. And knowing that 
 the wound of self-love is likely to bleed again 
 at the slightest touch, and that the tricks of 
 self-love are legion, what reason have we for 
 supposing that this Lent will find us immune 
 - from its myriad deceptions? 
 
 II 
 
 Perhaps the best way of escape is to recall 
 to ourselves wherein true repentance consists 
 and what are the fruits of penitence. That 
 means to think well upon things we have learnt 
 to call commonplaces by reason of our own 
 commonplace apprehension of them. As we 
 realize their depth and height, we shall make 
 our Lenten reading a study of the conceptions 
 of compunction of heart, penitence, penance, 
 and repentance, as we find them in the New 
 Testament especially, and in the great ascetical 
 
16 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 writers. (There is no need to disparage small 
 books wholesale; a small book may serve as 
 a gate into a large world of spirituai reality.) 
 And even the simplest study will avail to im- 
 print once more upon our forgetful minds the 
 fundamental truth that repentance is not a 
 self-regarding but a God-regarding activity; 
 that St. Thomas Aquinas was profoundly right 
 when he said that the root of all things is 
 Mercy; and that penitential sorrow is justi- 
 fied by its threefold fruit of joy, vision, and 
 courage. 
 
 Til 
 
 Of these fruits joy seems the most remote— 
 at any rate, in certain moods. Perhaps the 
 ultimate reason for this is that when we think 
 of joy we are accustomed to conceive of it as 
 having its root either in ourselves or in our 
 response to happy circumstances. The case is 
 otherwise with pain and sorrow. Catholic 
 teaching has familiarized us with the idea of 
 vicarious suffering and of participation in sor- 
 rows not our own. And even a superficial 
 acquaintance with the mystics takes us a step 
 
The Joy of Pemtence 17 
 
 further, in showing how the dedicated soul may - 
 be caught up into a pain and agony that have 
 their roots, neither in personal emotion, nor 
 in the mysterious movement of suffering sym- 
 pathy, but solely in the agony of our Lord upon 
 the Cross, which is permitted, as it were, to 
 overflow into the heart that could of itself 
 know no such pain. 
 
 The joy born of penitence comes somewhat 
 after the same fashion. It does not well up 
 from the penitent soul; it is not even merely 
 the conscious joy of forgiveness. It flows into 
 the soul from that Fountain of Joy which 
 springs up within angelic hearts, whose source 
 is in the very Being of God. It is part of the 
 unique and unearthly gladness of the angels 
 in heaven over one sinner that repenteth; and 
 it comes only to the soul that is humble and 
 brave enough to seek no joy for herself in the 
 cup of penitential sorrow, but leaves to the 
 citizens of heaven the wine that is salt tears 
 to her own palate. 
 
 It is therefore in vain that we try to excite 
 ourselves to joy at penitential seasons. When 
 our Lord looked for friends and neighbours to 
 
18 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 rejoice with Him over the sheep that was lost, 
 He could find them no nearer than heaven. 
 The flower of joy that we seek never yet grew 
 on human soil. 
 
 Yet we can do something to hasten the com- 
 ing of that joy. Itis a very simple thing, and, 
 perhaps for that very reason, the last thing 
 we think of doing. Weare told of St. Jerome 
 that one Christmas night he wished to give a 
 present to the Infant Jesus. First he offered 
 the Lord his works on the Holy Scriptures, 
 then his labours for the conversion of souls, 
 then such virtues of his as he was able to 
 offer. But all this was not what the Lord 
 wanted. “Jerome,” He said, “it is thy sins 
 I wished for. Give them to Me that I may 
 pardon them.” 
 
 We too are ready to offer everything but 
 the one thing to our Lord. We show Him our 
 poor efforts, our laborious penances, We are 
 impelled to offer Him our sorrows and dis- 
 appointments: and that is well. Only our sins 
 we hug to our bosoms, turning them towards 
 ourselves and writhing with shame, instead of 
 turning them towards Him and being humbled 
 by His joy at our confidence. That there is 
 
The Joy of Penitence 19 
 
 more real repentance in perfect trust than in 
 any other action is a truth we are very slow 
 to learn, 
 
 “The hour of a man’s pardon,” says Origen, 
 “is a festival-day for Jesus Christ”; and it is 
 when we make a feast-day for our Lord that 
 we first come to know that joy is indeed hidden 
 within the bitterness of penitential sorrow. 
 
 IV 
 
 The roots of joy lie deepest in the soil of 
 repentance, but it is the fruit of vision that 
 is generally the first to ripen. We have read 
 the stories of the Woman that was a Sinner 
 and of the Penitent Thief so often, and, it must 
 be confessed, so mindlessly, that we have been 
 dulled to their stinging challenge. At the heart 
 of their comforting assurance lies a sting which 
 pricked Jewish self-righteousness and pagan 
 arrogance alike into centuries of venemous re- 
 taliation, and still pricks the Pharisee and the 
 pagan that slumber in every human soul. For 
 these stories tell us that the outcast and de- 
 spised sometimes have what in mean moments 
 we incline to call a “trick” of discerning’ the 
 Divine Glory, where the respectable and re- 
 
20 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 spected can only see the grey homespun of com- 
 mon humanity. A woman who was accounted 
 as the mud of the streets, and accounted her- 
 self as such, sees a travel-worn mendicant sit- 
 ting slighted at a virtuous man’s table, and 
 recognizes in Him the world’s most illustrious 
 citizen and heaven’s centre of adoration, the 
 Divine-Human Saviour-Friend of all who sin 
 and suffer. A dying outlaw of the brutal type 
 looks from his cross of agony at the mangled 
 wreck of manhood on the cross next to him, 
 and sees, through blood and tears, the King 
 Who holds the keys of Paradise. Whence had 
 they, of all mortals, such piercing clarity of 
 spiritual vision? The answer ought to stab 
 us with self-reproach. It was because they 
 saw as we do not see. We see with our minds, 
 or our emotions, or our sentimental or artistic 
 susceptibilities; they saw with the eyes of 
 broken and contrite hearts. 
 
 And if we have to deplore a dearth of vision 
 among us, or, more fatal still, an epidemic of 
 spurious vision, it is because the light of peni- 
 tence burns dim. It is quite easy to have 
 the false vision which the thousand-and-one 
 pseudo-mystical cults encourage. Self-decep- 
 
The Joy of Pemtence 7 21 
 
 tion is always fatally easy, and the Devil can 
 counterfeit all gifts and graces except one— 
 the contrite heart. Pharisee and pagan alike 
 are readily captivated by the glory that en- 
 circles the brows of false Christs: the contrite 
 soul alone remains unsatisfied until she has 
 seen the print of the nails. 
 
 V 
 
 As with vision, so with that heroic devotion 
 which makes the saint. We implore God to 
 give saints to His Church in these difficult days. 
 There will be more saints when there are more 
 penitents, and better penitents. We look back 
 upon the early ages of the Church, when her 
 greatest saints were at once her most learned 
 doctors and her most profound penitents. 
 They came from the mire of a decadent pagan- 
 ism, and their conversion was wrought of blood 
 and tears, and born of an agony of penitence 
 that seems remote as an old-world legend to 
 us to-day. We remember the heroic Ages of 
 Faith, and our ears are filled with the weeping 
 of men and women who were penitents before 
 they were saints, and greater penitents as they 
 erew in sainthood. Their tears still bathe the 
 
22 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 feet of Christ. Their sorrow was the measure 
 of a love that dared greatly. 
 
 The Penitent Thief forgot his agony and 
 the jeers of the crowd in acclaiming his King. 
 He gathered up his dying strength into a con- 
 fession whose daring we can but vaguely meas- 
 ure. The Woman that was a Sinner brake 
 the box, and its perfume filled the house of 
 contempt and arrogance. The great aureoled 
 penitents of the Christian ages strike shame 
 to our timid hearts by the reckless magnificence 
 of their devotion, the sheer audacity of their 
 love. 
 
 We do not break the box of conventional 
 penance and pedestrian duty, because only the 
 fingers of penitential love can shatter its sub- 
 stance. We miss the adventure of the Christian 
 life because we love too little, and we love too 
 little because we see too dimly, and we see so 
 dimly because we are so slow to repent. But 
 as humble penitence grows, the unimaginable 
 love of Christ is revealed. Then love answers 
 Love; the box of self is shattered, and Easter 
 joy breaks through the greyness of Lenten 
 sorrow. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE MYSTERY OF MORTIFICATION 
 
 ONcE more that restless, myriad-faced entity 
 commonly called “the modern mind” is devel- 
 oping a sense of mystery. It has wearied of 
 the clear, thin doctrine of rationalism; sick- 
 ened of the thick, square religion of positivism; 
 outgrown the crass negations of secularism. 
 Once more it is attempting to launch out into 
 the deep, lured by the mystery at the core of 
 life. And since it confuses depth with unintel- 
 ligibility and mystery with bombastic vague- 
 ness, it lends a ready ear to the pseudo-mystic 
 and to the fluent purveyor of New Thought 
 who offer to hypnotize it “into tune with the 
 Infinite,” or to initiate it into the art of swelling 
 itself out into a “super-mind” and mastering 
 all of life there is to master. 
 
 I 
 
 But if the so-called “modern mind” is once 
 more falling in love with mystery, it is none 
 23 
 
24 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 the less as much out of love as ever with that 
 region of our mysterious life which is the 
 peculiar domain of mortification. Indeed, it 
 would deny that mortification and mystery 
 have anything in common. The one is the 
 essence of life, the other its flat dental. 
 Frankly, we have little patience with the idea 
 of mortification. To most of us it is part of 
 that dreary infatuation with death, that morbid 
 lust of repression, that underground conspiracy 
 against life itself which we call medizeval ascet- 
 icism. We have outgrown a religion expressed 
 in negatives. We crave for the positive. We 
 want, not life only, but life more abundant. 
 And in this we think to reproduce the mind of 
 Christ. 
 
 And yet, when we look closely at this im- 
 pressionable age of ours, with its passion for 
 positive, joyous life and its doctrine of un- 
 trammelled self-expression, we do not find that 
 it is characterized by that vigour and blitheness 
 which one connects with “life more abundant.” 
 Indeed, the devotees of the new cult of life 
 are strangely anemic and pulseless, and an 
 hour in their company leaves one considerably 
 depressed. The more talk there is about life, 
 
The Mystery of Mortification 25 
 
 the less of the reality can be traced. The 
 reason is not far to seek. These hectic lovers 
 of life have failed to discover its secret, for 
 they have sought it in life, whereas they should 
 have looked for it in death. At the centre 
 of life is a mystery of death, the secret of the 
 grain of wheat which, except it die, cannot 
 rise to life and bear fruit. That is why morti- 
 fication, the art of dying daily, so far from 
 being the negation of life, is its indispensable 
 condition. 
 
 But mortification is negative, we insist, and 
 the soul cannot live on negations. Mortifica- 
 tion is cloistered, monastic; and we moderns 
 shrink from the cloister. When we assist at 
 monastic office, what do we hear, the first thing 
 in the morning, when the positive sun pierces 
 the sky and the glad birds shrill their positive 
 note against the stillness? 
 
 Now that the daylight fills the sky, 
 
 We lift our hearts to God on high, 
 
 That He, in all we do or say, 
 Would keep us free from harm to-day: 
 
 Would guard our hearts and tongues from strife; 
 From anger’s din would hide our life; 
 
 From all ill sights would turn our eyes; 
 
 Would close our ears from vanities. 
 
26 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 It is negative from first to last. What if that 
 prayer be answered? What if we are kept 
 free from harm that day and saved from cer- 
 tain evils? Will that of itself make us any 
 better? Is the meek and incurious oyster really 
 a nobler creature than the restless and destruc- 
 tive lion? 
 
 II 
 
 Such reasoning is plausible enough on the 
 surface, but it will not stand the test of reality. 
 Richard Jefferies—by no means an advocate 
 of cloistered virtue—shatters it, en passant, 
 with a little parable. He was in the habit of 
 coming out of doors at night to feast his eyes 
 upon a brilliant star which dominated the sky 
 at that particular season. One night he came 
 out as usual, but, though the skies were clear, 
 there was no star to greet him. Puzzled, he 
 stood and looked. Then, suddenly, a light wind 
 stirred a tree, a leaf blew aside, and lo! the 
 star. The moving aside of a little leaf—how 
 barrenly negative! The star, with its mighty 
 suggestion, its thrilling wonder, its subduing 
 awe—how positive! 
 
 Or to come closer to human life. A drunk- 
 
The Mystery of Mortification 27 
 
 ard is induced at last to forswear strong drink. 
 He keeps his promise, and, by dint of a hard 
 struggle, quells the imperious craving. How 
 very negative that is! A man is not necessar- 
 ily the better for being sober; he may exchange 
 the headlong generosity of the drunkard for 
 the smug self-righteousness of the prig. But 
 what happens? As drink is given up and 
 sobriety restores the broken-down fibre, fam- 
 ily affection reappears, daily work becomes in- 
 teresting, the love of music or of reading re- 
 awakens, the spiritual instinct leaps into life. 
 The negative has released the positive; the 
 moving of the leaf has unveiled the star, 
 
 III 
 
 “Know well,” says that master of ascetic 
 wisdom, Thomas a Kempis, “that thou oughtest 
 to lead a dying life.” We are slow to believe 
 this, and so we die fatally because we refuse to 
 die. Mortification is not an optional accom- 
 plishment, a peculiar achievement belonging to 
 candidates for canonization, or, at any rate, 
 a heroic measure adopted by strenuous Catho- 
 lics during Lent, to be dropped at the first peal 
 of Easter bells. Or perhaps we concede its 
 
28 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 importance, and even necessity, for natures 
 hag-ridden by vices or tortured by passions, 
 for people of hot blood in whom the lust of 
 life runs riot, or people of incontinent ambi- 
 tion in whom the pride of life is rampant. We 
 forget that, more often than not, it only takes 
 a frail leaf to blot out a whole world of light. 
 What of that dissipation of soul that finds 
 so harmless an outlet in quite good-natured 
 talk, and yet bars the way to prayer and recol- 
 lection as effectually as frivolity or evil-living? 
 What of the constitutional laziness, the gen- 
 eral slackness, which issues in nothing more 
 than sinless ease, and yet shuts us out from 
 fellowship with our Crucified Lord as effectu- 
 ally as any vicious habit? What of the love 
 of praise, or the infirmity of purpose, or the 
 weak complaisance, which puts us outside the 
 ranks of Christ’s soldiery as completely as 
 theft or drunkenness? We may call these 
 things dead leaves on our tree of life, but it 
 sometimes takes a mighty storm to blow down 
 the leaf that hides a star. 
 
 But is not that too much like Jansenism to 
 be safe or wholesome? It would be, if death 
 were the end instead of the means: if we spent 
 
The Mystery of Mortification 29 
 
 our years in moving leaves that hid no star. 
 But there is a star, and already the leaf 
 trembles. 
 
 IV 
 
 To-day there is, even in the most unlikely 
 quarters, an increasing interest in Prayer and 
 in the interior life in general. Books on Mys- 
 ticism and manuals of interior practice are in 
 demand once more. And again and again one 
 meets earnest readers of such literature who 
 are sorrowfully enquiring why they cannot 
 even catch a fleeting glimpse of that land which 
 is the mystic’s home. They admit the possi- 
 bility—the probability, even—of their lacking 
 a vocation for the higher reaches of the in- 
 terior life; but might they not attain at least 
 to that acquired contemplation which is the 
 birthright of all aspiring souls? They long 
 for the magic, the thrll, the adventure of 
 the life of prayer and communion—why are 
 they kept entirely outside those realms of 
 gold? 
 
 The answer is simple, though not easy. 
 Through those realms, from the grey confines 
 to the frontiers of Eternity, there runs the 
 
30 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 Purgative Way—the way of mortification. It 
 is trodden plain by the feet of the humble who 
 have attained the Vision Splendid, but preju- 
 dice keeps many an earnest soul from walking 
 in it. There are things about that way which 
 appal us. It begins in mortification of the 
 flesh, it proceeds in the mortification of natural 
 impulses, it ends in the mortification of spirit- 
 ual desires. It is only with the two first ele- 
 ments that we need to reckon in the earlier 
 part of our pilgrimage. The mortification of 
 the flesh does not attract us. We like to say 
 that it is the spirit that needs to be attacked, 
 and that a devil of pride and lovelessness may 
 live within a macerated body. Nor does the 
 mortification of natural impulses appeal to us; 
 for is not nature the creation of God and the 
 “theatre” of His grace? 
 
 The question is a large oné, and disquisi- 
 tions have been written on both sides; but two 
 lines of thought may sufhce for our Lenten 
 consideration, One is quaintly. suggested by 
 the old monastic tag that it is not always ad- 
 visable to attack the Devil directly; once the 
 Devil sees his cherished companion, the flesh, 
 
The Mystery of Mortification 81 
 
 harshly treated, he generally runs away. That 
 is a half-truth, but it is well worth setting over 
 against the opposite half-truth—that a devil 
 may dwell in a macerated body. The second 
 is implied in our parable of the star and the 
 leaf. The leaf that hides the star is no evil 
 thing; it is a thing of innocence and natural 
 beauty, yet must fall and decay. And how 
 much more true that would be if the leaf, 
 instead of merely hiding the star, were its 
 sheath or its raw material, as the flesh is the 
 sheath of the spirit and natural impulse the 
 raw material of grace? 
 
 And so we come to realize that the mystery 
 of mortification is as the mystery of the star 
 and the leaf, and as the deeper mystery of 
 death and resurrection. The glory of eye and 
 ear and touch, the subtlety of brain, the pulse 
 of emotion, the grace of imagination, the 
 rhythm of impulse—things that belong to the 
 beauty and splendour of natural life—may 
 each be the leaf that hides the star, the husk 
 that imprisons the seed. And when self en- 
 closes them in its base grasp, they turn from 
 beauty to terror and from terror to malignity. 
 
32 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 A leaf that hides a star? Our self-obsessed 
 nature is a forest that blots out the sun, and 
 the bitter throes of mortification become the 
 birth-pangs of a new and unimaginably radiant 
 life. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE TREASURE OF SILENCE 
 
 “WHEN I came into the silent assemblies of 
 God’s people,” wrote Robert Barclay, the blus- 
 tering and argumentative Laird of Ury, two 
 centuries ago, “I felt a secret power among 
 them which touched my heart; and, as I gave 
 way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me 
 and the good raised up.” This was said of a 
 Quaker meeting; it might have been written 
 of a Catholic retreat. 
 
 The self-conscious and garrulous nineteenth 
 century saw in silence little more than a com- 
 mercial and prudential virtue and the neces- 
 sary habit of the thinker and the artist. Re- 
 ligious silence it regarded as the outworn 
 superstition of monks and nuns. To-day we 
 are rediscovering religious silence, and thou- 
 sands of simple, practical, everyday people are 
 finding in it, not only a refuge from the din 
 of controversy and the fret of small activities, 
 
 33 
 
34 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 but a sanctuary where they hear the voice of 
 God—a place of revelation and healing and 
 power. 
 
 I 
 
 Few of us use Lent sufficiently as the great 
 opportunity for discovering the hidden treas- 
 ure of silence. I have been looking through 
 a collection of parochial leaflets giving such 
 simple suggestions for the observance of Lent 
 as the average man and woman can adopt. 
 One feels that the writers of these leaflets were 
 often at a loss to find really practical sugges- 
 tions. Fasting is all but impossible for the 
 toilers, the sick, and the bitterly poor; vigils 
 are out of the question for the thousands who 
 have to work up to the very limit of their 
 strength ; almsgiving can obviously not be prac- 
 tised by all; additional time given to prayer, 
 spiritual reading and devotions is possible for 
 many, but may, in not a few cases, only serve 
 to strengthen the delusion of self-deceived souls 
 who need, not to say more prayers, but to turn 
 from evil and learn to do well. In not one of 
 these papers have I found an allusion to a Len- 
 ten discipline which can be practised by all— 
 
The Treasure of Silence 85 
 
 the discipline of silence. Everyone can take 
 from his working-day at least twenty minutes, 
 generally given to unnecessary conversation or 
 newspaper reading, and keep silence. And 
 competent instruction in this difficult art, 
 suited to the needs of various types of people, 
 is sorely needed. 
 
 For silence is an unexplored country, in 
 which the traveller may easily lose his way. 
 Not a few of us have, in fact, lost our way. 
 We have read certain little books, miscalled 
 mystical, which speak of “going into the 
 silence,” and give elaborate instructions for 
 getting there. And, in the end, we have found 
 ourselves in a state of idle day-dreaming, or 
 morbid introspection, or weakening self-hyp- 
 notism. Or we have followed the will-o’-the- 
 wisp of “the Christ within,” as interpreted by 
 such books, and discovered—or, what is still 
 more fatal, failed to discover—that it was only 
 another name for a subtle form of self-worship. 
 Christian silence is not a piece of amateur 
 psychotherapy; it is a great, practical discipline 
 which makes a highway for God through the 
 wilderness of our disordered thoughts and un- 
 controlled emotions. It is not an empty space 
 
36 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 filled with shadows, or a mirror flinging back 
 our own portrait; it is the response of our 
 whole being to the call of God. In it the soul 
 stands at attention. It is a great stillness, pre- 
 cisely because it is a great activity. Father 
 Baker, writing of this silence at its highest 
 point, compares it to the stillness of the soaring 
 bird. The bird’s wings are suspended, mo- 
 tionless; but all the time every muscle is con- 
 tributing its share to that noiseless cleaving 
 of the air which is at once perfect rest and sus- 
 tained activity. 
 
 IT 
 
 We often complain that profitable silence is 
 impossible for us. It breeds discomfort and 
 restlessness, or degenerates into “wool-gather- 
 ing.” More often still, it is filled with the 
 buzzing of small distractions. The petty wor- 
 ries and foolish thoughts which are forgotten 
 in the bustle of work or the pleasures of social 
 intercourse loom large and insistent the mo- 
 ment we retire into solitude, and the silence 
 which should be as the stillness of open spaces 
 becomes more narrowing and futile than the 
 most gossipy drawing-room. 
 
The Treasure of Silence 37 
 
 One reason for this is obvious. We need 
 not imagine that we can pass at a bound from 
 a daily round, in which talk—and often very 
 small talk indeed—swallows up three-fourths 
 of the soul’s energies, to a state of revealing 
 stillness. The practice of silence must begin, 
 not in the quiet half-hour, but in the office, the 
 home, the street, the playground. The soul 
 whose strength has been allowed to ooze from 
 it during eleven hours of the day need not 
 imagine that it would be able to regain it dur- 
 ing the one remaining hour. To put it quite 
 plainly, the first step towards the silence that 
 recreates is to hold one’s tongue more fre- 
 quently and to better purpose in the ordinary 
 ways of life. To spend one Lent in preparing 
 the right background for our daily time of 
 silence is doubtless no easy matter, but no one 
 who has tried it will ever regret the labour. 
 
 III 
 
 What is to be the objective, the particular 
 and definite purpose, of our Lenten silence? 
 Three aims suggest themselves: self-discipline, 
 self-knowledge, and attention to the Presence 
 of God within the soul. 
 
38 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 Self-discipline is the most obvious of these 
 aims. We begin Lent with the penitent con- 
 fession of sin and failure, and the burning 
 question is how to amend. Immediately our 
 thoughts fly to self-improvement. We go over 
 the depressing catalogue of our misdoings, 
 and realize that, while some were due to malice, 
 all have their root in weakness. That weak- 
 ness may be culpable; it is the result, for the 
 most part, of a relaxed, undisciplined, self- 
 indulgent habit of life. Clearly, the remedy 
 is to “tighten up” our lax fibre, to put the curb 
 upon our untutored impulses. And, if the 
 practice of silence will help us to do that, let 
 us welcome silence, especially since it is a 
 means of self-discipline so easily within our 
 reach. | 
 
 We remember, perhaps, Thomas Carlyle’s 
 praise of silence: “Silence is the element in 
 which great things fashion themselves together, 
 that at length they may emerge full-formed 
 and majestic into the daylight of life, which 
 they are henceforth to rule. . . . Do thou thy- 
 self but hold thy tongue for one day, and on 
 the morrow how much clearer are thy pur- 
 poses and duties; what wreck and rubbish have 
 
The Treasure of Silence 89 
 
 these mute workmen within thee swept away 
 when intrusive noises were shut out!” And 
 so we resolve upon the faithful keeping of our 
 daily Lenten silence, in the hope that it will 
 infuse vigour into our feeble purposes, that 
 with braced wills and purged desires we may 
 redeem the wasted years. 
 
 All this is very natural, and, up to a point, 
 it “works.” The only difficulty is that self- 
 improvement, however laudable, is not Chris- 
 tian repentance, and that the character it pro- 
 duces is, at its best, Protestant and Puritan, 
 and, at its worst, either Pharisaical or pagan. 
 We are called to Lenten discipline, not that 
 we may set about to improve ourselves, but 
 that, by the penitence of love, we may come 
 within the range of God’s redeeming and 
 cleansing mercy. 
 
 IV 
 
 Or, again, we may give ourselves to silence 
 because we feel our need of self-knowledge. 
 If only we had known the weakness and treach- 
 ery of our hearts, if only we had discerned the 
 trend of our natural propensities, we would 
 not have gone so far astray. Let us, therefore, 
 
40 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 in silence, explore our souls that we may be 
 saved from further delusions. 
 
 Self-knowledge certainly belongs to our sal- 
 vation, and for want of it we have suffered 
 shipwreck again and again. Father Faber 
 reminds us that a man needs to keep his heart 
 warm by living in it, and for thousands their 
 own hearts are an arctic region which they are 
 content to leave unexplored. We spend our 
 lives in the world of external things, until one 
 day we wake to the fact that the only life that 
 really matters is the buried life within the soul. 
 Then we sit and look into our hearts, and we 
 sicken as we look. Praiseworthy motives and 
 considerations which we imagined to be most 
 influential in our inner life are seen to be quite 
 superficial and conventional; base motives and 
 considerations which we imagined to be far 
 from us are seen to dominate and tyrannize. 
 Suddenly, and often with stunning force, it 
 becomes apparent to us by what mean and 
 unlovely things we really live. For the first 
 time we drink at the well of self-knowledge, 
 and its waters are very bitter. 
 
 They are also very dangerous. To sit silent 
 with one’s own intricate and shadow-thridden 
 
The Treasure of Silence 41 
 
 heart is not a safe business. It breeds humil- 
 lation without necessarily creating humility. 
 It results in vexation of spirit rather than in 
 contrition, in discouragement rather than in 
 repentance. And, in the long run, it may ob- 
 scure and distort the judgment instead of en- 
 lightening it, for a silence that is occupied with 
 self is a breeding-ground of delusions. Self 
 cannot rightly reflect self. “Behold, the Lord 
 is our mirror!” exclaims an early Christian 
 singer: “Open your eyes and see them in Him, 
 and learn the manner of your face.” It is only 
 in the light of God that we shall see light. 
 
 V 
 
 And so we are brought to that deep, in- 
 ward stillness which is “the silence of the soul 
 that waits for more than man to teach.” To 
 cross the threshold of that silence is not easy; 
 it implies that most difficult of achievements 
 —de-occupation with self. Until the obscur- 
 ing shadow of self has lifted, we must walk 
 among snares and pitfalls. And the veil of 
 self-deception cannot be rent in twain from 
 the bottom upwards; it must be rent from 
 above, and by purer Hands than ours. It is 
 
42 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 when we turn from our meanness to God’s 
 majesty, when we steep our souls in His glori- 
 ous attributes and open our hearts to His re- 
 deeming love, that we become translucent to 
 ourselves. It is when our silence is filled with 
 the vision of the Crucified that we really know 
 what we are. Then we see our sin as His 
 cross, His crown of thorns, His dark derelic- 
 tion. We see our meanness and cowardice in 
 His eyes of love, our disloyalty in His smile 
 of welcome, our selfishness in His ministering 
 hands, our reluctance in His hastening feet. 
 
 Such silence demands no great intellectual 
 eifts, no high spiritual attainments; but it does 
 demand an unwearied patience and a notable 
 fidelity. Its fruits are often very slow to ripen, 
 its disappointments are intolerable to the im- 
 patience of pride. It is to many a greater 
 hardship than fasting, a severer discipline than 
 physical discomfort, a more humiliating process 
 than self-examination. But, sooner or later, 
 and often much sooner than we think, the 
 Voice that cannot be mistaken cleaves the 
 silence, the Touch that cannot be counterfeited 
 falls upon our dullness, and the soul exclaims: 
 “Tt is the Lord!” 
 
The Treasure of Silence 43 
 
 This experience is not the exclusive prop- 
 erty of mystics, the prerogative of leisured 
 people, the birthright of the devotional tem- 
 perament. It is the bush that may burst into 
 flame for the simplest keeper of sheep, the well 
 that may spring up in the desert for the most 
 ignorant Hagar-soul. Books of direction only 
 confuse; nothing is needed but the faith that 
 waits for God, the humility that is not offended 
 at His long tarrying, the fidelity that stands 
 alert through the long night of desolation. 
 The treasure of silence is in very deed the 
 treasure of the humble and the wealth of 
 beggars. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE GLORY OF PATIENCE 
 
 To say that Lent is a school of patience is to 
 suggest to many minds a somewhat colourless 
 virtue—a sturdy bit of grey homespun, de- 
 cidedly serviceable but hardly attractive: on 
 its positive side, the prudence of men of the 
 world and the wisdom of men of business; on 
 its negative side, a virtue of the cloister. But 
 Christian patience is woven'on no earthly loom. 
 No earthly hands hold the shuttle that threads 
 its web with the scarlet of a courage that can 
 spend a lifetime in the trenches and have nerve 
 to spare to go “over the top” at the end; the 
 green of a hope that can live with a mocking 
 past and sing in the face of a threatening fu- 
 ture; the blue of a faith that can sit in the 
 dark and see the land that is afar off; the 
 gold of a love that can be broken and trampled 
 into the dust and still remain love. 
 
 Such patience is not a copy-book maxim: it 
 rests upon the very Being of God, and to find 
 it we must sink deep into that Being. “God 
 
 4A 
 
The Glory of Patience 45 
 
 is patient because He is eternal,” says St. 
 Augustine, and until we live in His eternity 
 we cannot know the true meaning of patience. 
 It cannot be learnt from books of ascetic the- 
 ology; its secret is inaccessible to mere self- 
 discipline. To know it we must look long at 
 Him Who hangs for us upon the Cross with 
 outstretched arms to the world’s end; to prac- 
 tise it we must identify ourselves whole- 
 heartedly with the eternal purposes of God. 
 Tertullian knew something of this when he 
 said that “patience protects the whole will of 
 God in man.” The practice of every Christian 
 virtue brings us near to God, but to practise 
 patience is to become intimate and colloquial 
 with our Creator. ‘Whosoever keeps the rule 
 of patience takes God for his novice-master,.” 
 And if the discovery of patience is a won- 
 derful adventure of the spirit, its practice, so 
 far from being a dreary, pedestrian exercise, 
 must be the most heroic of activities and test 
 the hardness of the Christian soldier to its 
 breaking-point. Lent offers us an unparalleled 
 opportunity for testing and consolidating pa- 
 tience at its very centre—patience with our- 
 selves, and with God, in the spiritual life. 
 
46 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 I 
 
 It is a commonplace to say that the observ- 
 ance of Lent, if it is not a mere formality, must 
 sooner or later reveal to us how very shallow 
 and brittle our spirituality really is. Before 
 we have got to mid-Lent our little self-denials 
 become a weariness, our additional devotions 
 are an awkward burden, our self-restraints 
 seem empty of meaning. And all’this is only 
 symptomatic of a deeper evil. The truth of 
 the matter is that our penitence has worn thin, 
 and our Lenten ideal has been dimmed in con- 
 sequence. At best, habit has usurped the place 
 that belongs to grace. Already, we think we 
 may have done enough in the way of strict- 
 ness, forgetting St. Augustine’s warning: “If 
 thou sayest, It is enough! thou hast perished.” 
 Soon, unless we pull ourselves together, we 
 shall once more be content to steer by moral 
 theology—that manual of first-aid for desper- 
 ate sinners—we, who have had a vision of 
 Christian perfection! 
 
 It is at this point that we read in some spirit- 
 ual book—probably excellent in itself, but not 
 in the least applicable to our own case—that 
 
The Glory of Patience 47 
 
 the great thing at such a time is to be patient 
 with oneself. It is no use getting angry be- 
 cause one has failed to stick to one’s Lenten 
 rule, or, at any rate, failed to observe it in the 
 spirit as well as in the letter. Perhaps the rule 
 was too hard, and it is true humility to acknowl- 
 edge it, and to try and get the rule modified. 
 In any case, it is no use scolding oneself: the 
 thing is to go on as best one can, and to remem- 
 ber that God is not a hard taskmaster, but 
 knows and compassionates our weakness. 
 
 All this is sound advice for the few; to most 
 of us itis rank poison. Patience with ourselves 
 does not spell self-indulgence. Its long-suffer- 
 ing lies rather in unweariedly recalling the 
 recalcitrant self to its first heroic purpose, set- 
 ting before it high views of honour and valour 
 in the service of God. Patience has no use 
 for that miserable casuistry which masquerades 
 as ascetic wisdom. It is not an advocate of 
 mediocrity. “There are no short roads to per- 
 fection,” says Cardinal Newman, “but there 
 are suire ones”; and the surest way is not the 
 way of concessions and dispensations. True, 
 we must be patient with ourselves, but not at 
 the cost of being impatient of our standard. 
 
48 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 Genuine patience with self means the calm, 
 steadfast, relentless upholding of that stand- 
 ard in the face of repeated failures. 
 
 II 
 
 The first work of patience is to renew and 
 deepen penitence. If God is indeed tender and 
 compassionate to our frailty, sych compassion 
 should create and renew a contrite heart within 
 us. We must be penitent before we have any 
 right to try to be heroic, and nothing short of 
 the patience that refuses to yield to allegations 
 of weariness and incapacity, but keeps us fixed 
 in the contemplation of the Everlasting Mercy, 
 will make and keep us penitent. For some of 
 us this will mean resort to our crucifix—that 
 wonderful compendium of both ascetic, and 
 mystical theology, at once the only textbook of 
 unlettered saints and the vade mecum of 
 learned doctors. To look long and patiently 
 at our crucified God, to keep on looking though 
 our eyes remain hard and tearless, to keep on 
 pondering though our hearts be dull and irre- 
 sponsive, to keep on adoring though without 
 a single throb of emotion—that is to have 
 patience with ourselves. How much of this 
 
The Glory of Patience 49 
 
 “dry” adoration, persisted in against every pro- 
 test of flesh and blood and against every argu- 
 ment of the inferior reason, has gone to pro- 
 duce that seraphic fervour in the presence of 
 the Blessed Sacrament, and the Eucharistic life 
 that flows from such fervour, which we im- 
 agine to be the expression of inborn religious 
 genius, the exclusive property of a handful of 
 saints! It may come as a surprise to us on the 
 Last Day to find ourselves reproved for lacking 
 some grace which we had imagined to be a gift 
 to a few elect souls, but which lay well within 
 the reach of our patience. How much more 
 can patience bring to us God’s universal gift 
 of penitence! 
 
 We constantly repeat the stupid cliché of a 
 certain school that this age is not an age of, 
 penitence, because the modern mind is incapa- 
 ble of that great, tragic emotion called “a sense 
 of sin.” It takes no particular type of mind, 
 and certainly no “great, tragic emotion,” to 
 make penitents. All we need is the patience 
 to face the facts of sin and forgiveness, the 
 patience to lay aside our interesting little books 
 and our absorbing little occupations and to 
 rivet our minds resolutely to unfamiliar and 
 
50 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 uninviting realities until we are subjugated by 
 them. It is simply a matter of persevering 
 response to grace; it is simply the patience of 
 man giving the patience of God its chance. 
 Our hearts are not made of different stuff from 
 the hearts of the saints; the difference between 
 us and the saints is that they held their hearts 
 still and gave them to be broken. And that 
 means patience, for the grace of God has a 
 slow stride, and the broken and contrite heart 
 is not attained by a Coué formula. 
 
 III 
 
 And having renewed our penitence, patience 
 will re-create our heroism. It may be that the 
 Lenten rule we have decided upon was too am- 
 bitious and needs to be modified, but that is not 
 very likely in these valetudinarian days. To 
 judge by certain popular writers, it might be 
 supposed that the average Catholic of to-day 
 was in the habit of scourging himself with a 
 contraption of razor-blades, like Father Wil- 
 liam Doyle; but few spiritual directors have 
 ever met those formidable ascetics. In nine 
 cases out of ten, it is not our rule but ourselves 
 that need “re-editing.” Our rule consists of 
 
The Glory of Patience 51 
 
 small self-denials, of little acts of mortifica- 
 tion, of apparently negligible religious obliga- 
 tions, and yet we find their repetition irksome. 
 God hides Himself; we ‘“‘don’t feel like it’’; the 
 Lenten days stretch before us like a dreary 
 erey road without a turning. But if we can 
 hold ourselves to it, if we can remember that 
 “feelings” count for nothing in the spiritual 
 life, if we can steadfastly resolve to do as much 
 for a hidden God as for a God Who reveals 
 Himself to us, we shall, by the time Lent ends, 
 have mastered the fundamental principle of 
 the heroic life and be on the way to saintship. 
 
 We say that this needs patience, and again 
 we think of patience as a humdrum virtue. It 
 needs one particular kind of patience, the 
 patience that springs, not from a prudential 
 brain or a disciplined soul, but from the very 
 heart of God Himself. Here, where the spirit- 
 ual life seems at its dullest, is the very romance 
 of spirituality. Human hearts everywhere and 
 in all ages have been thrilled by stories of chiv- 
 alrous love—love that asks for no return, that 
 counts no service too lowly, that assumes the 
 guise of a page or a kitchen-maid to be near 
 its beloved; content to be unnoticed, scorned, 
 
52 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 abused; content to die without being recog- 
 nized, or winning a flicker of response from 
 the adored. Yet, when this great love-adven- 
 ture comes to us in the spiritual realm, we vote 
 it dull and futile. We are slow to recognize 
 in Christian patience the interpreter of love’s 
 sublimest mysteries, the guide to love’s supreme 
 adventure. And so we modify our tiresome 
 rule and curtail our “dry” prayers, are content 
 with a defective penitence, and relinquish 
 heroic aspirations, imagining all the time that 
 we are imitators of St. Francis de Sales in 
 being patient with ourselves. And, in the end, 
 we have made another stride in the fatal art 
 of self-deception, and have not become more 
 patient with others or more sympathetic with 
 their lapses from the heroic ideal. 
 
 IV 
 
 It all comes back to this. God, Who never 
 wearies of a human soul, is asking, asking 
 again, asking continually, the same things of 
 us—little things or big things, as the case may 
 be, but asking still. Our lack of response does 
 not weary Him, our failures do not discourage 
 Him, our defections do not chill Him. He 
 
The Glory of Patience 53 
 
 comes to us on the Cross. He says one thing 
 to one of us and another thing to another, but 
 to each of us He says: “Give Me ail, and I 
 will make you a saint.” That is the great fact 
 at the back of Lent. Almighty God, strong 
 and patient, is asking something of us. If He 
 did not ask, our Lenten self-denials would be 
 a sheer impertinence; as long as He asks, our 
 fictitious patience with self in falling short of 
 His demands is an insult. If our Lenten ob- 
 servance means an unrelenting daily fidelity to 
 a distasteful rule, in the teeth of dullness and 
 “dryness,” and in penitent and patient response 
 to the demands of God, we need not worry 
 about the “greyness” of it all. What is grey 
 to our eyes is gold in the vision of angels. 
 
 T once heard a Lent preacher try to encour- 
 age the faithful with the reminder that it was 
 at midnight, when things looked darkest, that 
 Christ was born. But patience does not break 
 at midnight, even though not so much as one 
 star show in the sky. “It was midnight, and 
 Jesus was not yet come unto them.” There 
 would have been a dramatic fitness in the com- 
 ing of Jesus to His disciples at the blackest 
 hour of the night. But God is not dramatic; 
 
54 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 neither is life. Jesus came “at the fourth 
 watch,” at the most bleak, weary, unpropitious 
 time, the hour of lassitude and disillusionment; 
 and even then He would have passed by—the 
 numb lips of chilled and fear-worn men had 
 to hail Him. Patience, however heroic, fails 
 if it is not patience with God as well as with 
 ourselves and others. The patience that can- 
 not watch for Jesus until the “fourth watch,” 
 and then turn to Him across the waters of dis- 
 appointment, not querulously, but, as Tertul- 
 lian has it, “with pure brow, free from sadness 
 and irritation, with peaceful eyes, with a mouth 
 sealed with discretion,” has not yet “had her 
 perfect work.” It is precisely in the slow, com- 
 monplace discipline of Lent that patience is 
 tempered to its highest uses, and girded for 
 that great night whose dawning means the 
 soul’s encounter with God. That is why the 
 Lenten adventure is worth our most toilsome 
 effort, our most heroic endurance. 
 
CHAPTER WV 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THOUGHT 
 
 A LaDy who was by way of being a Catholic 
 had listened to a sermon upon the duty of 
 using’ one’s brains in religion, in the course 
 of which the preacher had enlarged upon the 
 sanctity of thought. The lady was not edified. 
 “Thinking,” she observed, “is so—so very 
 Protestant”: a dictum which deserves to be 
 put by the side of the curious opinion, held by 
 not a few among us, that thinking is a specifi- 
 cally Catholic process, and was first introduced 
 into the world by St. Thomas Aquinas. Asa 
 matter of fact, every Catholic who takes his 
 daily meditation seriously is thereby committed 
 to teach himself to think, and to think about 
 the most profound matters that can occupy the 
 human mind, It is not without significance 
 that a Roman manual of meditation, very pop- 
 ular a generation ago, bore the homely title, 
 “Think Well On’t.” Very few of the little 
 books which seek to teach “meditation without 
 BD 
 
56 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 tears” to present-day Catholics could sustain 
 such a title—there is not very much in them 
 that will bear thinking “well” on. Our writers 
 have largely caught the trick of the Psycho- 
 logical School—the fatal art of “thinking with 
 the imagination,” of substituting impressions, 
 apercus, moods and tenses of the superficial 
 brain, for genuine thought. The aim has been 
 to attract simple people; but, in most cases, 
 they have only attracted the lazy, who are 
 usually very complex persons indeed. | 
 
 I 
 
 Whatever be our way of observing Lent, 
 there can be few who have not proposed 
 to themselves a simple course of meditation; 
 and meditation involves reading, since very 
 few can make their meditation without books. 
 Nothing could be simpler than to determine 
 upon a course of meditation; nothing can—and 
 often does—prove more difficult and barren. 
 The question of method crops up at the very 
 outset, and we spend much time in trying to 
 force ourselves into moulds into which we were 
 not meant to fit; or else we cheerfully shelve 
 all methods and rely upon the inspiration that 
 
The Transfiguration of Thought 57 
 
 never comes. In the end, we often fall into 
 one of two traps: we either descend to vaguely 
 pious musing, sentimental or speculative, as 
 our native bent may be; or we settle down to 
 a course of dry study, very useful in its way 
 and an excellent discipline, but a most effectual 
 preventive of meditation. We either do not 
 think at all, or, if we do, our thought is not 
 transfigured. We muse, but the fire does not 
 burn. We drag along the ground without 
 gaining even the sense of solidity which con- 
 tact with the earth can give. 
 
 Perhaps the surest way out of the difficulty 
 is to begin by making it quite clear to ourselves 
 what meditation really is, and what it is in- 
 tended to effect. 
 
 IT 
 
 ‘ Meditation is to think of Divine things with 
 a certain end in view. That end is generally 
 defined as being the application of these things 
 to the details of our daily conduct. As a con- 
 sequence, we spend most of the time allotted 
 in drawing “practical lessons” and framing 
 resolutions. That is very admirable; it is also, 
 more often than not, very mechanical and 
 
58 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 wooden. Our Modernist friends would tell us 
 that it is very Jewish, very “Old Testament”; 
 but if the hundred-and-nineteenth Psalm is 
 typical, it is not at all “Old Testament.” “I 
 am as glad of Thy Word: as one that findeth 
 ereat spoils.” “Thy testimonies have I claimed 
 as my heritage for ever: and why? They are 
 the very joy of my heart.” “Thy testimonies 
 are wonderful: therefore doth my soul keep 
 them.” Discovery, joy, wonder—how many 
 of the meditations we like to call “practical” 
 evoke these things in us? And it is by dis- 
 covery, joy, and wonder that our mind expands 
 and our heart is ennobled. We treat them as 
 luxuries, and call our poor moralizings our 
 daily bread. But here also man does not 
 live by bread alone, and the most truly prac- 
 tical things are those we choose to call lux- 
 uries. 
 
 Supposing, then, we amend our definition 
 and say that to meditate means to think of 
 Divine things in such a way as to get to love 
 them? Love rejoices, wonders, makes dis- 
 coveries; and love is the most practical thing 
 in the world, for it is the fulfilment of the law. 
 
 At its best, such meditation is comprehen- 
 
The Transfiguration of Thought 59 
 
 sive and systematic. It takes the whole uni- 
 verse of Grace for its province. It is to be 
 regretted that there are so few books that can 
 take their place beside Bellord’s Meditations 
 on Christian Dogma. Doctrine still repels the 
 average lay person, who regards theology as 
 the esoteric amusement of a few learned peo- 
 ple; and we are waiting for the spiritual writer 
 who can make the great formative principles 
 of our religion to live for the ordinary man or, 
 rather, who can show them to be fibres of the 
 tree of life. Meditation on doctrine is inevi- 
 tably difficult, and even dry, in its initial stages; 
 but it is dry as practising scales is dry: sooner 
 or later the “notes” of dogma will weave them- 
 selves into spiritual music. To meditate upon 
 Catholic teaching concerning’ God, man, sin, 
 judgment, grace, salvation, the Sacraments, 
 and so forth, is slowly but surely to enter upon 
 a new world of wonder and beauty. The road 
 to that new world may be wearisome, but it 
 is only the road, and roads have an end. 
 
 III 
 
 We are sometimes told that the trouble with 
 intellectual or doctrinal meditation is that it 
 
60 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 all ends in preaching a little sermon to oneself. 
 Well, why not? It is the most profound and 
 sincere kind of preaching. It is when a man 
 has expounded to himself the entire system of 
 Christian doctrine, or the life and teaching of 
 our Lord, that he has found the master-key 
 to meditation. But does this not resolve itself 
 into a matter of reasoning? Yes, sometimes; 
 and it was while two disciples reasoned that 
 Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. 
 But does not such intellectual enquiry kill the 
 spirit of reverent awe and wonder? It may; 
 yet the Psalmist prayed: “Open Thou mine 
 eyes, that I may see the wondrous things of 
 Thy law.” Wonder is not the child of igno- 
 rance; it is the Christian reason irradiated and 
 active. There is nothing more saddening than 
 to observe the decline of wonder in the Catholic 
 Church. Converts enter it in the first flush of 
 untutored wonder. They live in a whirl of 
 joyous amazement, and their frank enthusiasm 
 is smilingly regarded by older Catholics as one 
 of the gaucheries of the spiritually nouveaux 
 riches. But, sooner or later, the wonder wears 
 thin, because it was sown in the shallow soil 
 of emotion and sentiment; it had no root in 
 
The Transfiguration of Thought 61 
 
 the mind. A course of systematic instruction 
 or self-instruction might have prevented this. 
 
 IV 
 
 Lent is, indeed, a time of self-instruction— 
 a time for doing intellectual “five-finger exer- 
 cises,” if you like—for both new and old Cath- 
 olics. If we gave ourselves to systematic med- 
 itation even for a few weeks, we would be 
 surprised to discover how feeble our hold upon 
 fundamental principles has been, and how 
 badly we lacked orientation in our spiritual 
 geography. 
 
 A priest, arguing against the invocation of 
 saints, has said that, in his experience, people 
 who prayed to the saints found their belief 
 slip away from them in time—probably at an 
 hour of crisis—and were left with their faith 
 in God shaken. That is undoubtedly true to 
 fact, but one cannot accept it as a valid argu- 
 ment against invoking the saints. The trouble 
 is that these people start with a non-Catholic 
 conception of God, and then attach to that 
 conception a sentimental belief in the interces- 
 sion of the saints because it appeals to them 
 as avery comforting doctrine. It is the super- 
 
62 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 imposing of an “eccentric” patch upon an alien 
 fabric, the tying of apples to a young plum 
 tree. At the first strain on the fabric, the 
 patch tears loose and leaves a gaping hole; 
 at the first gust of wind, the apples are blown 
 down and the branches of the tree broken. In 
 such cases, the faith of the persons concerned 
 has never been welded into one whole; it has 
 remained unarticulated—a mere agglomeration 
 of separate beliefs which do not follow from 
 central principles by the laws of an inexorable 
 dialectic. The remedy is to be found in an 
 honest endeavour to “think through” one’s 
 faith, a task in which the ‘ ae ais 
 may outstrip the “wise man.” 
 
 V 
 
 But it remains none the less true that for 
 some people anything like systematic medita- 
 tion is an impossibility, either by reason of 
 temperamental make-up or from lack of early 
 training. This is where spiritual freedom 
 comes in. Such souls should not force them- 
 selves into the groove of any method, however 
 approved, but remember St. Paul’s go-as-you- 
 please prescription: “Whatsoever things are 
 
The Transfiguration of Thought 68 
 
 true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever 
 things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
 whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever 
 things are of good report, if there be any vir- 
 tue, and if there be any praise, think on these 
 things.” It may be, also, that these undrilled 
 spirits are particularly sensitive to inner guid- 
 ance; and those who feel inclined to criticize 
 their “looseness” and “subjectivity” would do 
 well to remember that St. Ignatius—that mas- 
 ter of strictly ordered meditation—bids us drop 
 our plan and our points on the spot whenever 
 we are conscious of the Holy Spirit’s leading, 
 and follow that guidance whithersoever it may 
 take us. 
 
 Such souls will find their solid sustenance 
 in spiritual reading. We shall do well to re- 
 member here that meditation, as we know it 
 to-day, is a late institution. It is, in fact, the 
 result of the increasing hurry of life: an effort 
 to compress into half an hour, or even a quar- 
 ter of an hour, all those movements of the soul 
 which an early spirituality spread over half a 
 lifetime. In this earlier—and sounder—spirit- 
 uality, the lectio divina, the reading of the 
 things of God, occupied a central position. 
 
64 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 Men trained in the Benedictine or Carthusian 
 schools did not hurry to make their spiritual 
 offering to God before they had received the 
 material from Him. They read widely and 
 deeply, and their meditation followed naturally 
 from their reading. When they came to any- 
 thing that attracted them, they stopped and 
 exploited that vein of gold. That is medita- 
 tion at its best—natural and unprepared. The 
 soul comes into contact with truth, and is illu- 
 minated and kindled. For many of us, noth- 
 ing short of the strict Ignatian discipline is 
 needed; but it is those whom, for convenience, 
 one may call Benedictine spirits who know 
 “that wondering joy which flows from the clear 
 sight of truth’—St. Augustine’s gaudium de 
 veritate, 
 
 VI 
 
 And the end of both ways is the same— 
 to meet with God, to see light in His light, 
 to give Him love for love, to respond to 
 grace, to hear the call of Christ and obey it. 
 It is all very simple and familiar—and diff- 
 cult, as simple and familiar things are diffi- 
 cult. It means the forming of a new mind 
 
The Transfiguration of Thought 65 
 
 within us, it means the expulsive power of a 
 new affection; and those who have much to 
 part with know how that expulsive power can 
 hurt to the point of anguish. 
 
 There is, first, mental discipline, dry and 
 hard. Then wonder is born, and the soul 
 glows and thrills with the joy of discovery. 
 Then love grows; and love brings, not peace, 
 but a sword. One cannot take time to be 
 alone and think well upon Divine things with- 
 out meeting the Cross. What is begun in 
 quiet musing ends in sharp conflict of spirit. 
 Divine Love confronts us with its discon- 
 certing challenge, its stern exactions. We 
 wrestle with the angel in the darkness, and we 
 never walk with even step again. But it is 
 worth it all. And one hard, dreary Lent that 
 brings us to that night is better than many 
 lightly-won Eastertides. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE ADVENTURE OF ENDURANCE 
 
 WE often hear it said that, while genius is 
 rare, patient plodding is—thank God!—com- 
 mon enough. That, however, is not strictly 
 true. Genius may be rare, but really faithful 
 plodding—not the soulless grind of the rou- 
 tinier, but that well-nigh omnipotent quality 
 called staying-power—is almost as rare in its 
 full perfection. Staying-power is, indeed, it- 
 self a kind of genius. It is not dull, dogged 
 persistence; it is the magic art of going 
 through a lifetime of monotonous work and 
 remaining an artist, not a mechanic. To 
 persevere in grey drudgery and become as 
 grey as one’s work in the process is fatally 
 easy. Circumstances compel most of us to 
 persevere in our humdrum tasks, but the great 
 question is how we persevere, and what we 
 are like after ten, or twenty, or thirty years of 
 perseverance? 
 
 For endurance is a word that may cover 
 
 66 
 
The Adventure of Endurance 67 
 
 many conditions. It may mean the failure of 
 the mother who begins as a noble woman and 
 ends as a sour drudge; or it may mean the 
 triumph of the mother whose heart can be 
 broken and still remain a heart of love. It 
 may mean the sober virtue of the priest who, 
 through years of unrequited toil and appar- 
 ently barren effort, does his duty faithfully, 
 but with a dull, disillusioned heart; or it may 
 mean the radiant faith of the priest who, after 
 a lifetime of unrelieved disappointment and 
 outward failure, can still see visions and 
 dream dreams. It may be a hard servitude; 
 it should be a glorious adventure. 
 
 t 
 
 From the earliest days of the Church there 
 have been two distinct types of spirituality, 
 which, by a convenient anachronism, we may 
 call the Benedictine and the Ignatian. Long 
 before St. Ignatius had founded his unique 
 Society and imposed upon a world nurtured 
 upon simpler diet that heroic, but somewhat 
 sophisticated, system of holiness of which the 
 famous Exercises are merely a shorthand ab- 
 stract, there were men and women who found 
 
68 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 their very life in multiplying verbal devotions, 
 acts and inspirations, and who conceived saint- 
 hood as the doing of an endless number of 
 little things supremely well. When St. Igna- 
 tius enforced his two great maxims, Agere 
 contra in omnibus and communia non com- 
 muniter, upon his disciples, he was only crys- 
 tallizing the spiritual philosophy of thousands 
 before him who had spent their days in that 
 “acting against” (1.¢., nature and inclination) 
 which gives to the humblest daily routine the 
 dignity of a great religious discipline, and 
 whose one ambition was to do common things, 
 and the smallest of common things, in a quite 
 uncommonly perfect way. This spirituality, 
 in which the will plays the leading part, has 
 always been a great school for saints, and 
 has always attracted one type as much as it 
 has repelled another. To souls which may 
 loosely be described as Benedictine, it seems 
 pedestrian, cramping, legalistic—producing an 
 asphyxiating atmosphere in which the spirit 
 cannot breathe. Such souls love the broad 
 way of quiet surrender to God, feeling that 
 it is not preoccupation with the details of an 
 ascetic system but a lifting of the eyes to 
 
The Adventure of Endurance 69 
 
 the eternal hills that makes for perfection. 
 They are repelled by the scrupulous multi- 
 plication of small duties, irritated by the 
 munutie of formal devotions. They live in 
 the clear, tender light which surrounds the 
 soul that is calmly set upon its supreme Ob- 
 ject, walking in the glorious freedom of the 
 sons of God—strong alike to suffer and to 
 enjoy. And yet, between these two divergent 
 types, there is a common bond. Both live by 
 sheer staying-power, and both are bent upon 
 adventure—the adventure of faithful, unre- 
 mitting endurance. 
 
 In one of his famous Spiritual Conferences, 
 Father Faber says some very plain things 
 about the monotony of piety: “I will freely 
 confess that I know nothing in the world 
 to which I can compare for monotony the 
 occasional drag of a pious life except either 
 being detained at a country inn during a hope- 
 lessly wet day, or else driving in a gig, and 
 for a long stage, a tired horse which is on 
 the collar the whole way.” 
 
 Who has not felt the wearing monotony 
 of the Christian life? And how often we 
 would be glad if the monotony were merely 
 
70 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 wearing, and not irritating and humiliating 
 as well! The soul of large horizons, quietly 
 fixed upon God, feels it no less than its 
 brother-soul immersed in the details of holy 
 living. Indeed, it often feels it more acutely, 
 for there come times when, to quote Father 
 Faber once more, “God Himself becomes dull 
 to us. He is uninteresting, undemonstrative.” 
 What monotony in any human activity can 
 compare to that of prayer persevered in 
 against feelings of utter distaste and repug- 
 nance? 
 
 There is the inescapable monotony due to 
 the fixity of character and circumstance. All 
 night we toil hard on the lake and take noth- 
 ing, and it is always the same, every night— 
 the same old net, the same old pond. ‘The 
 temptations which conquered us yesterday, the 
 old trials and pitfalls which humiliated us 
 time after time have to be faced again to-day, 
 and to-morrow, and every day. True, at the 
 end of any night’s fruitless toil on the lake, 
 we may hear the voice of the Master bidding 
 us cast our nets to the right side of the ship, 
 and find ourselves, in the golden morning, 
 hauling in a “great draught” of reward. But 
 
The Adventure of Endurance 71 
 
 meanwhile the succession of fruitless nights 
 is eating into our very fibre, and we are 
 glutted with the bitter experience that work- 
 eth anything but hope. 
 
 And we succumb to tiredness. Grace seems 
 to have ebbed out from the shore of life, and, 
 while we still endeavour to do our first works, 
 we cannot keep our first love from slipping 
 away. We fall into the dreary habit of doing 
 good things badly. We get out of heart with 
 our spiritual duties, and soon the effect is seen 
 in a slipshod life. We have not ceased to 
 do well, but we are weary in well-doing; 
 and that is a desolating business. The path 
 through the meadow has ended in a hard, 
 erey road, just when we were getting tired. 
 A hard, grey road and weary feet make rough 
 going. 
 
 Again, the loneliness of the struggle often 
 dismays us. It takes so little to chill us with 
 a sense of loneliness. If we are sensitive, the 
 lift of a critical eyebrow at the “superstition” 
 and “fanaticism” of our Lenten practice some- 
 times suffices to breed a consciousness of 
 isolation. And to more robust souls there 
 inevitably comes a time when loneliness falls 
 
 a 
 
72 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 upon them like a pall. We realize, sooner 
 or later, that we cannot pray or become saints 
 in gangs; that we were not made for each 
 other, but for God. And our loneliness is 
 most afflicting, perhaps, when the heart’s cry 
 for human sympathy is met with well-mean- 
 ing inadequacy. The loneliest moments of 
 the Son of God, we imagine, were not on 
 the mountain-top alone with God, nor among 
 the crowd that misunderstood Him, but sur- 
 rounded by the weak love and dull-eyed sym- 
 pathy of His disciples. And, in whatever 
 way it seizes us, the loneliness of the spiritual 
 life wears endurance thin, and empties the 
 heart of courage. 
 
 II 
 
 To preach endurance at such times is to 
 preach a bleak doctrine indeed; not because 
 endurance is a bleak virtue, but because it is 
 an adventure in the dark. Yet we know that 
 countless souls have come to their birthright 
 of radiance and triumph simply by “keeping 
 on,” weary hour after weary hour, dull day 
 after dull day, grey year after grey year. 
 In the Life of Father William Doyle we are 
 
The Adventure of Endurance 73 
 
 given the spiritual diary of a radiant soul 
 that lived on the dry bread of endurance. 
 Father Doyle knew himself called by our Lord 
 to a life of the most heroic self-abnegation 
 in little things, a life barren of even the 
 most innocent comforts and gratifications. He 
 loathed the very idea of such a life, his deli- 
 cate health provided him with ample excuses 
 for not living it, his fastidious tastes made 
 it a torture. Yet he resolutely and persever- 
 ingly set himself to live it, failing every now 
 and then, quietly punishing himself for his 
 failure, and starting again. He never “felt 
 like it,” but feelings did not count in his 
 religion; so he got out of bed to pray when 
 he longed for sleep, went without sugar when 
 he craved it, chose the most distasteful food, 
 the hardest seat, the most uncongenial occu- 
 pation, when every fibre of his nature shrieked 
 a protest. He had had a vision of the life 
 God asked of him; the rest was sheer, dull, 
 dogged staying-power. It was a great adven- 
 ture—how great only those souls to whom 
 he brought strength and healing, and the 
 fighting men who learnt to love him with 
 an idolizing love on the tragic fields of 
 
74 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 France, can measure, and even they quite 
 inadequately. 
 
 Or to turn to the example of one who was 
 neither an ascetic nor a saint—Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, Writing to George Meredith, this 
 brave adventurer says: “For fourteen years 
 I have not had a day’s real health. I have 
 wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I 
 have done my work unflinchingly. I have 
 written in bed and written out of it, written 
 in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written 
 torn by coughing, written when my head swam 
 for weakness. And the battle goes on—ill 
 or well is a trifle.” 
 
 Endurance is not a prosaic business at the 
 heart of it. It is the secret of all romance, 
 as well as the seal of sanctity. It is not the 
 craftsmanship of the lamp that matters, when 
 the Bridegroom comes late in the drowsy 
 hours of the night: it is the oil that feeds 
 the light. It is the oil of loyalty in the lamp 
 of love that makes it a starry passion and 
 not a sensual gratification. It is the oil of 
 faithfulness in the lamp of faith that makes 
 it a spiritual discipline and not a neurotic 
 sentiment. It is the oil of habit in the lamp 
 
The Adventure of Endurance 75 
 
 of vision that makes it an enduring light and 
 not a will-o’-the-wisp. We all have moments 
 of vision, hours of insight; but it is not until 
 what we have seen and felt at such times is 
 “worn in” by habits of prayer and duty that 
 it becomes vital and victorious. It is the 
 goodness that lasts, the love that is faithful, 
 the devotion that is habitual, which makes all 
 the difference between a religion of senti- 
 ment ending in moral collapse and a religion 
 of grace leading to spiritual transfiguration 
 —between a glorious adventure and a narcotic 
 hallucination. 
 
 Tit 
 
 Nor need we wait for the end of endurance 
 to see the golden glory within the grey. “I 
 am almost inclined to believe,” says a recent 
 writer, “that it is the level land that is loved 
 the best, land that has no beauty in itself, 
 but only what it borrows from the clouds 
 and the mists, the night and the morning. 
 The reason Corot painted a tree as perhaps 
 no other man has painted it was because he 
 understood, in a special sense, the value of 
 atmosphere, and this value is too often lost 
 
76 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 in the beauty-spots of the world, where our 
 eyes are so held that we miss, as it were, the 
 soul of the picture. But it is not possible to 
 miss the soul in the level country, where, there 
 being nothing to break the line of vision, the 
 earth takes unto itself some of the charac- 
 teristics of water by acting as a reflection of 
 our moods.... The greatest writers and 
 thinkers have been born in the level lands.” * 
 
 And so it is with the long, low, grey level 
 of endurance. When we get down to that 
 level, the elations and thrills and enjoyments 
 of the naturally religious soul have been left 
 behind. Our landscape is now bare of inter- 
 esting or romantic features, We are alone 
 in the wilderness—with God. There our only 
 music is the tramp of our weary feet, our only 
 beauty the still atmosphere and the overbrood- 
 ing sky. Yet the wilderness is cramped with 
 wonder. To say wilderness is to say miracle. 
 Its sands are white with manna, its rocks 
 glistening with living water. “Out of the 
 wilderness a gift,’”’ as the inspired song has it, 
 
 And the name of that gift is joy. That is 
 
 *E, M. Martin, Wayside Wisdom, pp. 65-66. 
 
The Adventure of Endurance fics 
 
 the great adventure of endurance—the birth 
 of joy in the dark. On the hill-tops of life 
 we work that we may play with a clear con- 
 science when work is done. In the wilder- 
 ness it is all work; but, as we toil, there 
 exudes from our work a wonderful liquor, a 
 rare elixir, the sap of an invincible joy. More 
 than one saint has told us that it is not until 
 we are feeling utterly bored with our prayers, 
 and still pray on, that we can know the power 
 and joy of prayer. It is not until we have 
 worked and endured through half a long, 
 dragging day, endured when we felt utterly 
 dreary and heart-sick and tired to exhaustion, 
 that we begin to know the meaning of spirit- 
 ual joy. That is not a theory; it is a fact, 
 corroborated by the great army of those who 
 have endured to the end, from St. Francis 
 of Assisi down to the bed-ridden pauper 
 woman whose only complaint was that she 
 could not sing when she felt so much like 
 singing for sheer joy and gratitude. 
 
 It is a paradox—part of that greater para- 
 dox we call the joy of our Lord. Having 
 endured to the end, He bequeathed to the 
 
78 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 Church His joy. And still that joy, hidden 
 from the impatient egoist, eluding the re- 
 ligious sentimentalist, denied to the volatile 
 impressionist, wells up in the heart that knows 
 how to endure. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FINDING OF THE CROSS 
 
 Ir is a great day in a man’s life when—per- 
 haps in the midst of a crowded street, per- 
 haps in the stillness of a secluded sanctuary— 
 he is arrested, held, enfolded by a Power not 
 himself, and a voice speaks deep within his 
 heart, “Behold, Jesus Christ!’ Of such a 
 moment Lacordaire says that “he who has 
 not known it has not known man’s true 
 life.” 
 
 But to meet Jesus Christ is to find the 
 Cross. We do not always make the discovery 
 at once. Our first encounter may be with 
 the Divine Teacher of Galilee, or with the 
 risen Son of God; or Jesus may show Him- 
 self to us as He showed Himself to the dis- 
 ciples, “in another form’’—in some secret and 
 incommunicable manifestation, intensely indi- 
 vidual, irresistibly convincing, part of the 
 soul’s inalienable secret. But however radiant 
 and exhilarating our first sight of Jesus Christ 
 
 79 
 
80 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 may be, the moment will come when we shall 
 meet Him as His blessed Mother did—bear- 
 ing His Cross. 
 
 That moment will be one of sharp revela- 
 tion. To read of the Cross and of all it 
 implies is one thing; to meet Jesus bearing 
 His Cross, or to stand with the sorrowful 
 Mother at the foot of that Cross, is quite 
 another. Up till then the Cross had been a 
 comforting fact, taken on faith; now it be- 
 comes a piercing challenge, a question that 
 calls for an immediate answer. It is no longer 
 something to be meditated upon; it is some- 
 thing to be accepted, something to be borne. 
 A penetrative thinker has said that we cannot 
 love Jesus with impunity. We certainly can- 
 not meet the Cross with impunity. Whether 
 we accept it or shirk it, the encounter leaves 
 a wound. 
 
 I 
 
 But why this challenge and this pain? we 
 are tempted to ask. Is there not enough 
 suffering in the world, not enough sorrow, 
 even in a happy human life, that we should 
 need to find it in our religion? Is not 
 
The Finding of the Cross 81 
 
 religion meant to comfort, to heal, to restore, 
 to transfigure life into a radiant, joyous 
 thing? 
 
 The answer lies in the very words that our 
 shallow, joy-craving hearts constantly urge 
 against the doctrine of the Cross. Love, we 
 say, is the greatest thing in the world, and 
 God is love. Love does not smite, it heals. 
 Yes: the one thing in the universe that can 
 give comfort and happiness is love—and to 
 say “love” is to say “suffering”; to say “love” 
 is to say “Christ crucified”; to say “love” is 
 to say “I am crucified with Christ.” Where 
 on earth or in heaven is there a love that does 
 not live by pain, sorrow and sacrifice? If 
 we really want to argue successfully against 
 the element of suffering in religion, we must 
 first argue love out of the universe. In a 
 loveless world created by a loveless God, suf- 
 fering would be an insult, an outrage, sheer 
 folly. In a world created and redeemed by 
 Love, suffering is a glorious vocation, a Divine 
 energy, the very stuff of joy. But for suffer- 
 ing, sin would end in despair, and doubt in 
 madness. 
 
 We speak of the problem of suffering. 
 
82 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 There is a problem of suffering. But as we 
 look more deeply and steadily into its inex- 
 orable face, we come to know that, whatever 
 problems it may propound to us, suffering is 
 itself the solution of the world’s most crucial 
 problem—God’s own answer to the question 
 of the ages. It is the answer of Redemption 
 —God’s great answering Act, in a situation 
 which no mere argument can meet. We are 
 beaten and bruised, and words have no power 
 to heal us. But by His stripes we are healed 
 —Pain answering pain, Agony interpreting 
 agony, Death refuting death. We may quar- 
 rel with it all, if we will; but, in order to be 
 consistent, we would need to quarrel also with 
 the mother-love that gives its heart to be 
 broken, and the hero-passion that sheds its 
 blood for home and country. Given the fact 
 of sin, the only world in which voluntary 
 suffering is a superfluity is a world from 
 which love has been wiped out. When God 
 Himself wanted to redeem a sinful world, He 
 could only die for it. When Christ came into 
 that world, He could only conquer it by giv- 
 ing Himself for it. When the Church was 
 established upon earth, she had to be “born 
 
The Finding of the Cross 83 
 
 crucified.” The Cross runs all through life. 
 If we cannot attain to joy through it, we must 
 resign ourselves to those counterfeits of joy 
 with which the world is all too ready to cheat 
 us. The Cross is not a gloomy thing: the only 
 really joyous laughter in the world to-day is 
 the laughter of St. Francis and his spiritual 
 descendants; the only true gaieté de ceur is 
 the gaiety of St. Philip Neri and his merry 
 family. 
 
 ae 
 
 And so, as Lent deepens to Passion-tide, 
 we may discover or rediscover, the Cross, and 
 find, hidden deep in the field of grace, the 
 priceless pearl of sacrifice. That discovery 
 is not made by way of intellectual enquiry, 
 emotional expenditure, or artistic apprecia- 
 tion. There is only one way of really finding 
 the Cross, and not merely looking at it, and 
 that is by making common cause with the 
 crucified Lord. ‘This is an age that talks 
 loudly of sympathy, and to find the Cross is 
 to enter into a state of sympathy with Jesus 
 Christ. But the sympathy demanded by the 
 Cross is a very definite, distinctive, profound 
 
84 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 thing, miles removed from the shallow senti- 
 ment which so often bears the name. 
 
 Its first expression must always be, not 
 commiseration or companionship, but peni- 
 tence. The Cross is the judgment-seat of 
 Love, and when Love is judge, the most 
 blameless may well abase himself in dust and 
 ashes. The Cross of Jesus is the great trib- 
 unal of penance. Before it sentimental de- 
 votion and eloquent protestation die. The 
 whisper of penitence is the only language fit 
 for that great Court. 
 
 So our first contact with the Cross is made 
 at the tribunal of penance. In approaching 
 it we detach ourselves from the superficial, 
 easy-going, delusive attitude of the conven- 
 tional church-goer, who is content to be one 
 of, say, three thousand “miserable offenders,” 
 and does not mind even saying so, once a 
 week, in their company. Discarding the pro- 
 tection of the herd, alone with our own sin, 
 we kneel before Almighty God in the Sac- 
 rament of Penance. We know our sin—defi- 
 nite, individual, characteristic—to be some- 
 thing that brought the Saviour to the Cross; 
 and the only attitude possible to us, once we 
 
The Finding of the Cross 85 
 
 see that, is humiliation, shame, sorrow, a con- 
 trition not emotional or passionate it may be, 
 but entirely honest and humble. We ask for 
 judgment, for correction. We do not pre- 
 sume, nor describe ourselves as ‘“‘sympathiz- 
 ing’ with our crucified Judge. Yet a really 
 contrite confession is the great fundamental 
 act of sympathy with Christ. For it means 
 to think about sin as He did, to be of one 
 mind with Him regarding that which gave 
 the Cross its bitterness. Failing true peni- 
 tence and humble confession, all professions 
 of sympathy with our Lord are hollow, and 
 the thought of suffering with Him is a pesti- 
 lent delusion. 
 
 {it 
 
 To the penitent there comes the call to 
 accompany his Lord to the Cross. Our small- 
 est acts of self-denial, the simplest Lenten 
 rule, may be a vital moment in the history of 
 that companionship; a lifetime of appalling 
 austerities may fall entirely outside it. What 
 is commonly called “asceticism” does not even 
 begin to be Christian until its every act is 
 offered to God in humility, contrition and love, 
 
86 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 in union with that supreme Sacrifice which 
 alone gives our self-denials value. Otherwise 
 it remains, at its best, the noble violence of 
 the seeker after God; at its worst, the love- 
 less fanaticism of the Pharisee. 
 
 As we begin as humble learners in the way 
 of the Cross, not blighting our imagination 
 with a gloom that dishonours the Great Joy- 
 bringer, yet in the seriousness of unreserved 
 surrender, something of His suffering will 
 inevitably fall to our share. We may not 
 be caught up into the consuming fire of His 
 passion, but we shall surely feel something 
 of the chill loneliness of His endurance. We 
 shall know loneliness among our fellows, and, 
 perhaps most of all, among those who with 
 us follow in the way of the Cross. Why it 
 should be so is a perplexing problem, the roots 
 of which strike deep into the mystery of per- 
 sonality, human and Divine. It certainly was 
 so with Jesus. When He rode into Jerusa- 
 lem, the Pharisees who stood by and scowled 
 understood Him better than the crowd that 
 sang “Hosannah.” The Pharisees knew that 
 He had come to destroy what they had built 
 —hatred can be very clear-sighted at times. 
 
The Finding of the Cross 87 
 
 When Jesus stood before Pilate, His enemies 
 who cried, “Away with Him! Crucify Him!” 
 understood Him better than the disciples who 
 slunk away in grief and fear. The disciples 
 looked upon Him as the Saviour of the nation, 
 who would have restored the Kingdom of 
 Israel had He only been strong enough to 
 avert capture and death. The leaders of the 
 nation recognized that He was a peril to 
 nationalist ambitions; that, as long as He 
 was allowed to live, they would have no chance 
 with the people. And we may, in quite 
 humble, homely ways, reproduce that experi- 
 ence; only the courage of love can bear us 
 through. 
 
 IV 
 
 But there is a deeper loneliness—the mo- 
 ment when the disciple can no longer under- 
 stand his Master; when, our friends having 
 ceased to sympathize with us, the One Friend 
 seems to turn away and leave us with our per- 
 plexity. Writers and preachers have moved 
 us deeply again and again, as they waxed 
 eloquent over the loneliness of the misunder- 
 stood Christ—lonely in the home at Nazareth, 
 
88 The Finding of the Cross 
 
 lonely in the crowd, lonely among His dis- 
 ciples, lonely in His supreme agony; misun- 
 derstood by all, even by His most holy Mother, 
 denied by the generous-hearted Peter, for- 
 saken by the disciple He loved best. Noth- 
 ing 1s wanting to complete the picture of 
 utmost loneliness. But there is another side 
 to that picture. If a sword pierced the heart 
 of the forsaken Christ, did it not also pierce 
 the heart of those who forsook Him? Was 
 there no sword in St. Peter’s heart when he 
 heard the intolerable news of the approaching 
 Cross, and cried out: ““That be far from Thee, 
 Lord”? Was there no sword in the heart 
 of St. John and the others when their hopes 
 were so inconceivably shattered, their convic- 
 tions so fatally shaken? 
 
 And so there may come a time when we 
 also shall be unable to understand Jesus 
 Christ, when we too shall feel the loneliness 
 of separation from Him. It comes to most 
 of us in one form or another. Our plans 
 are upset just when we had framed them in 
 obedience to what we conceived to be the call 
 of Jesus. We may: become conscious of an 
 interior demand, of something being asked 
 
The Finding of the Cross 89 
 
 of us by God which runs entirely counter to 
 our previous conception of His will for us. 
 Or, perhaps, most mysterious of all, we may 
 find ourselves unable to discern the will of 
 God, left face to face with a silent Christ, 
 unable to see His working in our lives, yet 
 conscious only that an unknown Hand is shap- 
 ing them into a pattern that seems to make 
 no sense. We work, and our work is taken 
 away from us; we love, and are left lonely; 
 we pray, and God is silent when even His No 
 would be a blessed relief; we follow Jesus 
 along a hard road, and at great cost, and 
 Jesus leaves us. In such hours we can only 
 endure; it is not until they have passed that 
 we know how entirely we have been with 
 Jesus all the time, how deeply we have been 
 admitted into the Divine friendship. 
 
 V 
 
 _ There is a further discovery of the Cross 
 —the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings for 
 the sake of His Body, the Church. But while 
 it too is a finding of the Cross, it belongs 
 essentially to the fellowship of the ascended 
 life of our Lord—to that miraculous region, 
 
90 The finding of the Cross 
 
 “the other side of Lent,’’ where the soul that 
 has kept her fast with her Lord may enter 
 into His joy, the joy that is woven out of 
 sorrow, the triumph that is at once ease and 
 pain, peace and a sword. 
 
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 ee aD 
 
 GAYLORD | 
 
 
 
 PRINTEDIN U.S.A- 
 
wv 
 
 aes 
 en seu