ie ides Sete Tae cos i *) +2 Oe i 4 Pith Nee Yh ‘ ha v rd J Ni Ve Wit. ne ‘te keg ‘eer an 1 Ati ne 1 Wade i; ae’ AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library t httos://archive.org/details/anglocatholicsthOOraw! AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGI , he FOREWORD BY LORD HALIFAX AM asked to write a Foreword to this book, and I do I so with pleasure. At different times I have had to consult Mr. Rawlinson on matters of importance, literary, theological, and others—more especially on those relating to reunion with the Holy See. On every occasion I have had to thank him for expressions of opinion, information, and advice which I doubt if I could have obtained in any other quarter. Mr. Rawlinson filled a place peculiar to himself, and his loss, as we count such losses, is one which those who had the privilege of his friendship and the advan- tage of the help he was always ready to give, can never cease to regret. | The story of his life and the account of his opinions as recorded in this book will excite the keenest interest. It is a record of singular value, and one which all who are in- terested in the matters which concern us most and are of abiding interest, will thank Dr. Sparrow Simpson for having put together in an available and permanent shape. It is the record of a life and opinions not only interesting in them- selves but a record calculated to throw light on difficult subjects, and as such likely to be of much value to many souls. HALIFAX. De er utee A Ale ; A Ye { Vora! ii pe | Lh ry w* EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MAny friends of Fr. Rawlinson have helped in the production of this book. His sister has supplied many details of his early years. C. Turley Smith, Esq., who knew him intimately at Oxford, has written of his undergraduate career. Miss Dymphna Smith has furnished recollections of his work as a priest under her father, the Vicar of Wymering. For his work in London we are indebted to the Rev. A. F. A. Hanbury- Tracy, Vicar of St. Barnabas, Pimlico, and to various members of the Congregation, especially to Major and Lady Skinner, to A. J. Hayes, Esq., Churchwarden, to H. W. Hill, Esq., formerly Secretary of the English Church Union, whose extensive knowledge of men and keen judgment on their capabilities make his contribution to this Memoir particularly valuable. The Rev. E. A. Ommanney, the Rev. Basil P. Gurdon, who was for years his fellow Curate, the Rev. C. O. Becker, whom he succeeded at St. Barnabas, the Rev. FE. O. H. Whitby, have all supplied important estimates of the different spheres of Fr. Rawlinson’s work. For the later period of his life I am greatly indebted to the sympathetic and appre- ciative description given by the Right Reverend the Bishop of Nassau, and to the Rev. Fr. Weigall, who was Chaplain at Nassau during Fr. Rawlinson’s residence there. To the Rev. Canon Travers is due the account of his work in connec- tion with the University Mission to Central Africa. And all through, the encouragement and interest shown by Lord Halifax has been a great support. His prefatory words, to which the reader is indebted, are especially valuable, owing to his long and intimate knowledge of Fr. Rawlinson’s life and work. I have also to express my obligations to x EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Edgar Skinner, Esq., of the firm of Allen & Unwin, for infor- mation about our friend’s abilities as a literary critic; to the Secretary of the Anglo-Catholic Congress, and to the Proprietor of The Treasury, for permission to reprint Fr. Rawlinson’s papers; and especially to the Editor of the Church Times, and to F. B. Palmer, Esq., for the unpublished notes and MSS. Thoughts on Religion. Wayaises CONTENTS MEMOIR - = 7 PART I—SERMONS SOME CATHOLIC TYPES: Io Lee, ASCH LIC \« “ Il. THE MAN OF SORROWS . III. THE SCHOLAR = Iv. THE PHILANTHROPIST os V. THE CONTEMPLATIVE - (Preached at St. Leonards) VI. GENTLENESS x e (Preached at All Saints, Margaret Street) PART II A.—STUDIES IN MYSTICISM. I. WHAT MYSTICISM IS_~ - ll. DANTE, THE MYSTIC i Ill. THE SPANISH MYSTICS - IV. ST. FRANCIS DE SALES a V. THE QUESTION OF QUIETISM B.—TWO FIGURES IN FRENCH RELIGION. I. ST. FRANCIS DE SALES AS SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR 2 II. A TWENTIETH CENTURY SOLITARY C.—SOME RECENT FRENCH WORKS ON THEOLOGY AND RELIGION - D.—NASSAU: A SUB-TROPICAL CITY PAGE xii 47 58 68 80 ol 103 IIo Na Re, I20 Xii CONTENTS PART III.—CONGRESS PAPERS PAGE I. MEDITATION AND MYSTICISM - - = 135 (Reprint of First Anglo-Catholic Congress, 1920, pp. 170-176) II. THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER i . 143 (Newcastle. Printed in Ali Saints’ Magazine) III. CONFESSION AND DIRECTION - * ie I5ir (Oxford Convention, 1921) IV. 1, EGLISE D’ANGLETERRE AUJOURD’HUI . 159 (Reprinted from the “‘ Church Times’’) PART IV.—THOUGHTS ON RELIGION PUSEY - - - - - Ian TENDENCY TO STEREOTYPE - - 176 THE FUTURE OF RITUALISM - . =.) VEO@ FELLOWSHIP WITH THE CHURCH - - 179 MODERNISM - - - Pies HTS THE DIVINITY OF OUR LORD - - 180 MENTALITE CATHOLIQUE - - - I81 RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY - - 181 THE FAILURE OF MODERNISM - Sa a THE CROWD-SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH ane. hoe ee DISOBEDIENCE - - - - 186 THE ETHICS OF DISOBEDIENCE - - 187 THE CHRISTIAN PRIESTHOOD - - 188 THOUGHTS ON REUNION 4 ; — Ior ANGLICANISM AND NONCOMFORMITY - <3) Gam ON PREACHING - - - 195 SOLITUDE - - - - - 199 COMPARISON OF A GENTLEMAN AND A CHRISTIAN - - - 201 ESCAPES) - - - - - 203 MEMOIR of Robert Rawlinson, of Graythwaite, in North Lancashire. He was one of eight children, and was born on 30th May, 1868. Both father and mother came of a gifted race. His grandfather was a mathematician and took a high degree, and on the mother’s side he was descended from Romney, the artist. Scholarly and artistic strains were thus blended in his inheritance. He won an entrance scholarship at Malvern College when he was little more than thirteen. As a small boy of seven or eight he had set his mind on being ordained. This is said to have been largely due to the Mother’s influence, to whom he was warmly devoted. He never faltered in this desire to be a priest. An intimate friend of his College days, Mr. Turley Smith, says :— “‘ Gerald Rawlinson went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in October, 1887. He took Pass Mods with a view to treading History, and he would undoubtedly have taken a first in History, had he not previously met with the football accident that caused him so much pain and trouble. As it was he had to do his History papers in bed, and got a very good second class. Soon after leaving Oxford, and with a view to getting rid of this knee-trouble he went to a surgeon in London, but the treatment was not successful. “ At Oxford he played Association Football for his college, and received a kick on his knee in a cup-tie. Unfortunately the match ended in a tie, and was re- played almost at once. Rawlinson played, and I have Cre Christopher Rawlinson was the second son Xiv AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION always thought that the trouble was in consequence aggravated. He was not a cricketer, but sometimes he used to play in stray matches, but truth compels me to say that he was chosen more for himself than for his cricket ability. ‘““He took a keen interest in his last two years at Oxford in the College Debating Society, of which he was President, and his speeches were always interesting. He did not speak unless he knew what he was talking about, and when he did speak he seemed to know more than anyone else. He was at that time really interested in horse-racing. I fancy it was in his blood, and to the end of his life he was always keen upon it. I spent much time with him at Margate when his knee became so bad that abscesses kept on appearing. It was during those weary periods that he read prodigiously and very widely. Fiction he read in great quantities, and in his later years —as often happens to men who turn to fiction for sheer relaxation—he rejoiced in good shockers. His taste for good fiction remained the same, and it was a fine taste, but he was very far from scorning the sensational novel.”’ To all appearance the ecclesiastical influences of Oxford failed to impress themselves greatly on Rawlinson’s mind. His fellow undergraduate, Mr. Turley Smith, writes :—‘‘ I do not think one can say that Mr. Rawlinson came under any definite religious influence at Oxford. Our tutors at Exeter wete men of European reputations, greatly distinguished, but not men who appeal to normal undergraduates. The | only one of them of whom I ever heard Gerald Rawlinson speak with any affection was Mr. Boase, our history tutor, who was a dear old man.” It was during his Oxford days that he developed a love of French. It seems that this was his introduction to Catholic principles. As he read the great writers of the Church in France, he passed from appreciating the brilliance of their MEMOIR XV literary style to assimilating their theological conceptions, He was apparently one of those undergraduates on whom the sermons of Bossuet and Lacordaire exert a life-long influence. So he thought out, by independent study, quietly for himself, under the literary influence of French Catholicism, the doctrines of the Christian Faith, and arrived at the Catholic conclusions from which he never swerved. It is a singular feature of his religious development that he lived in Oxford, from 1887 to 1890, almost unaffected by the Tractarian Movement, and deriving his Catholicism from France. After leaving Oxford in 1891, Rawlinson went to Llandaff to prepare under Dean Vaughan for ordination. He was ““one of the last of the long line of ‘ Vaughan’s Doves.’ For the Dean of Llandaff he had a real regard and affection ; but in after life it amazed him to think that anyone could possibly regard Dr. Vaughan’s method as an adequate pre- paration for the office and manifold work of the priesthood.”’ (Church Times.) He was a contemporary of Hugh Benson at Llandaff. But there is nothing left to show what either thought of the other. It would have been an interesting mutual study. The wayward impulsiveness of the one presented the greatest contrast to the studious deliberateness of the other. Hugh Benson surpassed in brilliancy ; Gerald Rawlinson in solidity. In 1893 Rawlinson was ordained by the Bishop of Win- chester to the Curacy of Byfleet. His Vicar was a sound Tractarian, and firm believer in doctrinal teaching. The Vicar’s influence had a definite effect on Rawlinson’s develop- ment. But his residence there was brief. He broke down altogether in health, and was compelled to undergo the amputation of a leg in consequence of the injuries to his knee incurred at Oxford. When he recovered he was ordained priest in 1895 and went to be Curate at Wymering, near Portsmouth. Here XVi AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION he had rooms in the Vicarage and became an intimate friend of the large family living there. He was highly valued by every member of the home, especially by the mother of the family, who was deeply impressed by the quiet calm of his character, the security of his convictions, and his strong dislike of sentimentalism in religion. We are told that he was always the same, that he was their most perfect friend, that he was constantly consulted and his judgment trusted. This was the time when his connection began with the Church Times. When he announced that his first essay in journalism had been accepted he was met in the Vicarage of Wymering with laughter and cheers. He remained at Wymering for seven years. “TI stayed with him,” writes Mr. Turley Smith, “‘ both at Byfleet when he was Curate there, and more than once at Wymering. And we often went to the Continent together, to Paris, Rome, Florence, Perugia, and so forth.”’ “* During this time,’ writes a member of the Vicar’s family, ““my Father was head of the Portsmouth branch of the H.C.U., and we had great meetings at Wymering. But it was Mr. Rawlinson who worked it all, but never appeared to.”’ This last sentence represents a point on which many who knew him agree: his deliberate self-effacement. “His great work with us (at Wymering) was the Sunday School. He trained the teachers, and started the S. Sulpice method. We were the first to have it in the South, and clergy came out to see our Sunday School. The attendance was extremely good because so regular. He also started a Children’s Eucharist, but we were only able to have it once a month as there were two Churches to be served. The whole service was sung, and there were never fewer than seventy children present, and they loved it. The people in the village still talk of him.” Mr. H. W. Hill, at that time Secretary of the Hnplish Church Union, says that he came to know Rawlinson at MEMOIR XVii Wymering in the Summer of 1900, and was so much impressed by his remarkable commonsense, and ability and judgment, that he consulted him about a clerical case of considerable difficulty, and followed his advice, which proved to be a sound solution of the problem. While Rawlinson was Curate of Wymering, he often went to preach at St. Michael’s, Portsmouth, at the invitation of the Vicar, the Rev. E. A. Ommanney. This led to his removal to London. Mr. Ommanney recommended him to the Rev. A. Hanbury Tracy for the Curacy at St. Barnabas, Pimlico, which the Rev. C. O. Becker, now Librarian of Sion College, had held for many years, and relinquished on be- coming Rector of St. Botolph’s, Aldersgate. Mr. Becker, who knew Rawlinson intimately, says that he came to London with considerable diffidence and misgivings, but with the decided encouragement of his friends, who felt that this was the kind of work for which he was peculiarly fitted. Mr. Ommanney says that Rawlinson while at Wymering “always preached good doctrinal sermons, and spoke well and definitely at our clerical meetings. I always flatter myself I did one good day’s work when I got him to St. Barnabas.”’ Rawlinson removed to St. Barnabas, Pimlico, in 1902. There he worked for one and twenty years, and continued till he died. ‘This removal to London was immensely im- portant to his religious development. It placed him in immediate and constant fellowship with doctrinal and in- tellectual movements, with which he greatly sympathised. In the Church and Parish of St. Barnabas he was naturally overshadowed by the gifts and popularity of his distinguished Vicar, whose reputation was widely known where that of the Curate was not. Indeed Rawlinson developed slowly. It was long before he impressed the congregation as a preacher. An experienced and critical priest, who knew him well and highly valued him, says that he was a poor hand in the pulpit XVili AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION | at first. His subject was nearly always the same, and that was Mysticism. He did not by any means always appeal. Another priest assures us that he displayed a curious in- ability on the greatest festivals to confine himself to the subject of the day. Even at Christmas or Easter he would begin with a reference to some Frenchman, often a name they had never heard, and discourse on some example of life or ideal of ascetic discipline, and then, in a concluding sentence or two, suggest a reference, more or less remote, to the doctrine which they were assembled to commemorate. This, not unnaturally, produced a feeling of disappoint- ment. Nevertheless, in spite of limitations, it gradually dawned upon the people that they possessed a priest of unusual ability and religious power. The Secretary of the English Church Union, Mr. H. W. Hill, was for years a member of the congregation of St. Barnabas. Mr. Hill saw Rawlinson constantly three or four times a week, and heard of himin many ways. ‘The district of St. Barnabas included many poor, and on all the pastoral sides of a priest’s duty Rawlinson was extraordinarily good. In spite of his serious lameness he got about in a wonderful way. He was assiduous in his visits among the people. He.took-a great interest in the men’s club, where he held discussions, literary, historical, religious, leaving always the impression on educated visitors of a man extremely well-read, endowed with unusual capacity for giving sound judgments on the questions which arose. | It was also as a preacher that Mr. Hill recognised his power. Rawlinson often preached to the Sunday-Evening congrega- tion. ‘There was no eloquence, or at least no rhetoric. But there was the genuine thing. Notaredundant word. Length never more than twenty minutes, but condensing into that space precisely what was needed. Meanwhile Mr. Hill, then a Reader in the London Diocese, took notes of these MEMOIR xix instructions, and professes himself deeply indebted to Rawlinson’s teaching. * When Rawlinson was appointed Curate at St. Barnabas, Pimlico,” writes Mr. Turley Smith, “I was living in Upper George Street, and we went into rooms together at 164, Warwick Street, $.W., where we lived together for a long time. Eventually we moved into 20, Holbein House, but it was so small that there was no bedroom for me if each of us had a sitting room.” Number 20, Holbein House. How well many people knew that tiny flat. Five stories up and no lift to reach it. Did he wish to be inaccessible? A man must be really in demand if people were going to toil up all that way to dis- cover him. Did he want to be near the stars, and look down upon the world? We can sympathise with his aspirations ; but how unsuitable a position for a man crippled by loss of alimb! Did he mean to be a recluse? Was there no other place available? Or was it narrow means that put and kept him there? Anyhow, there he was, living entirely alone. A servant came in during the day, but left in the evening. At night the key was put under the door with a notice, in case of emergency, stating where it could be found. And there, in seclusion, he sat and read to late hours; his Sister says, far too late, as late as one or two in the morning—which lateness did not interfere with his punctual and regular presence at the daily Mass—Punctual, observed a busy man to the present writer, with impressive emphasis, suggestive of painful experience with priests of whom the same could not be said. This lofty elevation in the Chelsea flat by no means kept people away. All sorts of people came. They climbed the steep ascent. For the truth is that the Curate of St. Bar- nabas was anything rather than a man restricted to parochial interests, although at the same time gifted with a parochial xx AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION | mind. He was accessible to a wide outer circle which does not generally consult the parochial clergy. As the Church Times notice admirably put it: “To the tiny flat high up in Holbein House, reached by himself with slow and painful toil as his infirmity increased, came men of all ages and many minds, and each found himself welcome and at home. Some of the younger were perhaps surprised to find that this crippled and invalid priest could discuss with them on equal terms the form shown in recent cricket and football matches, or the chances of horses entered for the Derby or the Lincolnshire Handicap. But his early love of all forms of sport had not waned with his inability to follow them actively, and it commended him to the young who shared it. With others he would be equally ready to discuss problems in casuistry, or psychology—(he was keenly interested in psychological research)—or dogmatics, or the advancement of the Catholic cause, or modern poets or recent plays, always with critical insight and illuminating comment. Of a mind candid and analytical, he was never tempted to facile acquiescence in another’s opinion; but still less would he challenge for the sake of challenging, since he desired only to find where truth lay. In Bacon’s phrase, reading had made him a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Soto one who was a recluse not by choice but by the compulsion of infirmity, men came more and more to refer problems in a wide field of thought and action, confident that they would be set in the way of solving them. ‘Theologians of world-wide reputation, simple parish priests, boys from the clubs of the parish, missionaries on furlough, men of all professions, found their way up to the little rooms, lined and stacked with books, overlooking the Chelsea Barracks.” Perhaps it would be true to say, although it sounds curious, that he was for some years more appreciated by the children than by their elders. As a teacher in the Church Schools he MEMOIR Xxi is remembered with enthusiastic admiration. Trained teachers are not usually addicted to excessive praise for the efforts of the untrained curate who gives the Scripture lesson. But if Rawlinson had wanted a testimonial for efficiency he could hardly have done better than ask the head teachers of St. Barnabas School to write him one. Evidently he sympathised greatly with the children, and they appreciated him. He knew every child by name. He had a power of telling stories. He inherited artistic gifts. He could draw on the Blackboard. He had an extraordinarily keen sense of humour. He took them over new and unusual fields—one time he gave them a series of lessons on Dante. He took great interest in their amusements. “A point worth mentioning,’ writes his friend, Mr. Turley Smith, “is the play that Gerald Rawlinson got up for the boys and girls in the parish each Christmas for many years. Quite frankly he took some of his ideas from other plays, but all the same he wrote most of the play himself, and its performance was extraordinarily good. The amount of work that this annual play caused him was enor- mous, but he never grudged it.” One of these plays was called ‘‘ The Lost Fairies,” another was “ Robin Hood.” But apparently the most thrilling and best remembered was “‘ Rupert of the Redskins.” ** He was not a man of one idea by any means. He would often have his room full of boys and young men, and talk to them by the hour in the evenings about their football and cricket. He was always up in the latest sporting news. This made him very much liked by the young men of the parish. He never thrust religion down their throats, but got to know them and their own particular interests, and then led them gradually on to something higher.’”’ (The Rev. Basil P. Gurdon.) So far as literary work is concerned, Rawlinson has left us exceedingly little. His principal work, of course, consisted XXii AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION - in anonymous articles contributed to the Church Times. There his judgment was highly valued. He had an excep- tional faculty for making shrewd incisive remarks while avoiding statements which require a subsequent apology or withdrawal. It was felt that his critiques could be trusted, complete confidence was placed in his decisions. He was continually consulted on important matters affecting the interests of this leading Journal. But naturally, work of this kind is essentially ephemeral. It is the journalist’s fate that such writings can hardly be expected to survive. But the quiet influence of Rawlinson’s journalistic labours was world-wide. As they extended over twenty years— advancing from the functions of an occasional contribution to that of a recognised member of the Staff and regular writer of leading articles. Reference to Rawlinson’s journalistic labours would be hopelessly incomplete if attention were not drawn to the tone and high level of his contributions. It may safely be said that at no period of its existence was the level of the Church Times higher than during the seid when Rawlinson was one of its regular writers. There were also the series of Articles and Studies in Spiritual- ism and Mysticism which he sent to that admirable periodical, the Treasury ; one of the victims, alas, of the Great War. The Articles on Mysticism are reprinted in the present book. } A subject which Rawlinson had especially made his own was the theological literature of Modern France. He has. given an admirable outline of it in his little book on “‘ Recent French Tendencies, a Study in French Religion.” Were he sketches, with the familiarity of intimate knowledge, the altered attitude of French people towards Catholicism since the time of Renan. ‘The Modernist Movement, its rise and its failure in the Roman Church, is traced with remarkable ability, in an eminently readable style. The troubles of MEMOIR XXili Mgr. D’Hulst, at the Institute Catholique of Paris, his sympa- thetic effort to protect first Duchesne and afterwards Loisy whose inner development he did not really foresee; the criticism of Loisy on Harnack’s theory that Christianity consisted of the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God with the Son left out; the French Abbé’s brilliant reply that the teaching of Jesus was concentrated not on God’s Fatherhood so much as on the Kingdom of God; the unfortunate fate of that reply, which disconcerted the Protestant as much as it dismayed the Catholic, since Loisy admitted much of Harnack’s criticism to the dismay of the Catholic, and rejected Harnack’s inference, to the dismay of the Protestant :—all this is related by Rawlinson with delightful insight and keen- ness. So he traces the movement on through Blondel, Laberthonniére and le Roy, accounting for the failure of Modernism in the Roman Church as due to its having offered to supply something of which very few people apparently felt the need. No less interesting is the second half of the book, which traces the revival of Catholicism among the intellectual circles in France ; a phrase familiar to any reader of Dimnet’s writings. Much importance is assigned in this revival to the great writers Bourget and Barrés. Barrés’ “‘ eloquent plea on behalf of the village Churches of France, which in many cases were being allowed to fall into ruin,’ will not easily be forgotten by any reader of those tragic pages in La grande pitie de l Eghse de France. As Rawlinson said, ‘‘ Maurice Barrés may not believe in Jesus Christ, but he does believe in the Church.’’ Anatole France, on the contrary, is represented by Rawlinson as a belated survivor of the nineteenth century: ‘“ beyond question the most gifted of French writers, a master of perfect French’; but “the bitter foe of both religion and pat- riotism.”” He loses no opportunity to depreciate religion (as in le Procurateur de Judée) ; but also to depreciate Xxiv AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION - Patriotism (as in that satirical history of France, L’Ile des Pin- gouins) “a diabolical clever attempt to cover his country’s past with ridicule.” Bergson’s influence is regarded as on the whole favourable to religion, since his criticism undermines the assumption that there is no real knowledge, except that which is scientific, and no means of knowledge except the intellect. — If a man may be in any real degree known by his own library, Rawlinson would be at once recognised as a thorough student of modern French Theology. By the same test it would appear that Latin and Greek Patristic literature was beyond his province. Not a single volume of either could be found upon his shelves. He studied the later mystics, but not, it seems, the Fathers of the Church. Rawlinson’s knowledge of Religion in France was by no means merely derived from books. He was on friendly terms with quite a number of French laity and clergy, both on the Modernist and Orthodox side. He spent several holidays in France with Mr. Hayes, Churchwarden of St. Barnabas, who was with him at the time that he visited Loisy, not long after the excommunication, which was in 1908. Loisy was then living in very humble circumstances at a small place near Dereux, and Rawlinson stayed there several days. Among the distinguished French ecclesiastics whom — Rawlinson met in 1908 was Mgr. Mignot, Archbishop of Albi. The Archbishop was a man of wide outlook. He read and quoted Liddon and Sanday, and was greatly interested in. affairs of the English Church. He was deeply sympathetic towards criticism and towards Modernist aims, but deplored the extremes into which Iwisy had drifted. Within a year of Rawlinson’s interview with Mignot, the Archbishop pub- lished his book L’Eglise et la Critique, in which he quoted from Loisy, a paragraph with which he could agree, and spoke of his personal efforts to caution restless minds against MEMOIR XXV the discouragement and sadness which the condemnation of Modernist doctrine had been the pretext. Mignot also pointed out that critical exaggeration and excess had caused reaction, in which true critical methods and real knowledge had suffered unmerited distrust. Such was the distinguished and large-minded prelate whom Rawlinson was privileged to meet in 1908. An interesting memorandum of the inter- view was found among Rawlinson’s papers: “Interview with Mgr. Mignot, at Laon, 8th August, 1908. “Partly in the garden of La Clinique, in a corner of the old ramparts of the town, partly in his room, simply furnished with a writing table, and with a large four- post bed in a corner, with a crucifix over it. “The subjects of our conversation were mainly . three :— ** T.—Modernism. “He began on this at once, and evidently for him Modernism means M. Loisy. He seemed to be rather distressed at Loisy’s later work. Especial dissent from Loisy’s conclusions with regard to the Fourth Gospel. Why should Loisy’s opinion be more right than other critics’ opinions? Especially Mgr. Mignot does not agree that the story of the raising of Lazarus has no historical character. He spoke all through with the greatest affection and respect for Loisy, saying the Germans were jealous of him, and refused to notice his books, wishing to keep their subject (biblical criticism) in their own little circle. Hands off to French, Italians, etc. Hence the Germans ignore Loisy. “Mer. Mignot showed a great admiration among English writers for Driver and Armitage Robinson, the latter of whom had visited him at Albi. ““ Especially he admired the latter’s two lectures on the historicity of the Fourth Gospel. “TI asked him about Newman. He said he was not a XXvi (74 Tl. AN ANGILO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION - Modernist, but his ideas and books had made Modernists. He mentioned that his own first reading of the Essay on Development had impressed him a great deal. He said that Loisy had not written to him for a long time, called him for this reason ‘un grand paresseux,’ and told me to ask him to write to him at Laon. — State of Religion in France. “This, he thought, was bad. I said, ‘ Mais Mgr., vous étes pessimiste.’ And he replied that he was an optimist by nature, but that he could not regard the future with optimism. The younger clergy had hoped much from Separation, but this hope had not been fulfilled. Es- pecially were the instituteurs hostile to Christianity. The older ones were still Christian, but not the younger ones. ‘The influence of the Ecoles Normales where they were educated was bad. Christianity was often treated in the schools as une bétise, and the Christian God was characterised as cruel, etc. Hence a great difficulty in the catechisms. ‘The children came with a prejudice against what was taught them there. It was to counter- act this Anti-Clericalism of the schoolmaster that the ligue des Parents had been formed. “Mer. Mignot admitted that there was a great difference in departments. His own diocese of Albi was fairly satisfactory, but some were not at all so. The diocese of Soissons was not satisfactory. Few men went to Mass. We discussed the difference between France and England, he saying that in England the majority of people still had le sentiment religieux. He asked about the attendance of men at Church in England, and he agreed with me that while in England the religious sentiment may and does survive the loss of belief in dogmatic religion, in France this is not the case. “Of Mr. Campbell and the New Theology he knew practically nothing. MEMOIR XXVit “ [1i.—Anglicanism and Reunion. ““ We spoke of this in his room at the end. He was very kindly disposed towards the English Church, and manifestly had a great desire for unity. But he thought that the English people, while willing to be drawn nearer to the Continent in other things, had no desire for a rapprochement in religion. He asked what the King of England really believed. I said I did not know. I think he had the idea that, as the King had brought England and France together in these matters, so he might in this. He showed considerable knowledge of religious affairs in England.”’ On the subject of Modernism, Rawlinson passed through several phases. He began with great sympathy towards the movement, partly owing to his friendship with Loisy. He took care to hear the Rev. A. JL. Lilley lecture on Modernism, and to be in touch with Anglicans who were drawn that way. It was very characteristic of him to say that if Modernist ideas may prove perilous guests in many minds, so do all good and noble ideas to minds that are not fit to receive them. But he saw keenly the difficulties of a Restatement which would “‘ do for Pius X and Mr. H. G. Wells ”’ not to mention any other. He was firmly convinced that a Restatement of the Divinity of Christ which made His personality human cannot be made without stultifying the entire Christian experience. He was not at all disturbed by the sensation and the controversy which Modernism created. He held that “all ideas are explosive.” ‘In the Church of Rome Modernism was an explosion of liberal ideas”’: it was “ Red Catholicism.’’ But it is all a sign of life. Controversy is a wholesome sign that people are not asleep but thinking. In the interests of truth it is exactly | what ought to happen. Rawlinson greatly regretted the indiscriminating treatment of Modernism by Anglo-Catholics. XXVili AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION - “This denunciation of Modernism seems to me almost un- intelligent.”” At the same time, when Pius X pronounced against. the Movement, he wrote a paper on the failure of Modernism, in which he declared that Modernism is dead. But he believed in its resurrection in some form or other ; and expressed his opinion that much hostility towards the Movement was due to ignorance among the Roman clergy — and authorities, and even took the startling view that what the Church required was a new Voltaire to rouse it to realize the inadequacy of much of its traditional apolo- getics. Rawlinson further remarked that ‘‘ Plato seems to have been the first Modernist. ‘That is, if we use that name for the wish to remodel the old faith because it has become unsatisfactory, either to the intellect, or, as in his case, to the moral sense—See Republic, especially Books II and III, where he draws out his dis-satisfaction with the treatment of theological questions by the poets, especially Homer. Does not what he did with regard to Homer need doing for us with regard to the Old Testament, certain theories of the Atonement, etc. ?” Rawlinson deplored intensely the rigid suppressive ten- dencies of Roman authority, which stifled freedom through unawareness of the obsolete character of some of its own apologetics. “I find,” he writes, “the Church of England more satisfactory because I can find in it a mental life more unhampered.”’ It is therefore not difficult to see how it happened that . on a conservative estimate Rawlinson sometimes appeared as a downright Modernist, which however is exactly what he was not, as the selections from his thoughts on Religion prove. Rawlinson not only knew the life of the French clergy as a historian or biographer might know. He was deeply saturated with their spirit. His standard of priestly life MEMOIR XxXix was very largely derived from them. When we heard him speak at Oxford of the Abbé Huvelin as a priest “ whose name was little known to the outside world, although it still lives treasured in the memories of a number of the faithful,” and who “held no important place in the Church,” having been for thirty-five years one of the assistant clergy of an important Church in Paris: it was difficult not to think of striking resemblances in the speaker. And when he went on to say that Huvelin was a gifted spiritual guide, who, when his health had broken down, still continued to the very end to work among souls, the parallel was pathetically com- plete. Rawlinson was in many respects moulded by French ecclesiastical influence. He was profoundly sympathetic with the latest move- ments, and felt acutely the mistakes of the ultra-conservative traditionalism. In what was almost my last conversation with him he was full of possible changes in the attitude of Roman Authorities towards the Vatican Decrees. He was enthusiastic over the meeting between Lord Halifax and Cardinal Mercier. Unfortunately his ill health prevented him from accepting the invitation to form one of the party to Belgium on this occasion. While the Cardinal’s Pastoral on the Papal Con- clave appealed to certain Anglo-Catholics as a brilliant piece of journalism, written as if the spirit of diplomacy had never entered Rome, Rawlinson regarded it in a very different light, as an indication of more conciliatory feeling among great leaders of the Roman Church. He went so far as to maintain that the Papal Decree might be on the Roman side subjected to a minimising interpreta- tion, whereby the obstacle which to many appeared manifold might somehow be withdrawn. I asked him what he thought could be done with the fatal clause that “such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves irreformable, and not from the consent of the Church.’ He did not make his XXX AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION - view of this serious problem clear. But there was some- thing very attractive in his optimistic spirit. Since 1914 Rawlinson had been a literary adviser with regard to theological publications to the firm of Allen & Unwin. His reports on manuscripts were remarkably good and clear. The publishers relied very much on his judgment, which was searching and cautious. He had an admirable faculty for presenting the drift of a book in a few sentences, and an extremely useful faculty for gauging the probabilities of its circulation. This insight into the commercial side of things made his judgment particularly valuable. He took immense pains in making these reports and showed the wide range of his reading and his interests. In a letter to the Firm, dated May 7th, 1922, he wrote :— **T have been thinking over what you say, and I have always wished to write books. But since, owing to my health, I am now dependent on my pen for an income, Journalism occupies nearly all my time. What I want to do in the way of a book I do not suppose I shall ever be able to do, but for some time past I have wanted to write a book on the development of devotion since the Reformation. I gave a lecture on this last year, but it would need much more study and reading before it would make a book. Also there are always some French subjects on which I feel attracted to write, but very few people are interested in French affairs. “With regard to other writers, I am myself engaged in trying to get them, as I have entered, with another man, - into an engagement with Longman to edit a series of books for him. ‘This, of course, is only books of a certain definite point of view. We are on the look out, rather, for younger men with their reputation still to make.” The other man was Fr. Figgis. Meanwhile his advice to Messrs. Allen & Unwin’s was: “Why not start a broad Church series? ‘There is a great MEMOIR XxXxi ecclesiastical battle before us, as soon as people can think of anything except the war.”’ Rawlinson was a searching and exacting critic. Many a manuscript did not survive his judgment. If his own literary temains are few, he was instrumental in diminishing the number of other people’s publications. And certainly his criticisms carry a sense of justice and accuracy on the face of them. But it was perhaps as well that the authors of some of these manuscripts did not know what their critic said, and safer that they did not meet him. An author for instance would be less sensitive than his tribe if he read with equanimity that his work betrays a suburban disposition. Rawlinson’s mind was full of literary schemes which never matured. He was anxious in 1917 to write a book on the Christian attitude towards Spiritualism. But when a pub- lisher offered to print it he replied “It only exists in embryo in the form of some rough lecture notes; not a word of it is written, and perhaps never will be. So you will under- stand that it is impossible for me to fall in with your kind suggestion.” This was written to Messrs. Allen & Unwin. Another scheme was to write a devotional book for use in sickness. He meant to collaborate with a brother priest in producing it. But this alsocame to nothing. Yet another scheme was to edit, with the late Fr. Figgis, a series of books on Anglo-Catholic lines, to be written chiefly by younger men in full sympathy with present day ideas. This scheme collapsed on Fr. Figgis’ lamented death. It is a pathetic record of unfulfilled intentions. But the truth is that the necessity of securing an income kept him to journalism in which his strength was exhausted. Rawlinson came to have exceptional weight among his brother clergy as they recognized his learning and trusted his judgment. The Anglo-Catholic Movement tended to create associations of like-minded priests, and some of these groups acquired a certain notoriety. There was formed XXXii AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION. in the Diocese of London a group of distinguished clergy which was known by the title of the Twelve Apostles. Now the Twelve Apostles were all beneficed. They occupied important positions in the London Diocese. The existence of this association of the Beneficed suggested to others the idea of forming an association of the unbeneficed. The object was to get the younger clergy together, partly to improve the status of the curate, to define his relation to the incumbent, and to induce certain vicars to adopt a different attitude towards their assistant clergy. The juniors met partly with the militant aim of opposing arbitrary administra- tion at the Vicarage. It was also felt, by the more judicious of the younger men, that their colleagues were at times deficient in balance, and in knowledge, and that the Roman tendencies of some among their number were far more due to impulse than to principle. This group of the unbeneficed rejoiced in the optimistic title of the Band of Hope, which suggested at least a child-like cheerfulness of disposition. Now the Twelve Apostles, as was natural for the Beneficed, met for dinner, and the Band of Hope, as was also natural for the unbeneficed, met for tea. But the Band of Hope, in spite of the smiles which its name produced, proved to be a remarkably earnest and energetic association. Its promoters shewed their discernment by inviting Rawlinson to join. He became its moving spirit, distinctly the most influential in the circle. He was accepted as their leader, and presided over their discussions. The Bishop of Nassau, who was one of their number, says that Rawlinson was “ far. the greatest intellectual force among the unbeneficed.’”’ A study circle emerged out of the Band of Hope, the subject selected being Ascetic Theology. Rawlinson’s gifts, natural and acquired, gave him considerable influence in the circle. For their use he drew up his paper on the grounds of ecclesias- tical obedience. He was one of their most telling repre- sentatives on important occasions. ‘The loss of him is felt MEMOIR XXXiii to be irreparable. Priests who combine knowledge and judgment as he did, and who secure the confidence of their fellows, are not so numerous that they can easily be replaced. Probably, however, the little group over which he presided has done its work. For the Twelve Apostles and the Band of Hope appear to have developed into the Federation of Catholic priests in which Beneficed and Unbeneficed alike are united. Not much of preferment came in Gerald Rawlinson’s way. It could not in the nature of things be other- wise. His frail health and physical limitations made many spheres of activity impossible. He was indeed offered the charge of the Parish of St. Faith, Stoke Newington. But it is not wonderful that he declined it. Indeed his friends can hardly resist the conviction that he did better service where he was. Those who knew him best are deeply convinced that he was to a remarkable degree free from ecclesiastical ambitions. So he was a Curate in the English Church for nearly thirty years, and died in no higher official position, which is exactly the reason why a memoir of such a man should be written. He was not one of the ordinary pattern, nor qualified for the ordinary routine. He was more like one of the French Abbés of whom he constantly and uncon- sciously reminded us. For years he was a sufferer, afflicted with asthma, and forced to live out of London during the winter. He dragged out a slow and painful existence during the later period, crawling along the pavement, refusing to allow you to accom- pany him, sending you on to his rooms, giving you the key to go in and wait his arrival, up five stories of the London flat (how he ever climbed them was a mystery) ; then, after a long delay, he appeared, breathless, but full of intellectual energy and brightness. | , What seems to have impressed everybody who knew him was the entire absence of any trace of complaining. He made XXxiV AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION us forget his infirmities. One who knew him intimately | says that the more he suffered the more hilarious he became. But there is a feeling which haunted some of his friends, that towards the close he suffered from appalling loneliness up there in his flat; a loneliness which, now it is too late, they wish they had reached and sought to relieve. He un- doubtedly became a man of self-suppression. The courage with which he faced his infirmities was remarkable. His value as a spiritual director and confessor may be gathered from the following testimonial :— “ The first thing to strike one was his beautiful stillness. It gave you such a feeling of confidence. And next, his great gift of sympathetic understanding. He was so quick to see what one was trying to express, or to grope one’s way to ; and so ready to help and encourage. He always lifted things up to such a high level, and difficulties had a wonderful way with him of, if not quite disappearing, growing much less formidable. He could be very severe, but with it all, extra- ordinarily gentle, and never allowed one to go away dis- couraged or disheartened. He was never hurried, and his kindness and patience were unlimited. I was with him nine years, and can never be grateful enough for all he did for me.”’ af A priest who went to him for Confession says that it was as a spiritual director that Rawlinson showed his greatest: power. Some Confessors have a tremendous knowledge of books, but Rawlinson impressed you, while thoroughly familiar with ascetic and moral theology, as being at the same time intensely human. His sense of humour never deserted him even in the confessional. He would out with some illus- tration, telling, appropriate, illuminating, unforgetable. Some Confessors treat your soul like an Ingersol watch. Their ™ method is so mechanical. But Fr. Rawlinson was father and doctor and judge combined. He admired humility wholeheartedly, and insisted that it is far better to know MEMOIR XXXV what a failure one is than to be the victim of any illusions about it. Anyone who knew Rawlinson will remember what constant use he made of Bourget’s novels. His library contained a large selection of French romance, of which he was skilled in making religious use as a spiritual guide, and in solving problems which confront the Confessor at any moment in his difficult and arduous work. He was fond of insisting on “ the study of Fiction as part of the training of the Confessor.”’ ‘‘ Novels presented prob- lems. ‘They show us characters, and characters in certain distinctions. Just the sort of cases we have to meet. For example, suppose Becky Sharp, when at Miss Pinkertons’, had a Confessor—What should he have advised or ordered her? I suggest that a priest should read novels freely with this object in view.’’ And if you asked what novels? the authors which he advised priests to read especially were Thackeray, George Eliot, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Arnold Bennet, Balzac, Bourget, and Compton Mackenzie. It will be remembered that in the Priests’ Convention at Oxford he said that if a Bishop were to make him an examining chaplain he would set the clergy an examination paper on Fiction. In this connection it is interesting to know the opinion formed by his fellow curate for fifteen years, the Rev. Basil P. Gurdon, now Vicar of St. Johns’, Crowborough :— “He was a most helpful adviser in temporal as well as in spiritual matters, and always seemed to be able to go to the root of the difficulty put before him. His wide reading enabled him here, as he was one of the most omnivorous readers I have ever come across, not by any means exclu- sively of theological, but also of general literature.” By 1918 it became pathetically obvious that he could not spend a winter in London without much suffering, and he was strongly advised to take refuge in a sunnier clime. He was induced to go to the Bahamas, with his intimate friend, XXXVi AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION the Bishop of Nassau. ‘There he arrived on the festival of All Saints, I919, and remained until Easter week of 1920. During the whole of those months he lived with Fr. Weigall, to whom the present writer is greatly indebted for a know- ledge of this period. Rawlinson lived indeed of necessity the life of an invalid, but was happy in the perpetual sun- shine and comparative relief from physical distress. He begged to exchange the room, thoughtfully provided for him on the ground floor, for one upstairs where he could see the view. ‘There he sat, on the verandah, all day long, reading and welcoming any visitors who came to him. He soon made friends and drew to him several of the Cathedral boys over whom his influence was remarkable. He does not appear to have been equal to any sustained intellectual work, nor did he take many books with him. His one idea was to assist the Bishop in any way within his power, and to interest himself in the capacities and characteristics of the coloured race. He was much impressed by their courage, and their devotion, and their aptitude for meditative life. Some of these impressions of Nassau were recorded in his Albert Hall address at the first Anglo-Catholic Congress, and more fully in an Article which he contributed to the last number of the Treasury, reprinted in the present book. While wintering at Nassau, Rawlinson gave several lectures at St. Hilda’s, the Girls’ High School, on his favourite sub- ject, some characteristics of French religious life. They wakened considerable interest in his hearers. He seems to have given a good deal of instruction while at Nassau, in spite of his infirmities. He preached in the Cathedral, conducted a Retreat, and volunteered to preach offhand in an emergency. A frequent hearer of his sermons said, he is a man I would go anywhere to listen to. The residents of Nassau came quickly © to feel that they were in the presence of a man of intellectual ability and unusual character. The Retreat was regarded beforehand as rather formidable. It would be too severe MEMOIR XXXVii a searching of heart and conscience. ‘There were those who confessed to a certain relief that other occupations prevented their attendance. But austere as Rawlinson could be, nothing could be gentler than his dealing with individual souls. And it was acknowledged that this Retreat was a real occasion in the history of the Diocese. Rawlinson returned from the Bahamas with happy memories and an enlarged horizon, but without permanent improve- ment in his health. He felt unable to discharge the duties of a regular curacy, and resigned his official place while con- tinuing on the staff of clergy at St. Barnabas to do what lay within his power. He was now dependent almost entirely upon his literary work. Journalism was a necessity. What with his regular work on the Church Times, and his editing and reviewing, he managed to make an income sufficient for his needs. At the same time he was an excellent correspondent with Nassau, and kept the Bishop of that far-off Diocese supplied with criticisms of new books. His letters regularly sent were greatly valued, keeping the distant Church in touch with movements in the Church at home. Then an effort was made, a very earnest effort, to induce him to return to Nassau. An idyllic picture was drawn of the relief which it would bring. He could buy a certain Islandinthe Bahamas for a very few pounds, build a house for insignificant cost, and a boat for a similar price. There he might spend the remainder of his days where he really could live and breathe, and in a sunshine which would be perpetual. To all these fascinations he shook his head. He could not leave his work. He was dependant on his pen. The truth is he was convinced that he had not long to live. ‘The articles which constantly appeared in the Church Times were written straight off, without erasure or revision, never rewritten, and posted immediately as soon as finished, with the intensity of a man who contemplates as highly XXXVill AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION probable that this will be the last he will ever write. But as the Autumn of 1920 deepened it became necessary for Rawlinson once more to winter elsewhere. This time he chose St. Leonard’s. The same thing happened in the winter of 1921-1922. At Christ Church, St. Leonard’s, he preached a singularly beautiful course of sermons which seem to have made a deep impression. These were published in the Church Times, and are reprinted here. His power as a preacher had now matured, and was recognised. A word must be said on Rawlinson’s interest in Foreign Missions. For the last two years of his life he edited the Magazine Central Africa, for the Universities Mission, and became a literary adviser to the Mission. Here again he was highly valued, and certainly was treated with remarkable con- sideration. It was recognized that he could not be expected, in his frail health and increasing infirmities, to appear every week in the office in Dartmouth Street. So the Secretary would go and consult him, after office hours, in his rooms in Holbein House. What was felt was that he was in a way too good for them. His keen literary sense was always anxious to raise the literary standard, sometimes at the — sacrifice of popularity. He would assume a knowledge. which the average reader might not possess. His reviews were admirable, if perhaps a little above the requirements of a magazine of this kind. He took immense pains in what he wrote for the Mission, which was proud to possess him as one of its workers. Meanwhile the Anglo-Catholic Congress Movement began its course—and to this movement Rawlinson gave invaluable - support. “It seemed to him to offer precisely what was needed at the moment ; to hold promise of greater coherence, and a steadier advance, at a time when Catholicism in England MEMOIR XXX1X seemed to flag, and to be distracted by controversy about things of secondary importance. In particular, he welcomed it because it recalled English Catholics to the need of intellec- tual sincerity, and of renewed devotion to learning. Few things seemed to him more dangerous to the Catholic cause than the prevalent neglect by the younger clergy, of study, not only of those things which pertain to their calling— ceremonial always excepted—but of literature ; and he liked to think of the shock which the programme of the first Anglo- Catholic Conference, with its insistence upon fundamentals, must have been to shallow minds which had not expected to be summoned to any intellectual effort. It was in this movement that the ardent, almost boyish, hopes of his last years were centred, and to it his latter energies were gladly given.” (Church Times.) These words, written by an intimate friend with whom he was in constant touch, are a reminder how acutely Rawlin- son felt the weaknesses to which Anglo-Catholics are liable, the want of balance and proportion, the exaggerated esteem for minor things, the narrowness of the Sacristy. His out- look was too wide, his knowledge of the outer circle too thorough, to let him dream that Anglo-Catholicism could meet the needs of the age unless it was both intellectual and devotional, unless it went down to the deep problems of modern thought. To confine itself to the fringes and the minor details was simply suicidal, and courted the failure which a shallow religion deserved. One who knew Rawlinson quite well declares that he had no sense of beauty, that he seemed to be indifferent to the decorations of a Sanctuary, and scarcely aware of their absence, and totally unable to express any opinion about their nature. This indifference to. religious externals has often charac- terized the mystic. But at any rate it was accompanied in. his case by a keen appreciation of literary power and a love of poetry. xl AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION The real fact is that Rawlinson never hesitated to point out the dangers and the weaknesses of the Catholic movement to which he was devoted. He gave us reason to reflect when he observed that the earlier ritualism produced a very fine type of character, really spiritual, and went on to ask us whether the modern ritualist can compare with his predecessors. Certainly Rawlinson told us clergy some home truths about our studies. He formed a reading circle of which he was the moving spirit and director. ach member was to read what some great theologian said on the subject for discussion, to bring his contribution, and pool the information. ‘Thus every member was to make a genuine intellectual effort. Those who have had to do with study circles will acknowledge that this was a counsel of perfection. It may fairly be said that the Oxford Convention of ities at which no less than eleven hundred clergy appeared, satis- fied Rawlinson’s ideal to this extent, that it dealt with funda- mental truths and principles which Anglo-Catholicism represents. The series of Anglo-Catholic Congresses brought Rawlinson into touch with large assemblies to which he had been a stranger. The living Voice was heard in the first Congress in London, in Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, and at the Oxford Convention. He also spoke at the Church Congress . at Sheffield. There was something not easily defined, but very telling, about his speech. It was utterly destitute of rhetoric ; quiet, incisive, penetrating, a remarkable blending of austerity with kindness. | Rawlinson’s papers on Mysticism are undoubtedly the work of a master in the subject and the outcome of deep personal religion, and much experience in the guidance of souls. No one would have written that paper which he read to the first Anglo-Catholic Congress except after years of matured reflection, and trial of the methods with which he deals. MEMOIR xli The service that Rawlinson rendered to the cause in these Congresses was great. His powers were recognized. But he had completely exhausted his strength. He returned to London tired out, and never recovered. Frequent reference has been made in the foregoing pages to Rawlinson as a preacher. But there is still more which ought not to be left unsaid. Among all his papers he has not left one solitary sermon written out in full, Everything is in the form of outline. He excelled in the power of analysis. He drew up careful sys- tematic divisions of his subject, constructed in the clearest way, and illustrated profusely from an extensive range of reading. His sermon outlines are remarkably neat and methodical, the whole subject analysed and mapped out in clear distinct divisions all in his minute hand-writing. Examples of his peculiar skill in analysis will be found printed in the present book. ‘This logical clearness was largely due to his studies in French. It is needless to point out what power he acquired by this means as a teacher. How deeply he had studied the art of preaching his valuable paper on this subject shows. ‘There are very few of us who might not draw great benefit from that lecture. It proves how utterly alien to Rawlinson’s disposition is the rhetorical and sentimental flow of words, or the incoherent unsystematic discourse, which baffles analysis because it is constructed without a plan. ** As a preacher he suffered from an unfortunately mono- tonous delivery. His sermons were always intensely practical and to the point. No verbosity but straight Church-teaching with sly touches of humour interposed, and much quotation from literature, especially French. He appealed chiefly as a preacher to men, as he opposed any kind of sentimentalism. If anything, one could have wished for a little more of the ‘heart.’ But he was sensitive and rather shy, and kept himself closely in.” (Rev. Basil P. Gurdon.) xlii AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION This opinion by his fellow Curate is endorsed by the Article © about him in the Church Times :— “‘ His preaching especially appealed to men of education and of alert, critical mind, impatient of sermons in general. His sermons were models of head arrangement, and were admirably illustrated, for he had made a real study of the art of preaching. But in this also it was his personality that told. Congregations listened intently to this frail priest to whom preaching was so evidently a severe effort, and who was speaking to them not pecans he had to preach, but because he had a message to give.” This estimate is particularly true of the later period of his life. He gave, for example, a course of lectures in St. Barnabas, on Spiritualism and Christianity. And it was noticed that the congregation contained a remarkable element of people who did not usually attend the Church, and that the number increased as the course developed. It was the outer circle of thoughtful lay people who were attracted by his sympathetic treatment of psychological research and kindred subjects. In his later years, especially, it was very obvious that he had a following among literary people in London. They found him a power to be reckoned with, and were attracted by his literary knowledge and wide yet discriminating sym- — pathy with modern movements. He was in no sense a popular preacher, but he was a deeply impressive one. He was at times extremely telling—perhaps at his best when addressing an assembly of priests. He could tell us, and did tell us, home truths which were irresistible because of the entire absence of selfi-seeking in the speaker. I have seldom met a man more free from ostentation. He struck me as willing to be effaced by men who were in every way his inferiors. It was also characteristic of his sermons that the hearers MEMOIR xiii were not likely to go away self-satisfied. When preaching at a seaside place to a congregation of middle-aged communi- cants, he began with the remark that when he was a child he used to suppose that all grown-up people were good. But now that he was middle-aged he was inclined to think that the older one grew the worse one became. Anybody who knew him well remembers his frequent reference to the sickness that destroys in the noontide, the Demon du Mid: ; the frequent failure in morals and religion which beset us in the midway of this our mortal life. He informed a certain London Vicar (not his own) that a Patronal Festival was not a time for bucking people up, but for testing ourselves whether we were really what we professed to be. And he gave the sermon on this principle. He spoke, among other things, of the spirit of Reparation, and of Henry II being scourged by the monks at Canterbury for the wrongs he had inflicted on the Church. As a reader of papers he had a character quite his own. Some readers give the impression that they give you what once they thought. and now recite. Others that they are entirely identified with what they are now reading. Raw- linson left upon an experienced hearer the impression of being at once identified with what he was saying, and yet strangely aloof from it. As if, so to say, he was standing beside it, measuring his words, and dispassionately reflecting upon them. ‘There was not the smallest trace of rhetoric, nor of mere sentiment. It was incisive and biting. On all sides those who knew him recognized that he deepened wonderfully in the last few years. In the pulpit his instruc- tion acquired a spontaneity and interest which even startled some who heard him. One hearer says that as he listened to what was perhaps Rawlinson’s last sermon, there flashed irresistibly on his mind a parallel to St. Stephen’s speech. “He was always very optimistic about the future of the Catholic Movement in the Church of England, and very xliv AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION helpful in advising those who went to him with Roman difficulties to stay where they were and help to fight the battle.’ (Rev. Basil P. Gurdon.) There is no doubt that his disposition and temperament greatly helped him in this respect. Being constitutionally averse from impulsiveness and sentiment, he was never likely to be led by emotion which he distrusted, or by mere feeling which he abhorred. | He seems never to have suffered from the slightest attack of Roman fever. His confidence in the English Church was unswerving, in spite of his acute consciousness of its limita- tions and defects. In this respect he resembled Fr. Figgis. Both of them criticised Anglican inconsistencies and short- comings with a frankness which left nothing to be desired. But both of them were equally critical of the defects of the Ultramontane. If the Anglican suffered from too little authority the Roman suffered from too much. And the freedom of thought in the Anglican, in spite of its dangers, was preferable to the narrow despotism of the Roman Congregations. In this conviction Rawlinson never wav- ered. | His religious outlook was unmistakable. He had not the smallest affinity to Protestantism. Indeed it has been said, by a priest who knew him well, that he did not quite realise the good side of English Protestantism. He was constitutionally averse to its disregard for corporate authority. He believed intensely in the institutional aspect of religion, and was never tired of appealing to Von Hiigel’s admirable analysis of the main elements of religion. He insisted that what English people greatly needed was to be encouraged to faith in the Church; our duty being to accept what the Church maintains. He went whole-heartedly for Reunion with Rome. He contended that we could not have our policy dictated by Anti-Romanism of any kind. But the. Reunion which he contemplated was one founded on identity MEMOIR xlv of principles. He was convinced that the Vatican Infalli- bility Decree required an official explanation which it had not yet received. He sometimes startled people by para- doxical propositions on Roman ideas. He was intensely familiar with Roman limitations. His friendship with Roman priests and laymen enabled him to understand the cause of Modernism, and to sympathize not a little with its victims. He saw very distinctly the Latin tendency to over-definition and deprecated some of its chief developments. His appreciation of the Roman Church was combined with an acutely critical sense of its deficiencies. And his faith in the Catholic capabilities of the English Church was un- swerving. The Roman Congregation and its opinions on Anglican orders had not the smallest disturbing influence upon him. He knew too much about the constitution of the Committee and the influences by which that decision was brought about. He was keenly awake to the deplorable weakness and inconsistency of the English Church. Its inveterate tendency to compromise seldom has had a sharper critic. But the Roman denial of Anglican Consecrations was for him shattered to fragments against the fact that Angli- canism found itself capable of producing the same Catholic type of character which was the glory of Rome. When you can produce precisely the same results the cause which produces them must be the same. Anglican Sacraments do actually produce the same type of sanctity in Father Benson which Roman Sacraments produced in the Curé d’ Ars. It was said at the time of his death that “‘ his robust faith in the future of the English Church was also a part of the secret of his power. He knew by experience most of her weaknesses; he realized the confusion of her practice, all the more clearly because at every point he involuntarily contrasted it with the Church in France which he knew so well. But he held with intense conviction that her Catholic xlvi AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION heritage would come to be moxe and more valued, that con- fusion must be patiently tolerated if the truth was to be given its chance of slow emergence: that the English would hold all the more tenaciously that which they acquired slowly, and that freedom, though it was liable to great abuse, was preferable to repression.” This could hardly be better put. Its foresight and accuracy are attested on page after page of the fragmentary thoughts on Church affairs which his note books and papers contain, and which are printed at the end of the present volume. Rawlinson left hardly anything in a finished state. Stray thoughts were noted down, evidently for future use, some in a poor little note book oddly written, not on the lines but right across them, but for the most part on half sheets of paper. They belong chiefly to the opening years of the century. They are remarkably fresh, independent and critical, showing decided influence of friendship with literary circles and his keen awareness of the limitations of the clergy, whether Roman or Anglican; of the perils besetting Catho- licism in France and here; and of the reaction, far reaching and dangerous against Catholicism in modern life. The writer of these stray thoughts remarks that it is the complex characters that are interesting. There was more than one Newman. But there was only one Pusey. And this is why Pusey failed to attract him. The reader may — possibly feel that there was more than one Rawlinson. He certainly did not pursue one self-consistent scheme of thought. He is critical, speculative, tentative. . His fragmentary thoughts on Religion show that his habit was to take one side and write very forcibly upon it, and then at some other time to take perhaps the opposite point of view and write as forcibly upon that. His state- ments at one time require balancing by what he said at another. For example, his Notes on Pusey will appear to some’ MEMOIR xvii teaders unappreciative and even hard and ruthless, failing in justice to the value of a great pioneer—but for whom our present gains would have been humanly impossible. And the same impression may be made by Rawlinson’s remarks on the tendency of High Church Anglicans to bow blindly beneath the tyranny of Tractarians. Butthen, when the reader peruses his Notes on the Future of Ritualism, with its glowing admiration for the fine type of character, the intellectual, spirituality, and unworldliness among the earlier generation of the leaders of Anglicanism, he finds that the balance is adjusted. Rawlinson quite realized that he had not long to live. At his Mother’s funeral, a few months before his own, some one remarked to him on the number of deaths in their family. He replied, “ You will be attending another before long.”’ “What do you mean?” asked his companion. He simply answered, ‘° Mine.”’ There is no doubt that Rawlinson’s Anglo-Catholic Con- gress speeches were exertions beyond his strength. He returned to London completely exhausted. Nor did he survive these efforts very long. He was attacked by pneu- monia, and in the early hours of Sunday, January 7th, 1922, he died. “What always most impressed me,’ writes his Confessor, “was the holiness of his character and his devotion to the Faith.” Looking back upon his career, his friends agree that his nature was peculiarly reserved. His interests were somehow kept apart. Their multifarious character was not realized until we compared notes after his death. A priest who knew him well for many years says that Rawlinson never mentioned to him his studies in the theological literature of France. And there were certainly friends who had not the smallest idea of the extent of his influence beyond parochial limits. bf xlviii AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION The life of this humble-minded priest, a Curate for thirty _ years in the English Church, who never rose to any sort of official distinction, not even to that of Vicar or Rector any- where, restricted also and crippled by physical infirmity, and bad health, never thrusting himself forward, but achieving a very remarkable work, is just one of those lives about which people ought to know—because it is so liable to be overlooked among the more brilliant, successful and attrac- tive. ‘Those who heard Rawlinson’s last words to the great Oxford Conference of eleven hundred priests will not easily forget how he set us the ideal of studying to be “‘ more com- petent to write in souls.’’ His final sentence was, “ Tet that, not popular applause, not preferment, be our ambition.” His ideal of a priestly life was, as no one will deny who knew him, a very unworldly one. In one of his stray notes he wrote some words which illustrate his mind and are fairly applicable to himself. ‘“ The moral and spiritual history of the race is not worked out by mobs, but by quiet men in studies.’ The English Church would be the richer if it had more priests like him. PART I—SERMONS SOME CATHOLIC TYPES The first five of these Sermons were preached in Christ Church, S. Leonards, during Lent, 1922. The last at All Saints, Margaret Street, in November of the same year. tee is aa eb le oat ee ei Ab CREDO NPGS. dS UP ee J a ay an | yah we hie iG ' Sige tay he, Fed M ‘ ‘ A is ¢ it 5 oy s . ey ty G3 ‘4 Bitar. vis j }; 2 myo P ‘ ‘ My Ne 4 a | ihe Wty he y : tT - ‘ * ‘ ; ¥ 14 nn? t r es J BO ‘ae Nits Ae. A 4 NY ; ¥ ail! [02 ’ i F = i 7 ta f 7) " 1 . 3 i *, sy ' he \ fy. Q A) : i ’ Cela f eat > i . + ahs A ave Beas, i ‘ } ,f ti ‘ ay t rat at _ is J As 7 : , 1 PMS. ‘ , ee, ~ # a’ t A shy god } 43) tisk [2 ‘| a, up 7 , es. : +L re ey a ' ; i! i P 4 his t Pe “ - ‘ Me. eee |G) Ln Coe . ee Pray) ee ONT ae” i “ae Fae arigd j 0 € Reg FS a a ARRAS lee NN SG RE ay # } ag 4 7 a) ” 2 ' i j ‘ z 7 € t % . ; his } Co ee 3 q why +. 5 * 4 ic . Med) Ves Wee D LpnetA RS | gue APA Weert: BN sore ean es Bae Bae Rte he el gta cs | kame A oD Oe Eee eA , te j ata OY} Ds Hos i s Srey ae pee ieee aye aga? Ae PET ye ime 2 ty ‘ 3 « Re Ar AN f , y THE ASCETIC N the Spring of I919, when the terms of the Peace of Versailles were being considered, we heard much of four men to whom the newspapers often gave the title of the Big Four. There seems no need to question the justice of this designation. None of these men had started in high position, with the way to promotion easy before him ; each started, on the contrary, comparatively low on the ladder. One had begun as a small country solicitor ; another as a journalist ; another as a schoolmaster andadon. They had succeeded ; they had reached a very high position in their respective states, and obviously, they deserved the title of great. But should I be right in putting that kind of career before you here as the highest thing at which a man can aim, or popular success like that as the noblest of possible ambitions ? Or are the real supermen to be sought on a different plane altogether? ‘This is a question which, I think, all should face. It is most important that we should get our values right. I Some ten or a dozen years ago any traveller in the Sahara might have heard rumours of a white man living the life of a Christian hermit in the middle of the wild Mohammedan tribes of that region. If he cared to pursue his inquiries he would have soon found that the report was true, and that the hermit was a certain Charles de Foucauld, a French Viscount, formerly an officer in the French army, an explorer in Morocco, and the author of an important book of travel. In the ’eighties of the last century, when he was a young 2 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION man, it seemed as if a distinguished and important military career lay before him. His name was beginning to be favour- ably known to his superiors. But God had other designs. Just when he was at the height of his success, and when he was beginning to be something of a lion in Paris society, he was converted. And conversion for Charles de Foucauld meant much more than it means for the average man. He was one of those generous souls, as St. Ignatius called them, who are not content to give God something, but must give Him everything. It seems that the life of a hermit attracted him from the first, for, after a time spent in a Trappist monas- tery, he gave himself more and more to a solitary life. This in the end led him back to Africa, the scene of his early exploits, and first in one place and then in another he lived as a hermit—as some survivor in the twentieth century from the great ages of faith. His life was one of extraordinary severity. He seems to have despoiled himself not only of all luxuries but of many things which are to most of us the necessaries of life. His food was of the plainest description. One of his relatives, hearing that he allowed himself nothing but bread and herb-tea, and thinking this to be insufficient for a man who was still young, begged him to accept a small sum of money each month on the condition that it was em- ployed in the purchase of extrafood. Hereplied: “I accept. the ten francs; and if you want to know the menu, I have now a few dates in addition to the bread.’’ He allowed him- self no comforts. Once he went to spend a night with an old military friend. That friend, describing the visit in a letter, said: “I gave him a room. When he left I had just received a telegram announcing the visit of other friends. I said to my orderly: ‘ Be quick and get the room ready.’ - ‘ That won’t take long, mon General,’ was the reply. ‘ Why not?’ ‘ Because the bed has not been touched. Nothing has been disarranged. He slept on the floor.’”’ All this is heroic asceticism, of which the majority of us would be THE ASCETIC 3 utterly incapable. Severity with self is the keynote of every action in de Foucauld’s life. And the object of it all is the liberation of the soul, the removal of everything that may stifle the interior life. Because he did this he was able to enjoy all those hours in the desert with God—never less alone than when alone. The same, of course, is the object of all our Lenten asceticism—namely, the blowing of the divine spark into a pure, steady flame. ‘The Church provides many such opportunities for her children; for ordinary souls, times like Lent, retreats, occasional fasting; for select souls, the religious life and, in a few cases, a life-long asceticism. And I believe the contemplation of such heroic asceticism as that of Charles de Foucauld will be a great help to us in carrying out those lighter austerities which we nevertheless find so extraordinarily difficult. How ashamed we shall some- times feel when we contrast our own unwillingness to inflict the slightest hardships upon ourselves, our frequent failures to keep even the easiest rule, with that contemporary life lived under the fierce African sun by one who had been brought up in luxury, but had given up everything in order to serve God more perfectly. i I do not pretend that public opinion generally will be in favour of a life like this. To most of those who have been educated with the modern Englishman’s idea of religion it will seem exaggerated, absurd, and perhaps even foolish. Imagine the sort of conversation that might be held with regard to it between two men ensconced in the luxurious leather armchairs of a London club. One would say: “‘ What on earth does he do it all for?’ and the other would reply impatiently: “‘ Oh, of course, the man is crazy.’’ Something very like this you might get from two ladies in a drawing room. Ican hear one of them say: “ Well, of course, fasting is an excellent thing, and it does us all good not to go to 4 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION theatres in Lent, but that is really going a little too far.” While two working-men, confronted by an account of this life, would probably be too bewildered by its strangeness to say anything. Nevertheless, the more I look at such a life as that of Charles de Foucauld, the more it appears to me to be something supreme and wonderful. You get the joy of looking at the almost perfect thing. That is one of the rarest and one of the most exhilarating experiences of life. It may take many forms. It may be, for instance, a fresh, sunny morning in early spring, when nature seems suddenly to be alive and awake after her winter sleep; or it may be a glorious work of art like one of Holbein’s mag- nificent portraits; or a flawless story like one or two of Kipling’s ; or a brilliant and seemingly effortless cut to the boundary at Lords; but, whatever it is, we greet it with that quick gasp of delight with which we recognize the perfect thing. We feel that, of its kind, nothing could be better. Now I claim that we feel the same with regard to a few lives. They really do seem to come up to God’s plan. As in an artistic masterpiece, you find new beauties every time you look at them. ‘The life of de Foucauld seems to me to be one of these. It is like a perfect work of art. The more it is studied the more marvellous it appears. Some careers © seem, as we look at them, to be particularly rounded and. complete, as if the man had really done all that he had tried to do, and this career is one of them. This is what I mean by comparing it with a great work of art. It does not follow, of course, that everyone will admire. If you take any master- piece—say King Lear, or the Ode to a Grecian Urn—there will be found many who are incapable of appreciating it. But that, we are all agreed, condemns nothing but their . taste. So I believe that the nearer we are to the mind of Christ the more we shall be likely to admire lives like the one we are considering. All our Christian instincts, all our Christian taste, leap to admire. Here, we say, is the real THE ASCETIC 5 Christian thing; here is religious genius; here is the super- natural in action. We can test the values of things by laying them alongside the really great. Matthew Arnold used to advise us to do this with regard to literature. If you want to judge the value of a poem, he said, read it side by side with such a perfect line as that of Dante’s—la sua volontade e nostra pace : His will is our peace—and see if it can bear the proximity. Baser metal will at once be distinguished from pure gold. We may do much the same kind of thing if we wish to turn the searchlight upon ourselves. Take the life of the average priest—hard-working, conscientious, regular in the punctual performance of his duties, giving twenty minutes or half an hour a day to meditation ; or the life of the average Catholic layman, making his communion more or less frequently and his confession three or four times a year, fighting bravely against the temptation to mortal sin, and justly regarded by his friends and neighbours as a good man. Now, suppose we put lives like those—shall I say at once lives like ours ? —alongside such a life as Charles de Foucauld’s, can we possibly say that ours is the highest? Do not, indeed, our lives look very poor and unheroic beside the other? Still, we are near enough to it in spirit to be able to admire it. I believe the gravest failure of Protestantism to lie in its failure to admire such lives, and in its consequent failure to produce them. Protestant asceticism takes other forms: the forms of thrift and industry and self-denial, and, as these are the qualities that lead to worldly success, it has often happened that Protestant countries become wonderfully prosperous from the secular point of view. Many, indeed, have argued, because of this, that the Protestant religion is superior to the Catholic. Surely this is to judge by an altogether wrong set of values. It might not be too much to say that the natural result of Catholic asceticism is the saint, and the natural result of Protestant asceticism the 6 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION - millionaire. But if we put them side by side; on one side poor, penniless de Foucauld, with his broken sleep and his starvation diet, and, on the other, the man who has made good in the eyes of the world, with his magnificent car, and his seat in the most fashionable Baptist chapel in New York, and his thousands of dollars given in charity, which of the two will appear to us to have really made good from the highest point of view? I am not sneering at the latter, but the former is, I believe, the better, because his creed is better. Il There are many to-day who think of religion as an un- attractive thing. Probably the majority of young people believe this is the case. The reason for it, in my opinion, is that, as presented to the modern mind, it does not appeal sufficiently to the imagination. Think what the religious outlook is to a boy brought up in Anglicanism, especially to one who is learning his religion chiefly in the chapel of a public school. His religion is one of the helps to live a decent life; it has no. extremes and is all in excellent taste, but there is nothing heroic about it, nothing to stir the blood, nothing to give the vivid sense of the supernatural. But if we got our values right, if we were taught to see things as they are and the wonderful possibilities that lie before every soul, then everything would be changed, and what a different place the Church of England would be! ‘The younger people in our congregations would be alive to these possibilities. From a church like this, for instance, one day a server might . disappear, and it would become known that he had gone to a religious community to test his vocation for the religious life. Or it might be noticed that a young working man was no longer present, as formerly, at the Sunday High Mass, and inquiry would bring the information that he, too, had heard God’s voice and had gone to be a carpenter in the Nyassaland Mission. And all would know that such a call THE ASCETIC 7 might come to any soul. Religion would at once become full of all sorts of exciting possibilities. The supernatural character would always be in evidence. It is, I am sure, the supernatural that people really want. Unless this is present they lose interest in religion. In a book that has lately appeared on the war, Disenchantment, by that prince of journalists, Mr. C. E. Montague, there is a chapter on the Army chaplains. It is not pleasant reading to us, and is entitled, “‘ The sheep that were not fed.”” The writer shows that he thinks the chaplains might have made more of their opportunity. After describing the type and admitting its merits, he goes on: “And yet there was something about this type of chaplain—he had his counterpart in all the churches—with which the common men-at-arms would privately and temperately find a little fault. He seemed to be only too much afraid of having it thought that he was anything more than one of themselves. He had, with a ven- geance, ‘no clerical.nonsense about him.’ The vigour with which he threw off the parson and put on the man and the brother did not always strike the original men and brothers as it was intended.” The men felt, he makes us see, that something was missing. What this was they did not know: “They only felt a vacancy, an unspecified void, like the want of some unknown great thing in their generals’ minds and in the characters of their rulers at home. The chaplain’s tobacco was all to the good ; so was the civil tongue that he kept in his head ; so were all the good turns that he did. But, when it came to religion, were these things ‘all there was to it’? ” No, what men need in religion, however little they may be aware of it, is the supernatural. Where it is present, men of Catholic instincts recognize it at once and admire. Conse- quently, the more we keep before us such triumphantly super- natural lives as Charles de Foucauld’s, the better it will be for ourselves and for the world at large. Just as it is good for a painter to study the works of the great masters of painting so it is good for us, from our own Lenten point of view, to study the lives of the great ascetics. II THE MAN OF SORROWS ERNHARD Duhm has put forward a very interesting and attractive suggestion concerning that famous passage in the Old Testament, in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, describing the man of sorrows, the suffering servant of God. He suggests that, though the prophet had in mind and intended the figure to represent the Jewish people, the details of the picture were filled in from a contemporary Jew, suffering from leprosy, whose behaviour under that appalling malady was so wonderful, and whose happiness and resignation so impressed all who saw him, that he seemed to the writer the image of the perfect sufferer. There is nothing that need repel Catholics in this idea. We rightly refer the passage now to our Lord, but it did not mean what we see it to mean to its first readers. There was for them a contemporary allusion. The picture of the ideal sufferer was drawn from life, not from the memory of a prophetic glimpse into the future. Read the passage sometimes with — this thought in the mind, and it will help us to understand that not only have aspects of the life of Christ been shown since the Incarnation in the lives of Christian saints, but there were some in earlier times who anticipated Him. It will help also, perhaps, to throw light on the whole subject of human suffering. There are in life, in some lives, of course, much more than in others, but in all, to some degree, morti- fications which we cannot avoid. Last Sunday we were considering the mortifications a man may voluntarily inflict upon himself; to-day we are to ask and to try to answer THE MAN OF SORROWS 9 the question: Is there an ideal Catholic sufferer as there is an ideal Catholic ascetic ? I Light is what we want. For this problem of unmerited suffering, which has puzzled man since the dawn of thought, puzzles him more than ever to-day. Many, from the author of the Book of Job to Mr. H. G. Wells, have endeavoured to throw light upon the riddle. Is there any meaning in pain which we can discover? Some are entirely cynical about it. That gifted novelist, Mr. Thomas Hardy, concluding his story of the tragic life of a girl, ended with these words: “ The president of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.” That was all he saw in it; it was in that way that the sight of suffering moved him. If there are any gods at all, they are like a mischievous and cruel boy stirring up an ant-hill with a stick or pulling the wings off flies. Talk to another man and you will find that he thinks suffering must always be a punishment. If it comes, and he thinks he has done nothing to deserve it, he is resentful. While others, and these are probably the majority, take it as it comes, and do not worry very much about the philosophy or the explanation of it, but regard it as a tiresome hindrance and handicap, something that mars not only man’s happiness, but his usefulness as well. He will teach that these hin- drances must be surmounted if a man is to show any greatness of character. I imagine that is what maimed soldiers were often told. It was said: Vou are suffering from a tremen- dous handicap, but see if you cannot overcome it by the power of the human spirit in you. Don’t giveintoit. Rise superior to it and you will thus show yourself to be a true man. In other words, it was suggested that they should adopt the stoic philosophy, or, to use a phrase which will | be more intelligible to most, that they should grin and bear it. Especially, indeed, it is urged that we should be cheerful IO AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION about our handicaps, and not allow ourselves to be mastered by them. Now of course there is truth and wisdom in advice like this. I should be the last to deny it. It is a great thing if we can stand up to our misfortunes. Even if there is nothing supernatural about such an attitude, it continually arouses our wonder and our admiration when we see how much men can do by their natural powers. It depends probably a good deal on the way we regard suffering. If we look upon it as a nuisance and a misery, as something which we have not deserved and which threatens to ruin our life, the pro- bability is that it will ruin it. If, on the contrary, we regard our handicaps as opportunities instead of hindrances, the result will be altogether different. In that case they will be the raw material out of which character is formed. Cer- tainly, if anyone has got so far as to consider suffering in this light, he has gone a long way and is worthy of the sin- cerest admiration. But when you have said that, have you said everything? Has the last word been uttered on the subject when we realize that, when suffering visits us, we must submit to it; that we must make the best of it; be cheerful about it; not worry other people with it; not use it for profit, like a Spanish beggar exhibiting his sores to a British tourist ; not talk about it, begging silently for sym- pathy like a dog begging for a lump of sugar? It was said once of one who all his life bore gallantly a great bodily deformity, that he made so little of his burden that his friends almost forgot he had a burden to bear. Is that it, now? ~ Is that the highest point we can rise to? So to act as to make it unnoticed or forgotten ; to fight it and try to forget it ourselves ; to conquer it by an exertion of will; in a word, to cover up the ugly thing as far as possible. II For it is still ugly. Is there, on the other hand, a higher THE MAN OF SORROWS It way of regarding it by which it may become beautiful and attractive? If the Catholic religion can transform other things it ought to be able to transform this. The suspicion cannot help arising that suffering may be really a golden opportunity to produce something that is lovely and a true work of art, and that the really fortunate beings are not the strong and the healthy, but the weak and the suffering. Perhaps the Catholic has a kep which others are without. A recent writer has said that one of the chief characteristics of the Greek genius was that it could paint what is naturally ugly and yet make it appear to be beautiful. ‘“‘ Many moderns,” he says, “ can faithfully describe what is disagree- able, but their effects are often brutal and always depressing. The gift of portraying suffering and evil with unflinching truth, yet of conveying other feelings than mere horror, is reserved for few. Its rarity perhaps explains the rarity of great tragedy, of which it seems to be a condition that it shall truthfully show what is darkest in life, without leaving a final and dominating sense of gloom. The great Greek writers possessed this secret.’”* He illustrates this from Priam’s intensely moving and pathetic appeal to Achilles for the body of Hector in Homer’s Iliad. Now what the Greeks were able to do in literature, I believe the Catholic religion can effect in life—namely, the transformation of the ugly into the beautiful. We get the suffering saint. In his case suffering is no longer an ugly thing from which we turn away, or something which we try to hide and forget, but something lovely on which we delight to gaze. And if anyone asks what is the difference between this and the noble submission of the stoic, I reply that suffering becomes beauti- ful when it becomes voluntary. The suffering stoic bears up gallantly under the burden and sets his teeth to endure, but all the time he would have it different if he could. The suffering saint would not change his lot even if he had the *The Legacy of Greece. Ed. R. W. Livingstone, p. 268. I2 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION power. It is, I suppose, the thought of the sufferer shrinking from pain that makes it unbearable and ugly to the spectator. Our imagination places us in his position, and we see things through his eyes. The ugliness seems to lie in unwillingly endured pain. Weare made unhappy because he is unhappy. On the other hand, where there is no shrinking but a joyful acceptance, not desiring to have it otherwise, the ugliness disappears. Itis the same with poverty. Unwilling poverty, hated because it is poverty, is ugly ; joyful poverty; willingly accepted, is beautiful and good. ‘Though both are poor there is all the difference in the world between a bankrupt stock- broker and St. Francis. In the one case poverty is hated and feared; in the other it is loved, welcomed and chosen. It is the element of free choice, of willing acceptance, that transforms everything. This is the lesson in that beautiful chapter of the Imitation, “On the Royal Way of the Holy Cross.”’ III We might illustrate this in many ways. Think of that Jew of the Captivity, whoever he was, whom Duhm thought to have been a leper. Evidently he suffered in some visible and terribly humiliating way. ‘‘ His visage was so marred more than any man and his form more than the sons of men.’’ “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him.” ‘“ He was cut off out of the land of the living.” There is the outward picture, a picture of one with a face so dis- figured by disease that men turn away their faces when they pass, and whom they will not permit to mix with other men. Yet this portrait of this suffering servant of God, as given to us by the great prophet of the Exile, is not an ugly or tepulsive thing; on the contrary, it is instinct with beauty, THE MAN OF SORROWS 13 because the humiliation is willingly accepted and borne on behalf of others. You could find many instances in later times. Hereisacontemporary one. I take it from a circular letter sent home lately by Fr. Whitworth, of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa : “I turned aside to a village where I knew there was a sick woman and man, both Christians. The woman for a long time has been terribly ill with sores all over her body and really in a terrible way, but lately the husband and woman have developed Buba, one of our terrible scourges here; it takes the form again of bad sores all over the body, but it takes some two years to wear itself out, and during that time they cannot come to church or mix with their fellow-men, as itis very contagious. ‘That is an outlook which you would think would be enough to damp the enthusiasm of most people, and yet I do not think I have ever seen such a Christian house ; Christian joy seems to run through it, and this pair, in spite of their ills and five small children to be cared for, are full of life and happiness. . . . I wish you could see that family; it is the greatest Christian witness I have come across, I think, in the world.” That is supernatural. Such joy in suffering is beyond unaided nature. But most of all, of course, we find this element of beauty in the Passion of our Saviour. » What, after all, is the story of the Passion? If you look at it from one point of view it is just a horrible story of Eastern cruelty and torture; of coarse military brutality; the sort of thing you could hardly endure to read if you came across it in a book or newspaper. Indeed it would be quite unbearable if it were just the realistic description of a Roman execution. No other literature, except the Gospels, has ever succeeded in making torture beautiful.. Writers, indeed, hardly ever make the attempt. It is always done off the stage, so to speak. But, as everyone who reads the Gospels knows, you forget the ugliness of the torture in its willing acceptance. 14 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION: If there is anything horrible or repulsive usually it is the photograph of a tortured man, such as have been published, for instance, to show the cruelties of Germans in Africa or white men in the United States. But there is nothing ugly or repulsive about a crucifix, or even in a picture in which the whole stress is laid on the weakness and suffering, as in Velasquez’s Crucifixion. If you ask why voluntary accep- tance should make it beautiful I must simply say I do not know. But there it is. St. Francis kissed a leper because he saw Christinhim. The ugliness at once vanished. Indeed wherever you find voluntarily accepted suffering something of the beauty and the dignity of the Passion seems to be detached and to adhere to it. IV It is in these cases where there is the beauty that comes from voluntarily accepted suffering that suffering becomes inspiring. I am sure we all feel that. It enables others to take heart and bear their burdens. The man of sorrows described in the book of Isaiah became the source of inspira- tion in others. Possibly some do literally bear the sufferings of others, by the mercy of God; they endure that others may escape. There is no telling what burdens of others it may not be within our power to carry. But, if not that, we find things easier to bear after seeing these people. How — such an inspiration as this is needed! What a number. there are who are failing altogether to learn anything of the possi- bilities, the spiritual possibilities, of accepted suffering, and who remain, notwithstanding perhaps their confessions and their communions, just fretful invalids in a bathchair, or ill-tempered people to whom others give way because they must not be crossed, or egotists recounting their symptoms to anyone who is willing to listen, or sick people exercising the sick person’s admitted right to grumble. These are among the ugly things of life: suffering resented and hated MAN OF SORROWS I5 and most unwillingly borne. Where, in such cases, is the Catholic grace that might make the suffering beautiful ? Again, old age is ugly. There is nothing naturally beautiful about a decaying body, but the grace of the supernatural may make old age as lovely as autumn—the inner man shining through. ‘There are some who rebel against the coming of age and try to disguise it as long as possible from themselves and from others, and in such cases there is neither profit nor beauty. Old age is beautiful only if we would not have it otherwise, if the disabilities and the discomforts are gladly accepted, and we are happy, as Stanton said, to slow down into the terminus. Or, lastly, when death is at hand and a man feels already at his throat the grip of the fiend that is about to throttle him, we may admire the death-beds of the stoics—the Roman Emperor, for instance, dying with a jest upon his lips—but they help very little. Just indeed to bend to the inevitable, not to rejoice and be glad init. It is from Catholic deathbeds, where all is joyfully accepted, that we get the truest inspiration ; from a man, for example, like Huysmans, the French novelist, dying in slow agony of cancer on the tongue and declaring his joy in his sufferings and his unwillingness to avoid them, because of the many sins of his unconverted past. ‘There, and in cases like that, you have the power and the inspiration that come from the supernatural. To find joy in suffering, that is the Catholic secret. Til THE SCHOLAR E are living in a theological age, in a time, that is, when theological questions are being discussed with great interest, with more or less competence, and in all classes of society. Not a few novels are concerned with religious and theological problems, and no one thinks now, as many did once, of blaming them forit. Religious questions are even found good copy by the newspapers, as was seen at the time of the Cambridge Conference of Modern Church- men last year, and this testifies more than anything else to public interest. Such interest, of course, has not always been common. In the nineteenth century, in the age, say, of Lord Melbourne or of Lord Palmerston, religious subjects were banished from polite conversation. It was not thought good taste to allude to them. If, in the drawing-room or at the dinner table, the Name of God was introduced into the talk, except as an expletive, it produced surprise and em- barrassment. It was not what society was accustomed to. You can sometimes even now find among elderly people the same embarrassment and the special tone of voice that is kept for talk about religion. But with most people all that has passed away. ‘They are as ready, often readier, to discuss religion and theology as anything else. The subjects in which we are interested are being widely debated, very often from a highly unorthodox point of view. We have then, as Catholics, to face this position and to decide upon our own position with regard toit. What attitude are we, for example, to take up with regard to Modernism, a religious movement THE SCHOLAR 17 that we cannot pass over with indifference? Or what with tegard to Reunion, for here, too, it may be said in passing, the intellectual question behind it is very important? On this intellectual attitude, what it shall be, we have to come to a decision. And we shall best learn, I think, if we try to construct a portrait of the ideal Catholic scholar, as we have already tried to construct portraits of the ideal Catholic ascetic and the ideal Catholic sufferer. I What matters most is the object for which learning is sought ? Sometimes it is not a good one. In one of Balzac’s finest novels there is an unforgettable picture of a man of genius, learning, and tireless enthusiasm for science, who nevertheless wrecks his own life and the lives of those depen- dent upon him. At the beginning of the story you are shown him living in a charming old house in Douai, crammed with wonderful pictures, beautiful old silver and priceless furni- ture, and with its garden blazing with richly coloured tulips. At the end everything is gone: the stripped walls, the empty cupboards, and the ruined garden, testifying to the disaster which the pursuit of science has brought upon the house- hold. In the man of whom the story tells there was no unselfish pursuit of truth; he was aiming selfishly at fame, money, and success. Consequently, he obtained none of them. ‘The true student is out for truth. Without timidity he will follow where truth leads, for the pursuit of truth is one form of the worship of God. For it is the pursuit of Him Who said, ‘‘I am the Truth.” ‘This, then, is the first characteristic of the genuine Catholic scholar. He is aiming to bring truth into the world and to make it prevail. For more than three hundred years there has existed in Belgium a small society of Jesuit scholars, engaged in studying and writing the lives of the saints. Some have accused the Jesuits of caring little for truth and much for power and 18 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION influence, but there is no trace of this in the lives of the Bollandists, as these men are called, after one of the founders of the undertaking. Indeed, they have more than once risked the most serious unpopularity, owing to their deter- mination to follow the truth. Think of those few men— generally about half-a-dozen of them—engaged on that great work, not desiring fame or money, their names being almost unknown outside a narrow circle, but with a burning zeal for truth, in order that all the Church may profit from their labours, and that God may be glorified in the true record of the saints’ lives; think of them, and you will have an idea of what Catholic scholarship can be. In the early Church a little book was published, professing to recount a romantic incident in the life of St. Paul. Suspicion was aroused, how- ever, and inquiry was made as to its truth. In the end the priest who wrote it confessed that it was not truth but fiction, but said, in excuse, that he had written it for the greater honour of the Apostle. But that is not the right way. Edifi- cation must not be divorced from truth. We should most of us like to rewrite the history of the Church, avoiding mention of things that are discreditable and throwing always the most favourable light upon her action. This has often been done—so often, indeed, that controversial history is neatly always regarded with suspicion—but no good follows from it in the long run. It is truth that matters. And where there is honest desire for truth, even though there is error, it is not right to be harsh. I suppose the modern scientific movement has been to a very considerable extent © the work of men who have been indifferent to, and in some cases determined enemies of, the Faith. Remembering the harm that they have done, it is difficult, often, to be fair, but it is only right to recall also that the aim of these torch- bearers of modern science has been to find the truth, and that, in this respect, their lives are models of what the life of the Catholic scholar ought to be. Again, there is the THE SCHOLAR 19 Modernist movement. It is an extraordinarily wrong-headed movement in some ways, always inclined to believe that what is new must be true, and never learning from its past mistakes ; but it is quite evident that it is an honest movement, and eager in the search of truth. So from them, too, we may learn something. Zeal for truth is the first characteristic of the Catholic scholar. A second characteristic is sympathy with those who differ. The true scholar is able to understand. It is true that in ecclesiastical circles this sympathy is often absent. There are Roman Catholics who by fierce contempt endeavour to make Anglicans as uncomfortable as possible, and Anglicans who act in the same way towards Protestants. But you do not find this attitude among the finer minds. A distinguished French archbishop, who was a great scholar, used to proclaim readily how much he admired the work of Dr. Sanday and the present Dean of Wells, and this unwillingness to exaggerate differences, this desire to see the best in others, is, one would think, wiser from every point of view. You will never per- suade people by a harsh refusal to study their outlook. Politics might teach us that. How much political division and misunderstanding, how much of the gulf between classes in Europe, is due to the fact that there are, as Disraeli said, two nations, of which the inhabitants of the one do not try to understand or even to see the point of view of the other. Do the richer classes, for instance, usually try to realize how the social situation must appear to an intelligent boy of the industrial classes when he notices the differences in oppor- tunity between himself and an Eton boy? Itsooften happens that quite good people can never see anything from any other point of view but their own. And if you do not understand you will not sympathize. . The Catholic scholar tries to under- stand his opponents and to see things through their eyes. To take an example, he would not say: “‘ These Plymouth Brethren are wrong and absurdly wrong, and the sooner 20 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION I make that clear the better.’”’ He will say, on the con- trary: ‘“‘ Let me see first what is to be said for them. There must be some arguments to be advanced for their position. It cannot appear to them as impossible as it appears to me.” And, going to history for an answer, he may perhaps find a key. At any rate, that attitude produces an atmosphere in which differences can be discussed without bitterness or the sense of injury and injustice. Sympathy unlocks hearts and makes men amenable. But if you show that you think them fools and ignorant, you may be victorious in debate, but you will not persuade. To silence a person is not the same thing as to convince him. II There, then, is a roughly sketched portrait of the Catholic scholar. Ecclesiastical, or indeed any, controversy would be made sweeter if it were always approached in such a temper as this, with the sole desire for the victory of truth and with eagerness to understand opponents. The latter is very important. Victory is deprived of much of its charm if it leaves behind a number of sullen adversaries, defeated indeed but unacquiescent in defeat. Now, does this sketch give us any help concerning our attitude towards the religious con- troversies of the day, and especially towards Modernism ? For remembering what I said before: if we go out into the world at all we shall sometimes come across these questions and hear them discussed. If this happens it is not very creditable if more or less instructed Catholics find themselves unable to join intelligently in the conversation. More than that, the opinion of any one individual may not be very important, but it counts all the same. Weight of numbers. tells, and the policy that is desired by the majority will probably be adopted. Now one policy that may be adopted with regard to the Modernists is the policy of suppression ; to attempt, that is, to end the controversy within the Church THE SCHOLAR 21 by the exercise of authority. Many wish to do this, and they can certainly make out a very good case for themselves. But perhaps there is a better way. There is an old rhyme, dating from the seventeenth century, which is concerned with certain happenings at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At Oxford they were supposed to be disloyal, and the King sent soldiers to keep order; at Cambridge they were loyal, and received in consequence a gift of books. The rhyme tran thus: ? The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse, For Tories own no argument but force. With equal sense to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs admit no force but argument. There, you see, are two different methods. ‘There is the argument of force and the force of argument. If peace is to follow victory the latter method should surely be used. Of course it is tempting enough, when error is active and menacing, to fall back on the policeman. It seems the shortest cut to the desired conclusion. ‘This was the attitude of Bossuet, who has indeed been called the gendarme of orthodoxy, towards the early Modernism of Richard Simon. Not content with meeting him in argument he tried to suppress his opponent’s statement of his case by calling in the authority of the State and destroying the whole edition of his book. But it was a mistake, and it alwaysis a mistake. You cannot destroy ideas with a truncheon. It may seem the shortest course and be attractive to human impatience, but it is the worst course in the long run. Suppression creates sympathy. That is the lesson we learn from the history of the martyrs, and it is a lesson just as obviously true of the lesser martyr- doms of the Catholic Revival. Nothing contributed so much to the growth of Catholicism.as the passing of the wicked and vindictive Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874. Yet now we often find Catholics who are anxious to present the best weapon in their whole armoury to their Modernist foes. 22 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION The force of argument is better than the argument of force. For if our cause is true it ought to be able to prevail. I believe itcan. I believe the arguments against the Liberal Protestant form of Modernism are very strong. ‘Their attitude, especially with regard to miracles, I believe to be unscientific, and indeed it has been considerably modified in recent years. We must also, however, be constructive ourselves. The work the Modernist sets out to do is a work that needs doing. He desires to provide a defence of Christianity that will appeal to men brought up in modern methods of thinking, and to explain the Faith intelligibly to contemporary minds. We may think that, in the process, he explains it away, but it is not enough to condemn his effort without trying to do anything ourselves. Our coming Evangelistic movement must be addressed to the educated and the intelligent as well as to the others. Even if some Modernists have adopted posi- tions incompatible with Christianity, which seems to me to be undoubtedly the case, we ought surely to sympathize with them for desperately clinging to the Christian name. How- ever wrong they may be, it is surely to their credit to want still to be Christian. It shows at least that their heart is right. I am sure the policeman is not the best missionary. Nothing alienates English people more than the argument of force. Anditis English people we have toconvert. There is no need to multiply stumbling-blocks. Suppose, to take an example, a Modernist Dean could be expelled from his position for the preaching of heresy, what would be the result ? It would close the ears of many to our message through dislike of our methods, and the pleasure that some Catholics would feel at first would be soon followed by an uneasy feeling that such victories were only prejudicing men . against us. III No doubt some will say: What has all this to do with the THE SCHOLAR 23 laity? They are uninstructed, as a general rule, and unable to judge. That is true, largely, but it is not relevant. In these days of the public Press and cheap books such questions are discussed everywhere and cannot be avoided. As modern warfare means practically the mobilization of the entire population, so religious controversy means to-day the mobili- zation of the whole Church. It is no longer carried on by a few theological experts. Everyone is more or less in the battle line. Therefore to consider the attitude of the Catholic scholar is not a matter of merely academical interest and no personal concern to Catholic congregations. Part of the duty of a modern Catholic is to learn to defend his Faith, for he is sure to be at least sometimes engaged in outpost skir- mishes. It is possible that in the years that are coming there will be more results from the labours of humble Catholics of this type than from the works of the great doctors of the Faith. Every Catholic should be able to explain his religion, to defend it, and, please God, to show something of the beauty of it. IV THE PHILANTHROPIST makes the startling remark that if ever a revolution happens in England he thinks that the clergy and the aristocrats will escape, but that the gutters will run red with the blood of philanthropists. He is alluding, of course, to that type of philanthropist which delights to manage others, and to order the concerns of less fortunately placed people. Modern times have seen a great multiplication of these. Let me say at once that it is not this type of philanthropist that I have in view to-day. The Catholic philanthropist is the man who loves his fellow-men and wishes to give them the best he has. I N one of Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s books that brilliant writer I It will be useful again to take a concrete example to show what I mean. There is now in England a very remarkable man who, ten to fifteen years ago, was making himself a great name in learned circles on the Continent. Albert Schweitzer was a Professor at Strasburg and the author of a famous book which had deeply influenced the whole course © of theological thought. His theories were believed by many to be revolutionary, but perhaps because of this reputation they attracted a vast amount of attention. More than this, he was a skilled musician, an organist of great ability, and the author of a book on Johann Sebastian Bach, the famous composer. Had he chosen to pursue these careers, a future of great fame and much success obviously lay before him. THE PHILANTHROPIST 25 Of the younger generation of scholars few more than he had the world at their feet. But, in the midst of his success, other thoughts and other ambitions were in his mind. He had read, he has told us, about the physical miseries of the natives in the virgin forests of Equatorial Africa, and it seemed to him that Europeans troubled themselves too little about the great humanitarian task which offered itself in far-off lands. ‘The white races were like the rich man in the parable, happy and comfortable at home in the enjoyment of all the resources of modern civilization, while at his door “sits wretched Lazarus, the coloured folk, who suffers from illness and pain just as much as we do, nay, much more, and has absolutely no means of fighting them.”’ Dominated, there- fore, by this thought of our sin against the poor man at our gate, Dr. Schweitzer was trained as a doctor, abandoned his European work, and went to West Africa to do medical work for the Paris Evangelical Mission. This brilliant scholar and talented musician was ready to sacrifice his earthly career through love of his fellow-men. Acts and decisions like these are plainly supernatural. Dr. Schweitzer’s religion is not ours. He professes a Protestantism which seems to us very cold and unattractive compared with the warmth and beauty of Catholic faith and piety, but where we find faith and love like his we can only take off our hats and thank God that even what seems to us an incomplete Christianity can produce such wonderful fruits. Such a life may remind us that the best thing we have to give to others is the Christian religion. I am eager to lay stress on this because it is by no means generally recognized. Every year a stream of men, young for the most part, leaves England for work in distant countries. You meet them on the promenade-decks of liners, keen, eager and enthusiastic, some of them soldiers, some planters, some Civil servants, . and some merchants; almost all of them at least nominal Christians, many of them baptized and confirmed members 26 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION © of the Church of England. But how many of those men, who would willingly put their hands into their pockets to relieve a case of physical distress, will exert themselves in the least in India, Africa, or wherever it is, to spread the Christian Faith among those who are without it? Some- times it never strikes them that it is their business, or that their possession of this priceless privilege entails any respon- sibilities for handing it on. Sometimes it is worse, and you hear white men arguing that Mohammedanism is a better religion that Christianity for the black man. Perhaps the worst enemies of Christianity, from the days of Judas, have always been found in her own household. It is true, also, that the best gift we have to offer to our own country is the Catholic religion. We are living in an England where there is much antagonism between classes, immense and very widespread covetousness, vastly increased by an insatiate desire for luxury, and, apparently, a growing dislike of and rebellion against the restraints of Christian morals. Some thought the war would act as a purifying force, and that we should find ourselves after it wiser, humbler, and better. Anything but this has happened. Deteriora- tion of character is very marked. Thinking people are gravely disturbed at the prospect, and some even think that modern civilization is showing signs of collapse. Now, we believe that the one medicine which is needed for this sickness is the Catholic religion, and the Catholic philanthropist will realize that his first duty is to try to spread the knowledge of this. This is the idea which lies behind that determined and zealous movement which has gradually been taking form since the Anglo-Catholic Congress, and which, after a time of preparation, contemplates an evangelistic campaign to carry the Catholic message to the people of England. ‘The clergy alone could do little, but the Congress seemed to show a huge reserve of enthusiasm and missionary zeal in the laity, and it is this which gives hope for the future of the movement. THE PHILANTHROPIST 27 All over the country there are churches like yours, holding the Faith, practising it and loving it, and each of these churches will be a centre of missionary effort. There is a tendency sometimes for congregations to be wrapped up in themselves and to have no interests outside the parochial ones. Such self-sufficiency is not good. Rivalry between parishes is bad, but not so bad as this complete indifference. If we are to take our share in the work we must first of all break down any dislike we may have to talk about religion. If we let it be known how valuable the habit of confession has been - in our lives, or what a help attendance at the daily Mass has been, or what happiness is given by visits to the tabernacle, that sort of thing will be our philanthropic work. It will be © our attempt to give to others that which they need most. II To love our fellow-men and to do them good is not easy. Fallen man is naturally inclined to hate, and this has given rise to the saying, Homo homini lupbus—Man is a wolf to man. The world to-day is an illustration of this. Wherever you go—to Ireland or India or Egypt or the United States or Central Europe—you find hatred: black hating white and white hating black; colour hatreds, racial hatreds, national hatreds. It is not perhaps surprising when we remember that we have only lately issued from a great war. In war, perhaps inevitably, there are hatreds, and if we form then a habit of hatred we cannot drop it when we like directly the war is over. ‘The habit is there, and it will find other objects. No one who has formed a bad habit can abandon it without difficulty. Itis always a long and difficult process. The hatreds in the world now are the price we pay for the hatreds we indulged in the war. You can find this often in the dealings of individuals with individuals. There, too, | is the desire to hurt and to wound. ‘There is a certain type of person—it may be found in either sex—which delights to 28 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION | say nasty things, to be disagreeable, to give pain, to make others unhappy and uncomfortable. ‘To satisfy this desire for cruelty some will even sink to the lowest baseness. It is regrettable that you sometimes find people like these, and animosities like these, in Catholic congregations, which should be entirely free from them. ‘The peace of certain parishes is destroyed by them, and you may even find furious hatred and utterly unbridled tongues. Perhaps it is not so surprising after all. A person who is receiving the Sacraments unworthily—say with feelings of bitter malice in the heart—can quickly fall very far indeed. That is what all spiritual guides know. And the danger gets greater as we grow older. Hatred is not a common fault among the young, who are generous and forgiving ; it is the fault of middle-aged and elderly people. Moliére once drew a terrible picture of a hypocrite, of a man with religion on his lips but with wickedness in his heart. But the worst hypocrites of all are those who do not know that. they are hypocrites, and attempt to combine in their lives two things that are quite incompatible. Hypocrisy is often an intellectual fault, because it is a failure to recognize that a certain attitude towards others or a certain course of conduct is wrong. A person is not less a hypocrite, or less culpable, because he does not know it. Hatred of other people may be combined with the practice of religion, but it cannot be combined with the love of God. Where it is present the love of God is absent. In our own spiritual interests we must get over entirely that desire to be revenged, to pay people — out, to get our own back, as people say. It is true that all this is very natural, and to say that we must not indulge in it is like saying that we must go against nature; but we are called to live in the supernatural, and have reserves of spiritual strength to fall back on which others have not. I believe that the reason why many people refuse to practise religion is because they will not live up to its THE PHILANTHROPIST 29 demands. Itistoohardforthem. It is not their intelligence that revolts at Catholic dogma, but their will which rebels against too weighty a yoke. Modernists suggest that the ancient creeds are the stumbling-block, and that if these were revised many would return to religion. No; it is not that ; what is really disliked is the Sermon on the Mount, the demands of the Christian life, the claims of discipleship. We need not therefore be surprised that even within the Church there are found some who reject the claims of philan- thropy and brotherhood. But the kind of Catholics I have been describing—those, that is, who are quarrelsome, dis- agreeable, and unkind—will be no use in the evangelistic movement which is contemplated. The first step of all of us must be to improve ourselves. iil But please do not think that I am only urging philanthropy in spiritual things. There would be something rather in- human to attend to man’s spiritual welfare and to neglect his physical needs. If we had any tendency to do it the incident told in to-day’s Gospel is there to correct us. It is an instance of our Lord’s kindly humanity. After He has fed the soul He goes on to feed the body. ‘That attitude has always been copied by the Catholic Church. She has un- tiringly recommended works of mercy. Her list of saints contains many who were just merciful people, kind to the poor, the unhappy, and the suffering. That, indeed, was one of Nietzsche’s objections to Christianity, that it promoted the survival of weaklings. But we must get our values right. Important as the physical things are, and rightly eager as we should be to succour physical distress, the spiritual things are nevertheless of far greater importance. A starving soul is worse than a starving body. But, alas! it is far commoner. Mankind to-day is extraordinarily compassionate to bodily ills. A tale of human suffering, say of starving children, such 30 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION as we have lately heard from Russia, stirs our hearts and | makes us miserable until itis relieved. Spiritual deprivations do not always awaken the same sympathy among those who should be in a position to judge correctly. There are mis- tresses, for example, who would not think of depriving a servant of a dinner, but will deprive her of an opportunity of Communion without the slightest compunction. That is spiritual cruelty, but it is not intended as such, and is by few recognized as such. This Catholic philanthropy, however, should be the first- fruits of the sacramental life. Not all are called to great austerity, or to great suffering, or to the scholar’s life; but all are called to share their religion with others: to be kind; to be forgiving ; to be brothers, not wolves, to one another. Such an attitude of brotherhood will be the background of that life of prayer which is to be our subject next week. You must begin by philanthropy, by loving others; then you can go on to love God: “If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God Whom he hath not seen? ”’ V THE CONTEMPLATIVE religion. Possibly this is one reason why it is not very popular with Englishmen, for Englishmen generally like moderation and detest extremes. ‘They are, indeed, sometimes extreme in their hatred of extremes, just as some people are fanatical in their hatred of fanaticism, or intemperate in their love of temperance. Itis true they would admit that there are regions where moderation is not in place —few, for instance, would apply it to their patriotism—but religion is not one of these rare exceptions. I suppose the average man of the world would think moderation in religion an excellent thing, and would very likely agree with Lord Melbourne that things had come to a pretty pass when it was allowed to invade a man’s private life. It was this love of moderation and this hatred of extremes that once provoked a very clever priest and journalist to compare in bitter scorn a moderate Churchman with a moderately good egg or a moderately chaste woman. It is very probably the cause of the cold and unspiritual religion that the majority of English people profess. It is no wonder that English religion sometimes repels. Imagine a soul on fire with the love of God, and with a hunger for perfection, being confronted with the Choral Matins, the Anglican chants, the let and cushioned seats of many English churches. For moderation is not beloved by the Catholic who is earnest about his faith. It will help very little to advance in prayer. St. Paul did not mean ‘“‘ pray with moderation ”’ when he said “* Pray without ceasing.”’ M ODERATION is not a characteristic of the Catholic 32 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION I In those words of the Apostle to the Gentiles you have the portrait of the ideal man of prayer. And to assist us in our weak endeavours to pray well, and in our feeble efforts at meditation, we shall be helped most if we look, not at the man who is only just a little more advanced than ourselves, but at the man who has really learned what Catholic prayer is. This is the contemplative, a word that has dropped out of the religious vocabulary of many because the thing is so rare amongst us. Probably a good many think that vocal prayer and meditation cover practically the whole field, and that meditation is a practice, not of ordinary Christians, but of really advanced souls. That, however, is not the case. Meditation, in some form or other, is for beginners. Suppose you consult a competent book on prayer, you will find that the first section will deal with vocal prayer, and the next with meditation, describing, probably, various methods of the latter. After this it will go on to speak of certain kinds of prayer that are on the borderland between meditation and contemplation—affective prayer, for instance, and the practice of the Presence of God—while, finally, the last section will deal with contemplative prayer. Now, no doubt there are not a large number of souls who reach such a. height as this, but it can be reached, and those who have climbed so high are the kings of prayer. ‘They are on the mountain top while the majority of us are still clambering confusedly about the foothills. In proportion as a person reaches the higher stages of prayer his general attitude towards life will change. God will count for more and more: human things for less and less. Everything will be viewed from the standpoint, not of time, but of eternity. This is what makes. some people regard religion, if it is carried to extremes, as they say, as something almost inhuman. From one point of view no doubt it is. Take the case of a vocation to the reli- gious life when the person’s family is set against it. To THE CONTEMPLATIVE 33 persist in the vocation seems to many people to be wrong, selfish, unnatural, and unkind. ‘That is when it is looked at from the point of view of this world, and its affections and interests. If this world were all there is, it would very likely be the right view. But look at it from the point of view of eternity, and it appears very different. Instead of seeming wrong, it appears heroic and beautiful. I suppose we can test our religion a good deal by the way such actions as these appear to us. If you were to mention casually at midnight to certain people, just as you were going to bed, that at that very moment there were other people getting up for two hours’ prayer in chapel, you would probably be greeted by a stare of bewildered surprise. To such people it would seem quite natural in Switzerland to get up at a very early hour in order to climb a mountain, or at home in order to catch a train ; but to take part of the night in order to pray, and to curtail sleep for the same object, seems to be forbidden by the golden law of moderation. But, as we get to understand better what the Catholic religion is, such action seems most natural and admirable. Even though we ourselves may be utterly in- capable of it, having no call to such a work, we shall never- theless honour and admire those with a contemplative voca- tion. Instead of looking upon them as poor creatures, com- pared with the successful and jolly men of the world, we shall regard them as those who have drawn the most out of life and made the most of their lives. The Catholic looks at everything from a different angle. I believe this is really the reason why many people dislike Catholicism. It is not because they dislike vestments or incense: it is not even because they dislike certain Catholic practices, such as con- fession and fasting; it is something much bigger than all that. It is the fear of: finding oneself obliged to adopt a whole new philosophy of life, of being compelled to abandon the old way of looking at life, of having to accept an entirely new scheme of values. Itisthe uneasy dread of such a mental 34 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION upheaval that makes men dislike it. For Englishmen generally do not want to think differently from others; least of all do they desire to change the set of ideas with which they started their adult life. They like to think in masses, and to have the comfortable feeling that others think the same as they do. At the bottom of their hearts there is, perhaps, the idea that God must respect a majority. Thus with regard to the con- templative life there are two points of view. The non-Catholic says: I don’t want to pray like that; why should they ? The Catholic says: I can’t pray like that, but thank God some people can, and I hope they will pray for me. There is an entirely different way of looking at things. II Now in our own devotional life we must set the prayer of contemplation before us as the highest thing to wish for. Our noblest spiritual ambition will be to be received some day into the royal ranks of the contemplatives. We shall not, however, be disappointed if such success seems very far off. One of the lessons we have to learn in the spiritual life is to be patient with ourselves. It is a lesson which St. -Francois de Sales is never tired of insisting on in his spiritual correspondence. We must not be impatient because progress seems slow. Yet this is a very common failing. There are many who at the very outset are dissatisfied and distressed because they cannot pray as well as they wish. If they were learning a new language they would not expect to be able to speak it well after a week or two’s study, but they think that facility in prayer should come at once. It is probable that, as a general rule, only those in the cloister will reach the highest peaks of contemplative prayer, but we are not to suppose that very great advance in this direction may not often be made by those living in the world. ‘There are some who think that it is only from those called to the religious life, in its technical sense, that much advance in the life of THE CONTEMPLATIVE te prayer can be expected, but surely this is a mistake. We ought all of us to recognize the possibility of much greater advance than we have hitherto made. Some of the stages, at least, which lead to a more perfect prayer we might attempt. There is ejaculatory prayer, for instance. What a change it makes in the spiritual atmosphere of our whole life if, instead of just saying our prayers at certain times and never thinking of God for the rest of the day, we frequently dart little prayers up to God. It can be done at any time: when you are travelling on a tram; when you are waiting at a railway station; when you are reading the newspaper, or, even, in the middle of a conversation. It is a practice which, if persevered in, begins to make religion seem a different thing. Even more so is this the case with the practice of the presence of God. I wish everyone practised this more. It is the realization of the spiritual and unseen world which lies behind the visible, and it helps enormously to counteract that tendency to materialism which threatens to destroy the devotional life of every one of us. I came across two instances of it in an American review a few days ago. One was the story of a little boy of six who came to his mother one day and said: “‘ Mother, I dreamed about God last night. I was riding along in an automobile and I looked up at the sky and God waved to me—He didn’t say anything; He just waved.” ‘The other was a story of the great Biblical scholar Bengel in his old age. Someone wishing to hear him pray had secreted himself in Bengel’s study. ‘The hours of evening wore away, but the scholar remained still deep in his books. At last he looked up and said with a smile: *“Dear Lord Jesus, we are still on the same old terms.” Evidently in the background of both of those lives, the little boy’s and the old scholar’s, there was always the thought of God ready to come to the surface of the mind directly the mind was for a moment unoccupied. ‘This is doubtless what is meant by praying without ceasing. If we will ourselves 36 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION practice the presence of God we shall get glorious glimpses of — that further land of contemplative prayer. Those who have travelled in the English Lakes may remember the arrival at Windermere by the railway at the south end of the lake. The train has been running through wooded hills and the sense of approach is hot on you. Presently there appear gleams of water on one side of the carriage, and you jolt over the points into a covered station. Stepping down rapidly to the platform the passenger hurries out to the steamer wharf, and there, stretching northward for miles, is the dancing surface of the lake, with its amphitheatre of hills, and far away in the distance the frowning mountains of Westmoreland. Itis one of those breathless visions of beauty that remain with one for a life’s possession. Something like that is also, I think, the lot at times of the beginner in these ways of prayers when he gets occasional glimpses of the spiritual country that lies before him. Often we are plunged in desolation and dryness, and perseverance seems difficult and untempting, but every now and then the curtain is raised for a moment and we see beyond. It is through the practice of the presence of God that we may come to enjoy these privileges. | Ii! One sign of progress in the way of prayer is that we become increasingly independent of the world and of our .circum- stances. Most of us are still extraordinarily dependent on these. Questions of income and luxury, of love and friend- ship, matter enormously. It is difficult to conceive how there could be happiness if certain things, on which we have come to depend, were taken away. ‘There are many who wish to carry all these things into the next world; indeed they can hardly conceive of a happiness in the next world if they are absent. ‘The attraction of spiritualism to a large number is because it promises a future that is very like the present. But THE CONTEMPLATIVE 37 the more we learn about prayer the more we shall find our- selves growing detached and viewing things altogether from a different standpoint. Wecome back, indeed, to what I said just now about the Catholic point of view and the different way in which we shall find ourselves gradually regarding things. The object of this course of sermons has mainly been to show, through a selection of examples, the difference between the man of the world’s point of view and the Catholic’s. What I have said will appear to many to be utterly foolish and wrong-headed, but not to those who see life through Catholic spectacles. And we desire to convert other people to this point of view, for true happiness, we believe, is only to be found init. ‘The Catholic religion, then, is what the world needs. And it is the whole of Catholicism that is needed. There is great danger in half-truths. Ca- tholicism is not something added to Christianity; it is Christianity. A person cannot be a good Christian without being a Catholic. If he is not a Catholic there is something gravely defective about his religion. You cannot say that there is a substratum that all Christians hold in common ; that is the undenominationalist error that was so common fifteen or twenty years ago. Take away any part of the Catholic religion and the rest remains a collection of possibly misleading half-truths. You cannot, for example, isolate the Incarnation from the sacramental system and hold the one fully while neglecting the other. If you do that you have not got hold of half the truth, but of a half-truth, which is a very different thing. We are, then, to try to cultivate the Catholic mind. It is most important that we should get our values right. What is wrong with many and what hinders the spiritual progress of many is that they admire the wrong things. Perhaps one of the chief dangers that threatens English Catholicism is that there are many who, although converted to Catholicism and holding the Catholic Faith, still have Protestant minds 38 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION and are inclined every now and then to rebel. I will end as I began: Moderation is not a characteristic of the Catholic religion. VI GENTLENESS ““ Blessed are the meek.’’—St. Matthew v. that sounds strange, and even offensive, to English ears, but perhaps nothing that surprises more than this. We do not wish to be meek. We have a certain con- tempt for meekness, and perhaps would not be altogether unwilling to agree with Nietzsche, on this point at least, when he taxed Christian morality with being a morality for slaves. It is doubtful if many of us would like to be called meek ; it is almost certain we should not take it as a compliment. Nor is it difficult to understand the reason of such dislike. What is the picture that the word meekness conjures up in our minds? Very likely it is the image of a character like that of Uriah Heep; but, even if it is nothing so unattractive as this, we cannot help feeling that it means lack of spirit. Now I must remind you that the values of words change, and the word meekness has gathered new associations. It does not mean in our common speech to-day the same that it meant in common speech at the time the Authorized ver- sion of the Bible was made. Its real meaning is perhaps best expressed by the French words, doux, douceur, and perhaps the most exact English translation would be “ gentle,” especially in the sense in which the term is used in the word “ gentlemen.’’ We all know really what we mean by that when we use the word in its best sense. If it is permissible to define qualities by their opposites, we may say that gentle- ness is the opposite of all roughness, all self-assertiveness, all caddishness. It is of men possessed of this high quality Je Fea is a good deal in the Sermon on the Mount ¢ c 40 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION that our, Lord was speaking when He said that they should inherit the earth. I Now I think it is beyond all question true to say that gentleness of this kind is valued. You will find that to be true, I believe, among all classes of men. Think of the people you know. Who are those who attract the most affection? Are they not those who are best endowed with this quality of gentleness. Certainly it is the quality that attracts children, and they are generally supposed to be good instantaneous judges of character. Cast your eye, I say, over your acquaintances, and you will find that it is those who are gentle who have most the power of arousing your affection. Or think of the saints you love. We admire them all, and wonder at the supernatural character of their lives, but we do not love them all equally. Some have a greater power than others to awaken this emotion in us. It is the gentle saints whom we are inclined to love the most, and whom we would most have loved to know. Heroes like an Athanasius, an Anthony, a Thomas of Canterbury, we regard with an admiration of perhaps varying degrees of warmth, but we reserve our love for those, like the two Saint Francis’, who were gentle as well as great. Think of the - Saint of Assisi He was gentle with everybody, even with animals ; indeed, he was one of those to whom animals come naturally, as many stories in the “ Little Flowers ’”’ testify. Or think of Saint Francis de Sales, the “ gentleman saint,” as he was called by Leigh Hunt. Among modern saints there have been few more attractive characters than his, and his charm has survived his life: and lives still for those who tread his works. Everywhere, both in his actions and in his writings, his “‘ victorious gentleness,’’ as it has been called, showed itself. He was famous as a director of souls, and those who wish to know what his direction was like can ee a GENTLENESS 4I satisfy their curiosity by reading the Introduction to the Devout Life, or the four volumes of his correspondence. In all his dealings with people he was eminently gentle; he was never rough, as some directors are, possibly with every excuse. It was this douceur which gave him his wonderful power, and drew souls to him like a magnet. Ina very true sense the gentle inherit the earth. God does exalt the humble and meek. They are exalted not only to a lofty throne in heaven, but they are also enthroned in a very high place in the affections and memories of men. II Many people are surprised when they find that grace, besides making people good and developing in them the interior life, produces also, in many cases, those fine chivalrous qualities which are the characteristics of gentlemen and gentlewomen. Those who seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness indeed have many other things added unto them. Grace can make silk purses out of sows’ ears. It may _be, perhaps, some old agricultural labourer, with no educa- tion and no advantages, as people say, but who has never- theless all the finest instincts of a gentleman. I remember one such, in advanced old age and extreme poverty, who lived alone and did for himself as well as he could. His chief anxiety was that he might be unable to keep himself clean, and it was the fear of this that, more than anything else, was inclined to make him miserable. But he had been a regular weekly communicant for many years, and he had become a gentleman without ever trying to be one. On the other hand there may be some nouveau riche; loud, blus- tering, eager for a place in society, who desires beyond all else to be a gentleman and to be considered one, but fails. Why, however, should we be surprised? ‘This quality of gentleness comes from being in a fine tradition. It is one result therefore of the education of an English gentleman, 42 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION brought up in the belief that noblesse oblige. ‘That indeed is an excellent ideal, but the practice does not always come up to the theory. Sometimes of this type we may use Tenny- son’s words about Lancelot : ‘* His honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithiul kept him falsely true.” But, at its best, it is one of the finest types the world has produced. It is surpassed, however, by the finest Christian type, when gentleness is the result of grace, received in the Catholic tradition. Iil Naturally, now that you are keeping your festival, you will be asking how far this is true of the Saints, and especially of Our Lady, the Queen of Saints. Well, the answer is easy here. She is the supreme example of gentleness; and, as a result, has inherited the earth. ‘There is no need for me to insist upon the tremendously high position she enjoys in the Church. It is so high that some have objected, saying that honour is given to her such as ought to be given to God alone. But how has this come about? It has not been through the decrees of the authorities of the Church; in this matter they have always followed behind, merely rati- fying what was already done. It has been the result of popular devotion, which outran authority. Dogma in this case has followed devotion. Mary has her lofty place because the people were determined to put her there. It was not theological deduction arguing that this was right for her who was chosen to be Mother of God, but love that did it. She has captivated the world. Even those, I believe, whose harsh creed forbids them to honour her in the Catholic way, | regret in their hearts that they are compelled to abstain. And it is, I believe, her gentleness that has fascinated people most. Gentleness is what ordinary people, and especially the poor, value beyond all else. To say he is gentle is the = — GENTLENESS 43 highest praise they can give to a priest, to a doctor, to any- body. So this is why it is the gentle that inherit the earth, for they reign there in the hearts of men. From that throne they will never be expelled. The language of devotion delights to emphasize the love of gentleness. In the famous hymn, the Ave Mars Stella, the line that in the English Hymnal is translated “‘ passing meek and lowly ”’ is really “gentle beyond all,” znter omnes mitis. And we get almost the same idea in the line that ends the Salve Regina—*‘ O merciful, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.’’ Indeed when the saints, and especially the Blessed Virgin, are not honoured, gentleness seems to vanish from religion and roughness and hardness to creep in. In Puritanism, for instance, there are many great qualities, but gentleness is not one of them. Con- sequently Protestantism, as a religion, is not loved like Catho- licism. A Protestant can be very loyal to his religion. Ulster is with us to prove that—but it is a loyalty of duty like that given to the Hanoverian kings; not a passionate love and devotion like that given to the exiled Stuarts. I do not think it is unfair to say that Protestantism is not loved like Catho- licism. It is not everything in the world to the Protestant ; something dominating all human loves. And I attribute this to its hardness and lack of sweetness, which come, I believe, when Our Lady and the saints cease to be honoured. IV We may ask ourselves then, if that ideal—the ideal of gentleness—is at all ours. ‘Those who move about the world much: in business houses, in offices, in shops, know how often it is absent. Roughness seems a shorter and easier way of getting things done. But think what a difference it would make if gentleness became a popular ideal, and everyone aimed at it. It would change society. The gentleman and the gentlewoman are those who never willingly inflict pain on others; who are always anxious to avoid hurting the 44 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION feelings of others ; who do not show it when they are bored ; who are not self-assertive and do not thrust themselves for- ward; who do not monopolize the conversation; who are courteous to everyone, especially to their inferiors ; who are never rude or rough or overbearing. That is the background to many other Christian graces and virtues ; the soil in which they easily grow. Is it not worth while to ask the help of Mary and the Saints that we may become gentle ourselves ? PART II (a) STUDIES IN MYSTICISM (6) TWO FIGURES IN FRENCH RELIGION (c) SOME RECENT FRENCH WORKS ON THEOLOGY AND RELIGION * (d) NASSAU: A SUB-TROPICAL CITY oo he \ Ary aS rs ard ae Es 4 ‘ dar: Ae ¥ | ta AMY i itorh: ¥ yy ihe a 3 \ an ae A WHAT MYSTICISM IS HERE has been a great revival in recent years of the sympathetic study of mysticism. For a long time it was regarded as unworthy of the notice of any intelligent man, and only of interest to the student of the aberrations of the human mind. Professor William James, in one of his books, speaks of the tendency people have to discredit “‘ states of mind for which we have an antipathy,” and this is very noticeable in those to whom he gives the not unsuitable name of medical materialists. ‘‘ Medical material- ism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as a hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as a hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity; it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxication most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.” This is an attitude which, though by no means extinct, is now discredited. We are in the full tide of reaction against the tremendous claims made by natural science in the nine- teenth century. Science itself is influenced by it. The chief exponents, men like Sir Oliver Lodge in England, or the late Henri Poincaré in France, speak in very different fashion 48 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION from the strident, bullying tones of Huxley, Tyndall, and | others only a few years ago. It is recognised that religious experiences cannot be dismissed in this cavalier fashion. Rationalism at present is under a cloud, and it is being very widely recognized that the human reason may not be the only instrument we have for the attainment of truth and reality. The popularity of the philosophy of M. Henri Bergson is due to this. At another time his name might hardly have been known outside his lecture room at the Collége de France, but in the intellectual climate of the present day, with its anti-rationalism and its tending towards mys- ticism, he has attained a celebrity that has rarely been enjoyed by philosophers in their lifetime. So, if it is any consolation to do so, those of us who care for spiritual things, and believe in the existence of a spiritual faculty in man, may congratulate ourselves that we are in the fashion. Indeed, so much is this the case that there is a danger of the whole subject being vulgarized. If there is any truth at all in the mystical experience, then it is the most tremendous and awful fact in life, not simply a subject for smart journalists or for casual drawing-room conversation. Sometimes neglect and con- tempt on the part of the world may be more healthy for spiritual endeavour than popularity and adulation. And, as every spiritual expert knows, that mystical country presents the most appalling dangers for the unwise and unguided traveller. Just as Christian, when he passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, saw the mangled bodies of many pilgrims who had perished there, so the history of mysticism is often a dire record of souls ruined by presump- tion or by ignorance. Many definitions have been given of mysticism, and few. words have been used more loosely. Some people only use it to describe a state of ecstatic union with God, while others extend the use of the term to cover practically all devotion. Perhaps it is best to define it as an immediate experience of STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 49 God. ‘This is not the same thing, of course, as an experience of grace. All Christians whose religion is real, and who fre- quent the sacraments, have frequently had that experience. Unless religion is in some way experimentally justified by a soul it is very soon abandoned. Indeed that is the most frequent cause of lapses from religious practice. The mystic, however, claims much more than a knowledge and an ex- perience that God is there to help him; he insists on the possibility of an immediate experience of union with God while still in the body, on being able to have a foretaste here of what heaven will be hereafter. God, for him, can not only be known about but known. And he strictly defines the method by which this experience can be gained. We are here, of course, on very difficult ground. Experience is an individual thing, and only those are competent to criticise who have in some degree shared it, or at any rate made the attempt. The majority of men are unable to follow. So we are thrown back entirely upon the testimony of the mystics themselves to their wonderful experience. We are unable to control their assertions, and if the testimony was slight and the claimed experience only corroborated by a few, we should, without any doubt, either reject their claims or at least suspend-our judgment. But when we find that that experience has been shared, or claimed to be shared, by a multitude of men and women, not all of one age or of one teligion; when we find the most astonishing similarity in the accounts given by men who have never heard of the experience of others; when we take into consideration the fact that these claims are made, not by hysterical invalids, but by men and women often of remarkable intelligence and keen business capacity, then, unless we are prepared to reject everything outside the limited range of our own experience, we must admit that the claim of the mystic is not lightly to be brushed aside. Mysticism may be regarded as the romance of religion. To 50 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION many people religion is a dull, stay-at-home affair; some- thing consisting of “‘ the daily round, the common task,” and of nothing else. It is really a wild fascinating adventure. The spiritual life is something far more romantic, far more adventurous than the majority of men have any idea of. When Peter Pan said: ‘“‘ Death! That will be a great adventure,” he was speaking as any of the mystics might speak. Only for them it is not only death that is an adven- ture. The whole of the spiritual life is that. They tell us of those strange mysterious seas of the spirit, and of what awaits there the lonely voyager ; the hardships, the sufferings, the wonderful and unexpected discoveries. There have been many bold adventurous spirits, whose bodies hardly ever left the cell or the hermitage, who have been accustomed to roam at will over the boundless ocean of eternity. ‘They are the men who care for nothing but the spiritual, and can find the spiritual everywhere, even in the commonest things ; who can always see The traffic of Jacob’s ladder -Pitched betwixt heaven and Charing Cross. In the eternal struggle between immanence and trans- cendence the mystics always see God as immanent. They find Him everywhere. Even though they may not deny His transcendence—which, however, non-Christian mystics. generally do—it falls into the background. For this reason, as for others, the mystics have seldom been regarded with much favour by ecclesiastical authority. They are too independent ; too careless of the things for which others care most; too inclined to slide into heresy. And it can hardly be denied that authority has often been in the right. If we ought to try to hold evenly-balanced, as Baron von » Hiigel has told us, the three sides of religion—the institutional, the mystical, and the intellectual—it can easily be seen that many of the mystics have cared far too little for the institu- tional side, for all the organisation and dogmatic system of STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 51 the Church. But it has happened often too that the mystical side has been obscured by institutional religion. This is likely to be the case when the Catholic Faith is fighting for its life. If one truth is in deadly peril, other truths get necessarily rather obscured. Something of this kind has happened in the Catholic revival in the Church of England. In that long battle for Catholic dogma, and for the right to worship God in the Catholic way, the matter in hand absorbed all energies. The mystic element was driven into the back- ground. Among those influenced by the movement there was a great deal of piety, but hardly anything of what we call mysticism. What mysticism there has been in England has been more of a pantheistic or literary than of a devotional kind. Now that the battle for the Catholic faith is practically won, it may be hoped that the other two elements, the mystical and the intellectual, may be restored to their due proportions. At a time when so many weird religions and uncanny ex- periences are dignified by the name of mysticism it is much to be desired that the true Catholic type should be exhibited as well. Besides this, as the Abbot of Downside has said: “ The great religious teachers have nearly all been mystics. For instance, though the Imitation of Christ and The Spiritual Exercises should be classed among ascetical books rather than mystical, still Thomas 4 Kempis and St. Ignatius cer- tainly were mystics, and had they not been, neither would their books be what they are. Thus the religious streams flowing from them and irrigating such countless work-a-day lives have their source in the wells of mysticism.’’ ‘This is certainly true. The supreme religious teachers have always been those of whom people say: “‘ He knows; he speaks of what he has felt and seen.’’ After Dante had written his Inferno we are told that the simple common people looked on him with awe as the man who had been in hell, and who bore traces on his countenance of that awful experience ; in the same way the mystic is regarded as the man who has 52 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION visited heaven and can tell something of the glories he has seen there. There is no short-cut to this experience. The road to Union is very clearly mapped out by those who have travelled it. They distinguish three stages, first, the Way of Purgation ; secondly, the Way of Illumination; and lastly, the Way of Union. That the Way of Purgation must come first practically all mystics are agreed. ‘The Hindoo fakir is as certain as the Christian saint. If there is to be any fore- taste of heaven on earth then the cleansing fires of Purgatory must be anticipated here. The soul must do the work itself oneartth. This, of course, is the explanation of the asceticism of the great saints. They did not torture themselves under any delusion that God rejoiced in human suffering; they did it because they knew of no other way of liberating the soul. It is, no doubt, easy to scoff. Cheap witticism at the expense of certain ascetic practices have always been popular with the irreligious and the unthinking, but these practices are justi- fied by the result. They do what they are intended to do. From St. Paul downwards all the Christian mystics have said the same thing, castigo corpus meum, et.in servitutem vedigo. ‘The comfortable stockbroker with his motor cars and his luxuries may marvel that anyone can voluntarily renounce all that seems to him to make life worth living, but the mystic knows more of the things that really matter, and of the true meaning of life, than the man of the world has any conception of. So in Dante’s Purgatorio the souls which are enduring purification plunge happily into the flame through which they can reach God. Poi s’ascose nel fuoco che li affina. The willingness to undergo this purification is the test of desire. It is no speedy process; the flesh has tremendous power and does not easily die, and there will be great need of patience, as Hurrell Froude’s little poem shows : STUDIES IN MYSTICISM fa" Lord, I have fasted, I have prayed, And sackcloth has my girdle been, To purge my soul I have essayed With hunger blank and vigil keen ; O God of Mercy, why am I Still haunted by the self I fly ? Sackcloth is a girdle good, O bind it round thee still: Fasting, it is Angel’s food, And Jesus loved the night-air chill; Yet think not prayer and fast were given To make one step ’twixt earth and heaven. Asceticism with the mystics is never an end in itself, but only a means. ‘They find very soon that there are certain pleasures, habits, gifts, which, however harmless in them- selves, yet cripple and handicap spiritual progress. ‘They have to be remorselessly abjured. That God is a jealous God the mystic knows better than anyone else. Art, litera- ture, the beauties of nature, the love of wife or child are generally nothing to him. He is seeking for something better and joyiully foregoes all of these. It was told of St. Bernard that he once rode all day by the side of the Lake of Geneva and never once noticed the glories of the landscape. On the Purgative Way it is not only sins, vicious habits, and careless practices that have to be abandoned; the mystic must there leave behind everything, however attractive and harmless for others, that has any suspicion or taint of the world in it, triumphantly sacrificing the lesser in order to gain the greater. He aims at indifference, at the attainment of such a state that everything that has its roots in the world, physical pain or physical pleasure, is entirely a matter of indifference. The apparent heartlessness of some of the saints has continually been a scandal to good worldly people. Even personal cleanliness has often been foregone as a means of mortification. Then follows the Way of Illumination, that state of radiant peace which more than atones for the torments and agonies 54 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION of the Purgative Way. We are not to suppose that the soul has never had moments of illumination before; without them it could never have had the strength or the constancy to persevere. But they were fleeting and rare; now for the first time the mystic really begins to understand what God is. He has come out of the darkness into a sea of light; the faculty of intuition in him is super-naturally sharpened, and, though he has not yet attained to Union, he knows where formerly he believed. It is in this land of illumination that most of the mystics dwell. Their rapturous descriptions of it are the subject of nearly all their works. It has seldom been better or more simply described than by Brother Lawrence, an artless, uneducated French monk of the seventeenth cen- tury, who became cook in the monastery kitchen. He seems to have lived his life there on a very high plane of illumina- tion. ‘‘ The time of business,” he said, ‘“‘ does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, where several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in a great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.”’ In the Illuminative Way then the soul possesses light, and perhaps the majority of mystics never advance beyond this. However there is something that lies beyond, namely Union. It is more than knowledge. In that last stage the soul is in some sense merged in God. As Tennyson’s Ancient Sage says: If thou would’st hear the Nameless, and descend Into the Temple cave of thine own self, There, brooding by the central altar, thou May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice, By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise; For knowledge is the swallow on the lake, That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there, But never yet hath dipt into the Abysm. But before the stage of Union can be reached another puri- fication must be undergone, and the spiritual traveller passes — STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 55 into the dark Night of the Soul. There have been periods of desolation before, but they are nothing compared with this awful and tremendous darkness. The sun is suddenly blotted out of the mystic’s sky; illumination gradually recedes ; the power of a great darkness falls upon him, and he is only sustained by the memory of what he has seen and known from the abyss of despair. A modern poet has described it: Long time I fought to win the firm assurance, Long time I sought the land from which I come. Lonely I looked for One Alone sufficing ; Now I am lost and very far from home! Once I could stretch toward thy secret splendour, Once through the quiet I knew a message came: Now I am old—yea, old and very weary, Cold is thy hearth, and spectral seems the Flame! Once it was light with me, now shadows gather Swift to my sight: too long the soul’s reprieve. God of my dreams, have pity on the dreamer ; And kill me quickly, whilst I yet believe! Purification means growth, and as the first purification led tojthe Way of Illumination, so this second and more terrible purging of the spirit leads to the Way of Union. Few mystics have penetrated so far. Those who have done so, have only done it for a short time, and only on very rare occasions, and what they have seen or experienced they can only tell in halting language or broken metaphor. Trasumanar significar per verba Non si poria ; “I saw God in a point,’’ says one of them. Or perhaps we must say, following a recent philosophical writer of great ability and sympathy: ‘‘ We may doubt again whether in this life, the ‘ unitive way’ has ever absolutely reached its goal. Possibly the inability of the great mystics to tell us ‘what they have seen on the way,’ except in broken hints and by manifest symbols, may not be wholly due to the 56 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION. inadequacies of language and the dullness of our vision. Even among themselves, it may be, they could speak little otherwise, because even they have not seen the ‘ Good’ face to face.” One characteristic of the mystic’s life is loneliness. Not for him the pleasures of spiritual companionship which we have on our lower sphere. He goes out alone from the pleasant fireside into the night. Messages from other tra- vellers at a distance may occasionally reach him, but that isall. Heis, what Spinoza was said to be, “‘ a God-intoxicated man.” ‘The spiritual levels on which the ordinary man lives are not for him. He can never be satisfied with them, for he wants more. It is God he needs and nothing else, to see God face to face, to be solus cum solo. People have some- times commented on what they call the selfishness of such a life. It seems to them that for anyone to withdraw himself from the world, where there is so much to be done; so many hungry to be fed; so many diseased to be healed ; so many sick souls to be cured, is a wilful abandonment of the better way in order to revel in a selfish spiritual luxury.. This is a short-sighted view. We want experts in every walk of life, and the mystics are our spiritual experts. They explore the trackless oceans of the spirit, and come. back and tell us what they have seen. The whole level of spiritual life is everywhere raised by them. If there were no mystics the general level of spiritual attainment would be very low. Even if they are not working directly for the alleviation of human want and misery, indirectly their work cannot be exaggerated. They are living witnesses to the worth and the importance of the spiritual life. The Church needs her Marthas, and the sons of Martha deserve every word of the praise they receive in Rudyard Kipling’s noble poem ; porro unum est necessarium, — and a world without the sons of Mary would be hard, un- spiritual and godless. The life of Brother Lawrence, spent within the four walls of his monastery kitchen, was as valuable © ee STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 57 to the world as that of Cardinal Richelieu, and there have been few greater benefactors of the human race than Thomas a Kempis. It all depends on the point of view. If we think that the world is going to be saved by science and philanthropy, then no doubt we shall logically condemn the useless lives of the mystics. We shall regard contemplation as waste of time and ecstacy as delusion. But if, on the contrary, we believe, with St. Augustine, that man was made for God and the heart is restless until it finds rest in Him, then we shall see spiritual things and spiritual experiences in their true importance. The mystics will take their place in our thoughts, not as cowardly shirkers of the real battle, but as the bold, intrepid pioneers of the spiritual life, and the world will be the gainer by their rich spiritual experiences. ‘That will be the view taken in this series of articles. ‘The careers of some of the greater mystics will be considered, and an attempt will be made to estimate the value of their contribution to religious life and thought. II DANTE THE MYSTIC orthodoxy of Dante. Yet there have been times when it has been vehemently and bitterly assailed. The extraordinary freedom of his criticism of the Popes, and the outspoken manner in which he denounced the ecclesiastical abuses of his time, the simony, the corruption, and the use of spiritual penalties for material ends, has caused many to look upon him as one of the precursors of the Reformation. A French writer of the last century even went so far as to call Dante a heretic, a revolutionary, and a socialist, and to express the conviction that he was one of the most dangerous enemies the Church has ever had. But this theory has never commanded general allegiance. Nor, indeed, could it do so. ‘There is ample evidence that Dante accepted without any hesitation the whole of the medieval Catholic system. His reverence for St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the scholastic theologians, is apparent to every reader of the © Paradiso. Dr. Moore, the most learned of English Dante scholars, has in his essay on “‘ Dante as a Religious Teacher ”’ vindicated ‘‘ this theological position as a sincere and earnest Catholic.” ‘That he looked upon heresy as one of the gravest. of sins can hardly be doubted, and strange as it may seem to find Sigier of Brabant placed in Paradise with other great theologians in the heaven of the sun, yet it may reasonably be doubted whether Dante knew much of the teaching of this rather mysterious character, or understood how far he went in his denial of immortality and other foundation doc- trines of the Catholic faith. Yet it is not difficult to see how i; is hardly necessary at the present day to defend the STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 59 the mistake has arisen. The modern Ultramontane, and those whose ideas of Catholicism are gained from him, cannot understand the extreme licence that medieval theologians permitted themselves. Many of them were the great Modern- ists of their time. And it never even occurred to any of them to think that criticism of the Pope’s actions or policy was wrong, and likely to cause scandal among the faithful. To suppose this is to read modern ideas into medieval times. It is true that Dante scourged without scruple the vices of the Popes, and did not hesitate to place some of them in Hell, but no one, except political opponents, thought the worse of him for that, and no one ever dreamed of calling him a heretic, or even a bad Catholic, because of it. Dante, then, believed sincerely in the Catholic system as it was understood in the Middle Ages. He was a devout and earnest believer in the sacraments of the Church. It is in the highest degree unlikely that any doubt with regard to them ever crossed his mind. But he was a mystic as well, and it seems quite certain, from a study of the Divina Com- media, that he accepted that as the highest type of religion. In the Paradiso he places the great contemplatives above all the other redeemed souls in the heaven of Saturn, and there are many other passages which show where his sympathies lay. It was probably this tendency to mysticism far more than his medizvalism or his Catholicism that made him so unpopular in the eighteenth century. Even Goldsmith could say that “‘ He shows a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity,’ where by “ absurdity’ he probably means his mysticism, so distasteful to the robust common sense and hatred of enthusiasm that characterised the eighteenth cen- tury; and Dr. Moore tells us that Goethe complained that “the Inferno was abominable, the Purgatorio dubious, and the Paradiso tiresome,”’ an expression of critical opinion that, at the present day, does more harm to Goethe than to Dante. Indeed, Dante’s great poem is a proof, if proof is needed, 60 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION that mysticism is not incompatible with the Catholic faith, or with institutional religion. An attempt is sometimes made to prove that the two are opposites, and that one cannot be the one and remain the other. ‘The truth, of course, is that the ideas are complementary and not exclusive. ‘The greatest mystics, it is perhaps not too much to say, have held fast to institutional religion. St. Teresa of Jesus, St. John of the Cross, the rest of the great Spanish mystics, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Francois de Sales, Fénelon, and many others, show how easy it is to combine the practice of the mystic way with a firm hold on the dogmas of the Catholic religion. It is not denied that many mystics have slipped into heresy, but this has been, not from any necessary incompatibility between their Catholicism and their mysticism, but from the fact that they exaggerated: the one at the expense of the other. A perfect religion must have its institutional as well as its mystical side, and grave dangers follow if either is neglected. If the mystical side is ignored Catholicism tends to become a polity more than a religion—a danger from which the Papacy has been by no means exempt—while, if the institutional side is neglected, mysticism quickly descends into heresy and pantheism. There is a marked mystical revival going on at the present day, and it will be a great pity if certain unscrupulous persons try to use it as an anti- Catholic weapon. There are signs that this may be done, and that mysticism may be preached as the opposite of Catholicism, and used to galvanise into life again the dying Protestantism of the Church of England. The Catholic “.revival has aroused bitter and undying enmities, and there are many things more unlikely than that the mystical revival may be appropriated by a revived Evangelicalism. Such an appropriation, however, must be vehemently disputed. The mystical element of religion must be proclaimed without any minimising of the institutional. As St. Peter and St. Paul, whom Dr. Bigg taught us to regard as the disciplinary STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 61 and the mystical types of Christianity, lived side by side in the Apostolic Church, so Dante is an example of how the medizval Church could combine true Catholic loyalty with a thorough-going mysticism. It is not surprising that Dante was a mystic. Mysticism was then in the air, and what Mr. Balfour calls the psycho- logical climate was favourable to it. Most of the greatest religious teachers of that age had their mystical side, and it seems certain that a great deal of the religion of the poor was mystical in tendency. Partly this was due to the appalling miseries of the time. When life and property were insecure ; when bands of robbers roamed over the country; when force seemed the only right, it is not surprising that many were brought to seek in spiritual things the peace and the happi- ness that were denied them on earth. The hymns of the Middle Ages, such as the O quania qualia of Abelard, are an instance of this. They are songs of exile, and speak of the dissatisfaction with the material and the longing for the spiritual world, the hunger for Him. Qui vitam sine termino Nobis donet in patria. Such a soil is ready prepared for mysticism. Mysticism gives, in this life, an escape into the spiritual, and affords a compensation, and far more than a compensation, to those to whom the world offers nothing. Consequently, before Dante’s day there was a flowering of strange mystic sects, many of them heretical, but all testifying to the desire for escape from the unhappiness of the visible world. Among these mystic prophets Joachim of Flora, at the end of the twelfth century, is the best known; but, although Dante places him in Paradise, there is no evidence that he had any influence over the poet’s thought. It is different with St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic, the due campiont of Christ’s army, the two wheels of the Church’s chariot. Two cantos of the Paradiso are used to proclaim their merits and their 62 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION work, and there can be little doubt that Dante was deeply influenced by St. Francis. The description of the marriage of Francis with the Lady Poverty is one of the most famous in the whole poem. Few men indeed have ever struck the imagination of their contemporaries with more vivid force than did the little poor man of Assisi. He helped to proclaim to his own and to succeeding ages that one can be a mystic and a devout Catholic at the same time. It is not perhaps fanciful to see in the circumstances of Dante’s own life a predisposing cause to mysticism. God leads men to Himself by many ways: some by the negative road of St. Augustine; others through their love of art, like Huysmans; and others again through the bitter ex- perience of the vanities which this world offers. Dante was of the latter. He desired most earnestly worldly fame and success; he was brilliant and ambitious, and at one time it appeared as if all that he desired was within his reach. Then the blow fell. He was exiled from his beloved Florence ; return was forbidden him under penalty of death, and he spent the rest of his life in dreary wanderings from one petty Italian court to another, from Verona to Lunigiana, then to Lucca, to Bologna, perhaps to Paris, until finally fever struck him down on his return from a visit to Venice, and he died at Ravenna. Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity, and so it seems to have been with Dante. Those middle years of ambition, when he fell into the sins which were so sharply rebuked by Beatrice, he came to look upon later as. wanderings in a dark forest where he had lost his way, and . the later life of the poet was that of one who lived very near God. No one can read the Divina Commedia without seeing this. The world rejected him, but he found God instead. Had Dante gained his ambitions he would probably have lived in history as a clever Florentine poet and politician, but he would never have written the Divine Comedy. It is not recognized by all readers that the Divina Commedia STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 63 is an allegorical poem. It is often read simply as a fictitious representation of the states of the human soul after death, as a description of an adventurous journey by a living man into the future world, similar to the descent. of Virgil into the world of the dead in the sixth book of the Aeneid. Of course it is this, but it is more. Dante intended his poem to be also an allegorical representation of the state of the soul while in the body; that, for instance, it is possible for a man while still living on earth to be in Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise. Indeed, more can be said than this. A man is practically, while still in the body, in one of those three places or states. If he is in the grip of sin he is in hell; if he is on the road to sanctification, and is gradually purging himself of the stains he has received, he is in purgatory; if that process is completed he is in Paradise. Every Christian soul now is in one or the other of those three states, and the importance of death lies in the fact that if a man is in hell when it overtakes him, he will remain there for ever; if he is in purgatory the process he has begun will be completed ; if he is in Paradise he will be sure of remaining there eternally. In reading Dante’s poem it is necessary to keep this allegorical side continually in view if one is to understand all the poet meant. Of course this view of the human life is thoroughly mystical. To the mystic, heaven, hell, purgatory are not so much places as states, and a person can be living in any one of them even while still in the body in the present life. This is very different, no doubt, from the popular view. Most people think of the future world geographically—as certain places to which one is transferred after death, and which are entirely distinct from the present world and life. The common phrase, “‘ the next life,” shows this. It is thought of as some- thing entirely distinct from the present existence. To the mystic this way of regarding things is meaningless. For him the spiritual is all one; eternity is something he can possess 64 AN ANGIO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION here and now; and union with God is an experience not of the future but of the present. The visible world hardly veils the spiritual from him, and none knows better than he that “‘ man does not live by bread alone.’’ The favourite texts of the mystic have always been: ‘“ This is life eternal, that they may know thee, the only true God,” and “ The Kingdom of God is within you.” No doubt to many. people their tremendous claim appears unnatural and impossible —an imagination of the madhouse—but the more it is thought over the more reasonable and natural it will appear, once granted the hypothesis of the spiritual world. ‘The mystic’s claim that all spiritual experiences can be his, even while still in the body, will not seem so preposterous as it did at first. | It is very interesting to read the Divina Commedia from this point of view, as the passage of a soul in this life through the experiences of sin on to the mystical ways of purgation, illumination, and union. The Inferno may be taken as a terrible picture of the world, with men in the grip of sins which have become habits and predict a destiny. Dante’s own knowledge of the world helped him to paint this picture from the life. The painful ascent of the mountain of Purgatory is a vivid description of the sufferings which a man must undergo in this life if once he has been stained by sin and wishes to be purified. It is the Purgative Way of the mystic. But on those terraces, great as the sufferings are, they are endured willingly, because every moment’ brings the soul nearer to God. ‘The souls on them will hardly wait to speak to Dante, lest they should lose some of the purifying pain. That this description is true to life every sinner who has tried to purge himself from his sins knows. The pain is terrible ; there is not only the mental pain caused by the memory of past sins, but there is the terrible physical pain of a dying temptation. But since he knows that all this is necessary if he is to escape from the slavery, he endures it STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 65 willingly and even joyfully. It is like the willing endurance of a Polar explorer, who will suffer anything to gain his end, because it is an end that cannot be gained without suffering. The Way of Illumination is described by Dante in the journey through the first nine heavens of the Paradiso. ‘The soul has passed through the Purgative Way, and is in heaven. It is illuminated by the sight of the redeemed souls and by the knowledge it obtains from them. ‘Things that were difficult before become clear and simple now. ‘The mysteries of faith are no longer mysteries because they are fully understood. And everything is seen in its right proportion, both spiritual things and material. This is shown symbolically in the wonderful image where Dante, standing in the stellar heaven, looked down and saw the earth far below looking extraor- dinarily small and insignificant, Tal ch’io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante ; “Such that I smiled at its mean appearance.” If we are living on the earthly plane the world seems the centre of the universe, and appears magnificent and attractive, but if, on the other hand, we are living on the spiritual plane, then spiritual things seem the most important, and the world and all that it has to offer in the way of material delights seem inexpressibly mean and unimportant. It is all a question of the point of view. The point of view of the average sensual man is that of the character in Browning’s poem : Do I view the world as a vale of tears? Ah, reverend sir, not I. But the point of view of the spiritual man is that of St. Paul when he wrote “‘ The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.’’ The man who knows what spiritual joys are, especially the mystic who has climbed up to the Illuminative Way, no longer cares at all about the possession of worldly things. He rates the world at its true value, and is astonished that he can ever have been deceived by its vil sembiante. 66 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION The Unitive Way, the introduction of the soul into the - visible Presence of God Himself, is described in the later cantos of the Paradiso when Dante enters the Tenth Heaven, the Empyrean. ‘Then he sees the Mystic Rose, the vision of all the Redeemed, and there at last, after his long journey, he looks upon God Himself, and understands something of the nature of the Three in One. And with that, the attain- ment of the latest stages of the Mystic Way, the poem ends. The mystics who have claimed to have seen and been united to God have never been able to describe the experience. They have only been able to do it in broken words and in symbols. ‘This is what is called in mystic language “ ecstasy,”’ and it is this experience of theirs that has been least under- stood, and been most regarded as simply of pathological interest. But if there is anything in their claims surely it could not be otherwise. If they have really been introduced into the courts of heaven, how can human language describe what they have felt there? Even Dante, with his magnificent powers, never dared to describe. He recognised that such an experience could never be put into words. | Thenceforward, what I saw Was not for words to speak, nor memory’s self To stand against such outrage on her skill’ © As one who from a dream awakened, straight All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains Impressions of the feeling in his dream ; E’en such am I: for all the vision dies, As ’twere, away; and yet the sense of sweet, That spray from it, still trickles in my heart, Thus in the sun-thaw is the snow unseal’d ; Thus in the winds on flitting leaves was lost The Sibyl’s sentence. And he prays: Give my tongue Power, but to leave one sparkle of thy glory Unto the race to come, that shall not lose Thy triumph wholly. STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 67 Every mystic is alike here. They cannot come back and tell all they have seen on their way, and it is partly for this reason that we believe them. The great instrument of the mystics in reaching Union is contemplation. So we should expect to find Dante laying great stress on the contemplative life. The Paradiso is full of the respect with which he regarded it. When he meets Richard of Saint Victor, one of the greatest mystics of the Middle Ages, in the Heaven of the Sun, he speaks of him as Che a considerar fu pili che viro ; which shows that he regarded contemplation as a specially angelic power. And in the heaven of Saturn, high above all the other ranks of the Redeemed, he places the great con- templatives. It is there he sees the foot of Jacob’s Ladder, with its top out of sight above, up and down which flash the lights which are the souls of those who have given themselves to contemplation. - Questi altri fochi tutti contemplanti Uomini furo, accessi di quel caldo Che fa nascere i fiori e i frutti santi. And at the end of all, the guide who takes Beatrice’s place at the entrance to the Empyrean is St. Bernard, the great Eisner ; Colui, che in questo mondo Contemplando, gusté di quella pace. No spiritual writer has ever spoken of contemplation with greater reverence and respect than Dante, and none has ever attributed greater rewards to him who practises it. Here he is in the true mystic tradition, and may surely be counted himself among the glorious company of true mystics. Til THE SPANISH MYSTICS ROBABLY there never were people who took their Pp religion more seriously than the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century. Religion was everything to them. ‘They cared for nothing else. Living as they did in a time when the New World was being discovered, and the spirit of adventure had seized hold of the nation; when the river at Seville was full of ships newly returned from strange and fascinating climes; in days when the Spanish infantry was sweeping all before it in Europe, they seem to have cared for none of these things. Other interests exclusively claimed them. They sought their adventures in the region of the spirit, and the stories they had to tell were no less matvellous or inspiring than those of the conquistadores who conquered Mexico and Peru. M. Huysmans, in his well- known novel, ‘‘ En Route,” thus makes Durtal, his hero, speak of Saint Teresa : | Oui, Monsieur l’Abbé, je le reconnais, Sainte-Térése a exploré plus a fond que tout autre les régions inconnues de l’4me; elle en est, en quelque sorte, la géographe; elle a surtout dressé la carte de ses poles, marqué les latitudes contemplatives, les terres intérieures du ciel humain; d’autres saints les avaient parcourues avant elle, mais ils ne nous en avaient laissé une topographie ni aussi méthodique, ni aussi exacte. Even if that is saying too much, and if others, like Saint Bernard, or Tauler, or Ruysbroeck, have gone as far as she did on the mystic way, and left a clear account of their journey, yet undoubtedly it is Saint Teresa and Saint John of the STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 69 Cross and the other great Spanish mystics who have most influenced the mystic career of their successors. Spanish religion then had an intense mystical element. In modern Spain, given over to materialism, and in parts strongly irreligious, this is not so evident. But in Saint Teresa’s days the counter-Reformation was carrying all before it on the Continent. Since then Protestantism, as Macaulay remarked, has gained nothing. In Spain especially a wave of spiritual exaltation swept over the people, comparable only to the previous wave that swept back from Europe the tide of Moslem aggression, and restored Toledo and Seville, Cordoba and Granada to the Cross. Religion was not only something for monks and nuns and a few pious lay people. Everybody shared in the enthusiasm. ‘The soldiers and sailors of the Armada entered upon that disastrous exploit as upon a new crusade, and cared far more for the triumph of Catholicism than even for the prestige of the Spanish flag. The idea common among Englishmen of the Spaniards of the sixteenth century has little or no ground in reality. It is largely gathered from Charles Kingsley and other writers whose anti-papal prejudice caused them to regard every Spaniard as a cruel persecutor and every piratical English- man as an angel of light. In that bitter conflict neither side could judge the other fairly. To the Spaniard Drake was a name of horror to frighten children with, and the picture of him drawn by Lope de Vega in the Dragontea was no doubt as far from the truth as that of the modern English dramatist. To the Englishman the Spaniard was bigoted, cold, crafty, and calculating. Bigoted perhaps he was, if we mean by that that he cared for his religion more than for anything else, but surely in the twentieth century we are far enough away from those bitter conflicts to recognise the deep sincerity and the marvellous devotion of Spanish religion. We can forget the evil that was often done—Europeans in foreign countries have often been cruel and grasping and merciless, Englishmen 70 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION - as well as Spaniards—and we can remember and admire their fiery zeal, their loyalty to the Church, and their wonderful devotion to our Lord. All Spanish religion at that date had a deeply mystical tendency. Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross were not lonely figures in the midst of a careless and unmystical world ; they simply represented the highest pitch to which the mysticism of the people was brought. This mystical ten- dency has been well brought out by M. Maurice Barrés, the French novelist, in his book on El Greco and the secret of Toledo. El Greco was an artist who lived at Toledo, who, although a Greek by origin, yet represented perfectly the religious character of Spanish life. Toledo has always been a religious city. The traveller who crosses the yellow Tagus and mounts the steep hill to the town is astonished at once at the number of the churches. It is true that Toledo has other memories, memories of the Moorish occupation, and memories of the great Cervantes. A house in it is shown where the immortal creator of Don Quixote once lived. But more than anything else Toledo speaks to the traveller of the soul and the hunger of the soul for God. It is in the Cathedral— perhaps the greatest masterpiece of Gothic architecture that was ever reared—that can be seen the tomb of the great Cardinal Portocarrero, with its inscription, “ Hic jacet pulvis cinis et nihil ’’—a triumphant assertion that the soul does not perish with the body. It is this care for spiritual things, this belief that the spiritual world is closely entwined with the visible world, to which the pictures of El Greco testify. . They are strange indeed. In his lifetime he was thought by many to be a madman, and many have thought the same since. In what is perhaps the most famous of them, the “ Burial of the Count of Orgaz,’’ which is preserved in the Church of San Tomé in Toledo, the lower half of the canvas is occupied with the laying of the dead body in the tomb by a number of ecclesiastics in rich vestments surrounded by a STUDIES IN MYSTICISM a1 crowd of serious Spaniards, but the upper half represents the reception of the count into heaven by our Lord and our Lady surrounded by jubilant saints and angels. To the Spaniard of that age the spiritual was very real and very near. The picture may seem fantastic to us, but it is doubtful if it did so to the Toledan nobles and monks of the sixteenth century. The note of spirituality can be remarked in all the faces of the men whom El Greco painted. It is significant to compare them with the strenuous and business-like but thoroughly worldly faces of the great men of the Elizabethan age in England, which again are very different from the coarser, more sensual faces of the Georgian era. ‘The long thin faces, with high narrow foreheads, of the Spaniards are the faces of men with an ideal which is not of this world. They are of the type which produces often fanatics, but sometimes saints. The Elizabethan face is the face of the man who conquers the world, the Castilian is that of the man who storms the heights of heaven. It was into this world with its care for spiritual things and its worship of spiritual excellence that Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross were born. While no doubt there were many priests as careless in their lives as Lope de Vega and many laymen who found the temptations of the world and the flesh too strong, yet it was a time when devotion was fashionable and admired. The man, whether priest or lay- man, who cared extremely for his soul and endeavoured to climb as high as possible the steep road of sanctity was honoured by his fellows. He was not looked upon as a weak fool engaged in things which wise men regard with contempt, nor was religion considered as suitable only for women. It is impossible to read at all deeply in the spiritual history of those times without being struck by the number of pious laymen. Saint Teresa’s father, who belonged to one of the proudest houses of Castile, was one of these. Although at first he doubted the religious vocation of his child, and was 72 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION unwilling for her to enter a convent, yet he was humble enough to be willing to learn from her later on, and to become her disciple in the art of contemplation. On his death-bed, so his daughter tells us, he paid no heed to anything but the affairs of his soul, and he died as he was reciting the Creed. He was a wonderful example of the holiness to which a man can attain while living the secular life. Nor was he alone in this. Saint Teresa had another relation, also living at Avila, a certain Don Francis Salcedo, whom she used to call “the holy knight,’ and who was so far advanced in the spiritual life that at one time the saint was willing to put herself under his direction. It is true that this was not particularly successful; it was too much perhaps to expect that Don Francis should know enough to guide so holy a soul as Teresa, but it shows as clearly as anything the reverence with which his holiness and wisdom were regarded. ‘This then was the soil in which the great Spanish mystics grew. It was favourable for their growth. Great saints do not usually grow up as solitary examples of holiness in the midst of a careless and unbelieving society ; they are nearly always surrounded by a host of lesser men and women who care very earnestly for the same things. They do not shine as single stars of great brilliance seen alone in the darkness of the night; they shine rather as the chief luminaries in a Milky Way. The most brilliant of these stars was Saint Teresa, whose merits have been sung with almost an excess of enthusiasm by the English seventeenth century poet, Richard Crashaw : O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires ; By all the eagle in thee, all the Be By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they ; By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire; STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 73 By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His; By all the heaven thou hast in Him (Fair sister of the seraphim !), By all of Him we have in thee, Leave nothing of myself in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may die. The inspirer of this poem was born in the year 1515 at Avila, a walled medieval city situated on the dreary, boulder- strewn plain of Castile, some seventy miles north of Madrid. From her earliest days she cared for religion, and when only seven years old ran away from home with her little brother in order to seek martyrdom at the hands of the Moors. She lost her mother early, and soon sought her natural home in the cloister. For many years—indeed till she was past forty—she suffered terribly from ill-health, on one occasion being thought to be dead; but her health improved in later life and she was able to undertake the heavy work in con- nexion with the reform and foundation of religious houses. The story of her mystical experiences can be read in her life, written by herself at the request or command of her director. She lived till old age, dying in the year 1582, going, as one of those present said, “‘ like a pure dove to enjoy the vision of her God.” The life of Saint John of the Cross was shorter and more stormy. Born in 1542, he entered the Carmelite Order in 1563. He soon made the acquaintance of Saint Teresa, and was her invaluable assistant in carrying out the reforms she introduced. “ Small in body but great in soul,” as he is called by the author of “‘ Hours with the Mystics,” he was, like Saint Teresa, equally great in religion and in practical matters. His energy in reformation aroused great hostility, and he was imprisoned as a runaway and apostate monk eight months in a filthy dungeon in Toledo. In the end, however, Saint Teresa and her powerful friends managed to obtain his liberty; he became in 1585 provincial of his 74 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION order in Andalusia, but further trouble arose, in the midst of which he died in 1591, having survived his friend for nine years. ‘They are two of the greatest glories of Spain. The name of Saint John of the Cross is especially connected with the mystical experience called the dark night of the soul. ‘This is that terrible condition of desolation and aridity which comes over a soul which has been dwelling for some time in the illuminated life, and which is about to proceed to the life of union. Many of the best never get so far on the road as this. They dwell serenely on the heights of illumination, rejoicing, as did Brother Lawrence, in the continual practice of the presence of God. And all the poet- mystics seem to rest here also, and never go on to what is beyond. Wordsworth seems to have frequently enjoyed some kind of illumination, but there was nothing in his life or spiritual experience to correspond with the dark night of the soul. Indeed, it is only the greater souls who pass through this. They come to understand that there is something beyond illumination, that man can not only know but can also be, and that God can be enjoyed in a way far more per- fect than those in the state of illumination ever dream of. And once they have realised that there is something beyond they cannot rest until they have attained it. The hunger of the explorer for fresh fields to penetrate is theirs. They — cannot rest quietly at home; they are a prey to spiritual nostalgia, and must be going forward. And the only way to that further country lies through a long dark tunnel through which all travellers must pass. It is an awful ex- perience. The first purgation was painful, but this, the second, is far worse. The soul seems left entirely alone ; God seems to have deserted it ; there is no pleasure in prayer or devotion or in any spiritual exercise. There is complete and utter privation of all religious consolation and enjoy- ment. No doubt there is a psychological explanation. Miss Underhill explains it as partly the result of fatigue and STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 75 exhaustion, and partly as the pains of transition to a new and higher state. It is, as she finely says, the “ sorting-house of the spiritual life,’ where “we part from the ‘nature mystics,’ the mystic poets, and all who shared in or were contented with the illuminated visage of reality. Those who go on are the great and strong spirits, who do not seek to know, but are driven to be.’’ Saint John of the Cross distinguishes three nights through which the soul must pass. There is first the night of the senses, then the night of the spirit, when everything seems to be chaos and the soul entirely abandoned by God, and, finally, the night of the memory and will, when the world becomes nothing and God every- thing. In a lovely poem he has described how even in that awiul midnight the soul is happy because it knows it is guided by God. In an obscure night, With anxious love inflamed, O happy lot! Forth unobserved I went, My house being now at rest... . In that happy night, In secret, seen of none, Seeing nought but myself, Without other light or guide Save that which in my heart was burning. That light guided me More surely than the noonday sun To the place where he was waiting for me Whom I knew well, And none but he appeared. O guiding night O night more lovely than the dawn ! O night that hast united The lover with his beloved And charged her with her love. 76 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION On my flowery bosom Kept whole for him alone, He reposed and slept: I kept him and the waving Of the cedars fanned him. Then his hair floated in the breeze That blew from the turret ; He struck me on the neck With his gentle hand, And all sensation left me. I continued in oblivion lost, My head was resting on my love; I fainted at last abandoned, And, amid the lilies forgotten, Threw all my cares away. Such is the dark night of the soul as taught by Saint John of the Cross. The soul must gradually be purged from every attachment, for then, and only then, will it see the King in His beauty and the land that is very far off. The man of the world, just because he is a man of the world, can never under- stand this. It all seems to him unnatural, even inhuman. So, in a sense, it is. But the average man’s idea of God is the “bon Dieu” of the Frenchman, a kindly, easy-going potentate. The mystic’s idea of God is something very different ; something awful, terrible, and exacting, but also something infinitely loving, gentle, and tender. An example of the average man’s view of Saint John of the Cross’s teaching can be found in Vaughan’s “ Hours with the Mystics.”” The author of that book—which for a long time was almost the only, if not the only, full account of the mystics in English —is entirely out of sympathy with the great Spaniards. He speaks of their “‘ great fundamental error,”’ of “ supernatural theopathy,’’ and so on. Saint John of the Cross is to him “miserably mistaken.”? And this is the view which no doubt many others would take. It is true it is a hard doc- trine which few are able to bear; it is true it is far beyond STUDIES IN MYSTICISM Ti not only the average man’s attainment, but even his under- standing; still it must be remembered that all this hard teaching of suffering, of night, of renunciation, does not go a step beyond the teaching of our Lord Himself. Many of the great mystics have had strange supernatural experiences. Sometimes they have been in the form of visions, sometimes in that of voices. We remember the voices that spoke to the infant Samuel, to Joan of Arc, to Saint Patrick, and the visions of Isaiah, of Saint John, of Saint Peter, and of many other saints. ‘The life of Saint Teresa was especially fruitful in visions. These are not desired by the mystic, for there is usually great doubt whether they come from God or the devil. Many spiritual guides have believed that Satan frequently transforms himself into an angel of light and sends a vision to delude some unwary saint. Teresa herself was more than once told that her visions came from the devil. But a wiser guidance deter- mined their celestial origin, and she ceased to regard them as temptations. She did not, however, lay stressonthem. ‘The great mystics receive them, if they come, with joy and grati- tude; but if they are absent they are not anxious or unhappy, for they know that such visions are not necessary marks of God’s favour. Perhaps the most famous of Saint Teresa’s visions is the one where she saw an angel close to her, on her left side, in bodily form. In his hand the angel held a golden spear with a point of flame. This he kept on thrusting into her heart, and, as he did this, it seemed to leave her on fire with a love of God. ‘The pain was so sweet that she did not desire to get rid of it. A much earlier experience was when she saw, while talking with a friend, a vision of our Lord bound to a pillar and covered with wounds looking at her reproachfully. This was in the days when Teresa felt that she had not yet given herself entirely to God. Saint Teresa’s visions seem generally to have been of our Lord. This is not surprising, for the great mark of the 78 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION Spanish mystics was a burning love of Him. O gran amadora, she says of Saint Catherine, in one of her poems, but the words are truer still of herself. She was a great lover in every sense of the word. ‘There is a beautiful sonnet, some- times attributed to her, sometimes to Saint John of the Cross, sometimes to Saint Ignatius Loyola, of which this is Dryden’s translation : | | O God, Thou art the object of my love, Not for the hope of endless joys above, Nor for the fear of endless pains below Which such as love Thee not must undergo: | For me, and such as me, Thou once didst bear The ignominious cross, the nails, the spear, A thorny crown transpierced Thy sacred brow, What bloody sweats from every member flow ! For me, in torture Thou resign’st Thy breath, Nailed to the cross and saved’st me by Thy death: Say, can these sufferings fail my heart to move? What but Thyself can now deserve my love ? Such as then was and is Thy love to me, Such is, and shall be still, my love to Thee, Thy love, O Jesus, may I ever sing, O God of love, kind Parent, dearest King. This is beautiful enough, but it lacks the concise directness of the original : Ti me mueves, Sefior: muéve me el verte Clavado en una cruz y escarnecido ; Muéveme ver tu cuerpo tan herido ; Muévenme tus afrentas y tu muerte. The poem helps us to understand the marvellous “ Cruci- fixion ’’ of Velasquez in the Prado Gallery at Madrid, which is thought too painful by some people, but represented the idea of the suffering Saviour which appealed most to the Spanish mystics.—It was an idea of suffering that moved to emulation, an emulation that was not confined to the great saints. ‘The story is told of one of the admirals of the Armada STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 79 who returned home dying with fever. He perpetually asked for water, which the doctors refused to give him. At last, when all hope was gone and he was manifestly dying, a glass of water was handed to him. He seized it eagerly, but hesitated, and then poured it on the ground, saying: ‘‘ I pour it out in memory of Christ’s sufferings.” This love of the Crucified is the great mark of Spanish religion in the sixteenth century. It shines through the literature, the art, even the warfare of the time, and among these splendid lovers none were greater than the twin mystics, Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. IV SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES HERE are few more attractive figures in religious history than that of Saint Francis de Sales. His charm was so strongly felt in his lifetime that he was canonised only a few years after his death, and time has brought no diminution of his fame. Nor has this admira- tion been confined to Catholics. ‘The sceptical Leigh Hunt said of him that he was one of those remarkable figures which the Church of France alone seems able to produce, and called him “the gentleman saint,’’ while his works have had an enormous popularity among all sections of Christians. He is best known as a spiritual guide and director, but he was much more than that. Few lives have been more active. Born in 1567, when the Counter-Reformation was beginning to carry all before it on the Continent, he became Bishop of Geneva at the early age of thirty-five, and for the remaining twenty years of his life was a model of what a bishop should be. Much time was spent in theological controversy—his diocese was full of Protestants—but controversy with Saint Francis de Sales was a very different thing from what it was with most of the controversialists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He eschewed all bitterness and tried to win by love. Together with this there were the cares of his diocese. He was an indefatigable traveller, and was continually in movement, preaching, directing, hearing con- fessions. He was equally loved by rich and poor, and was the model of what a Christian pastor should be. But there STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 8I was one work in which he excelled. He was in great demand as a spiritual director. When he arrived home in the evening after one of his exhausting diocesan journeys he would find a pile of letters awaiting him, and these he would answer with the greatest care. Religious, men and women of the court and of the world, the poor, all wrote to him for guidance and help, and what sort of guidance he gave them can be seen in his best-known and most popular book, the Introduc- tion a la vie dévote. The origin of that book was almost accidental. Among his spiritual children was a certain Madame de Charmoisy, who had been converted from a worldly life by a sermon preached by the saint. She was not previously unknown to him, being married to one of his relations, and as a result of her conversion a correspondence sprang up between them. Mme. de Charmoisy was a clever, intelligent woman, of fine character—a belle dme, as Saint Francis said—and she wished now to become devout, and for this end put herself under his guidance. Soon the letters accumulated, and one day she showed them to a friendly monk, Pére Fourier, who was so pleased with them that he made copies, and these soon began to circulate widely. Pére Fourier, however, was not satisfied with this. He knew Saint Francis, and kept on urging him to put the scattered notes in order and produce a book. He had less trouble, perhaps, than he expected. “It was easy for him to persuade him,” said Saint Francis de Sales, “for his friendship had much power over my will, and his judgment a great authority over mine.” The result was the Introduction to the Devout Life. It is doubtful if a religious book ever had so sudden or so remarkable a success. Bishops wrote to recommend it, and it was soon almost as well known in foreign countries as at home. Only eleven years after it was published Saint Francis could write: “It is true that it has been very useful in France, in Flanders, in England, and has been reprinted more than forty times in different 82 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION places in the French language.”’ In England it soon became popular. Marie de Médicis sent a magnificently bound copy to James I, and an English translation was soon made. This translation suffered a curious fate. Although it had been approved by Archbishop Laud, Charles I, in order to conciliate Puritan prejudices, and to exculpate himself from the charge of favouring Romanism, ordered all copies of it to be seized and burned. A copy of this proclamation, dated May 14th, 1637, is preserved at the British Museum. It will be seen, then, that the book answered the needs of a multitude of souls, and it not only marks, as M. Brémond has said, “‘ the culminating point of the Christian Renaissance and the decisive victory of the Counter-Reformation,” but it had no small share in the triumphant revival of French religion in the seventeenth century. The book is intended to teach piety. It has been called a pedagogy of devotion. Saint Francis de Sales believed very strongly that there was a right way and a wrong way of setting to work, and he believed that many souls were being hindered in their progress by a wrong devotional method. He did not believe at all that a pious soul would spontaneously find out the right way and the most appropriate devotional practices; he believed in the necessity of teaching this, and had no sympathy with the suspicion that some people feel of the spiritual director. He conceived of the lonely soul as labouring under a great spiritual disadvantage, and he would certainly have disagreed with the poet who wrote: Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne He travels fastest who travels alone— at any rate with regard to the journey to the Throne. Saint Francis in his direction acts on a double principle: first, that devotion is acquired slowly and is a life’s work ; secondly, that the grace of God does not usually work by violent or miraculous methods, but in accordance with natural gifts and tendencies. Hence the soul that desires sanctity must STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 83 follow a regular method, and, in the mind of Saint Francis, this method consists of three things: examination of con- Science, meditation, action. First must come self-examina- tion. The most important thing for the soul is to know itself, and if the examination is strictly and thoroughly carried out we shall be aware in ourselves of a number of tendencies, some good, some evil, and all trying to realise themselves. We shall then know the task that lies before us, what we have specially to cultivate and what to be aware of, and what are the chief dangers that threaten our moral and religious life. The next step is to find some method by which the tendencies to good may be strengthened and the tendencies to evil starved, and Saint Francis finds this in the practice of meditation. Modern psychology would agree with him. It is well known now that what Marcus Aurelius said long ago, “ The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts,” is true and that Emerson was right when he said, “‘ Our real action isin our silent moments.’ All thoughts have what psychologists call ‘‘ideo-motor force’’; that is, they tend, sometimes almost irresistibly, to embody them- selves in action. So the soul which is continually meditating on love, on sacrifice, on purity, will become inevitably more loving, more self-sacrificing, more pure, while, on the con- trary, the soul that is filled with black thoughts of anger, or avarice, or lust, will rapidly become more passionate, covetous, and impure. Meditation sows the acts that are to follow. Consequently Saint Francis recommends his readers, at the end of their meditation, to carry away what he quaintly calls “a spiritual nosegay.”’ Just as those who have visited a beautiful garden carry away a little bunch of flowers to remind them of it, so, at the end of a meditation, he bids us select one thought to bring out. again and again in the course of the day. One thing still remains. There is need of action to transform the soul. Meditation provokes desire; action forms habit, and the soul is not truly virtuous until virtues 84 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION have become habits and are done easily and unconsciously. And Saint Francis recommends strongly the pursuit of the simple, homely virtues. He is no friend of the desire to do great or startling acts of love or devotion: the true school of the soul for him is le fuseau et la quenouille ; that is, the simple duties of every day. We can picture him directing some untamed, ambitious soul, on fire to do great things) into simpler paths; the perfect performance, perhaps, of a wife’s duties, or the honourable career of a Christian man of the world. But there was one class of soul with which Saint Francis had not yet been brought into contact. He had not been called upon, so it seems, to guide or help anyone with strongly mystical tendencies. That experience now awaited him. In 1604, he met Saint Chantal, who was one of the most remark- able, if not the most remarkable, of religious figures in the first half of the seventeenth century in France. Of good birth, belonging to a legal family, Jeanne Frémyot was married early to the Baron de Chantal. Eight years of almost perfect happiness followed. Then there came an appalling accident, and M. de Chantal was shot by mistake by one of his friends while hunting. Nine days later he died. The blow was terrible for the poor young widow, left with six children, but Madame de Chantal was not the woman to allow her life to be broken. Always religious, she began to think more about spiritual things and to aim at reaching a high degree of sanctity. Her first desire was for a skilled director. In her prayers she asked God incessantly to send her a guide. At last she thought she had found one. While paying a visit to her father at Dijon she met several pious ladies who recommended very strongly their own director. She agreed —it was with astonishment, so she says, that she found he was willing to direct her—but she could not have made a more unfortunate choice. This good monk had no qualifica- tions for the post at all, much less any qualifications to guide so elect a soul as Madame de Chantal. He was severe, STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 85 brutal, and jealous. He overwhelmed her with a multitude of petty, tiresome devotions which made not only her own life a burden, but the lives of those who lived with her. He ordered prayers in the middle of the night, fasts, and all sorts of mortifications. Her servants used to say afterwards that Madame’s first guide made her pray three times a day and it was a nuisance to everybody, while the Bishop of Geneva made her pray all day and no one was incommoded. And so afraid was this earlier director lest he should lose this dme d élite, that, when he had to go away for some days, he ordered one of his other penitents never to let her out of her sight, and he extracted a promise from her that she would not change her director. But all these precautions were useless. In 1604, Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Chantal met. If ever there is such a thing as spiritual affinity it existed between these two souls. She first heard the Bishop of Geneva preach a Lenten sermon in the Sainte-Chapelle at Dijon, and a meeting between the two quickly followed. In the end he decided—for she consulted him on this point at once—that she was not bound by her previous promise, and agreed himself to become her spiritual guide. J] est fort vrai, he said, que c’est la volonté de Dieu que je me charge de vitre con- duite spirituelle et que vous suiviez mes avis. The same day she made her general confession to him, and a new chapter in the life of each of them began. It seems that at first he had no idea of the spiritual genius of the woman whom God had brought to him. He thought she was only one like so many others who looked to him for guidance, another Madame de Charmoisy, one of the type for which the Introduction to the Devout Life was written. He began by regulating all her spiritual exercises, and by seizing every opportunity to mortify her. She had, for instance, a great dislike for olives, therefore he insisted on her eating them. But soon he began to understand that here was something very different from anything he had known 86 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION before. He began to recognize the originality and the power of this soul, and perhaps even to recognize that she was as far, if not farther, advanced in the spiritual life than he was himself. Perhaps that is to say too much. It might be better to say that she showed him new peaks to climb. Let us try to represent Saint Francis de Sales as he was at this period of his life. He was living a life of great devotion and carry- ing out to the full the precepts he gave to others. His piety and goodness were known all over France. But though he must have known of the mystic life, and though especially the career of Saint Teresa must have been familiar to him, it does not seem that this had ever been presented to him as a possibility for himself. It was not till he met a soul of that type that he recognized that the capacity for the same experiences was also in himself. Probably most priests whose duty it is to act as spiritual guides learn more from their own penitents than from anyone else. ‘To read about a thing is not the same thing as to see it. So Saint Francis de Sales found. His knowledge of Madame de Chantal enlightened him as to the meaning and secret of the lives of the great Spanish mystics. She had already begun to follow in the path of Saint Teresa and he followed her. It would be impossible to say which owed most to the other. She used to say that | she owed everything to Monsieur de Genéve, and certainly she owed a very great deal, but he was good enough and humble enough to be willing to learn from her. ‘The story of their intimacy, of their spiritual progress, and how they helped one another is one of the most romantic and charming in the history of Christianity. Saint Francis had not a spark of jealousy in his nature, and when Madame de Chantal wished to put herself for a time to school with the Carmelites of Dijon, in order to learn and gain something of the spirit of Saint Teresa, he encouraged her with all his power. From those holy women, and especially from Mére de la Trinité, she STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 87 learned much of the mystic life. They clearly discerned her mystical vocation and did much to foster it. M. Brémond, the author of an admirable modern life of Saint Chantal, says of this period that Saint Francis l’avait confiée novice a Sainte- Térése. Elle lu revient professe. Nor had the saint himself been standing still. If between 1604 and 1610 Madame de Chantal made great progress, Saint Francis de Sales made perhaps greater still. Wecan measure this progress when we compare the Tvaité de l’amour de Dieu, published in 1616, with the Introduction a la vie dévote, pub- lished in 160r. You breathe a different air in each of them, and if we did not know it would be hard to believe that they were written by the same person. The explanation is that after the publication of the earlier book Saint Francis de Sales was brought into immediate personal contact with souls of a mystical bent, and had cultivated the same ten- dency in himself. It was for such souls, especially, no doubt, for Madame de Chantal, that he wrote the Tvaité de l’amour de Dieu. According to him, in this book, the ideal of human nature is harmony and beauty: all our actions, habits, desires, tendencies being united in harmony under the empire of the will, But man is very far from this ideal. ‘There is war in the soul, often a pandemonium of contending desires, the appétit sensuel arrayed against the appétit intellectuel. In his psychology Saint Francis de Sales follows Montaigne and regards man as mi ange ni béte, So much bad in the best of us, So much good in the worst of us, as Robert Louis Stevenson said. Deep down in every man are volcanic. fires, the dark tendencies to evil which are so dificult to eradicate. The will alone can reduce all this chaos of conflicting passions and desires to order and har- mony which are the beauty of the soul. And to do this — it needs a motive. This motive Saint Francis finds in love. There are many kinds of love, but among them all celuy 88 AN ANGIO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION de Dieu tient le sceptre. Tove cannot be permanently satisfied with anything short of God. So the aim of the soul must be the love of God, for, once that is gained, it will bring every- thing else with it. And love is the pathway to union. It implies the desire of possession, and the soul can possess God. Such union, or such possession, is only very partial and very occasional while we are still on earth, but it can be enjoyed fully beyond. ‘This full union is the end and the achievement of love. It is interesting to compare this insistence on love with the lesson Dante teaches in the Purgatorio, that even all sin can be traced back to love, love misdirected or love excessive. Saint Francis de Sales would have agreed entirely with the Florentine poet. And the chief means towards attaining the love of God is contemplation. Contemplation leads to love and love leads to union. In the Introduction, it will be remembered, the stress is laid on meditation. That is the great instrument for the attainment of pious and devotional habits. But it cannot do more than this. ‘There is a point at which it stops short. It cannot help the soul to ascend the summits. That is the part of contemplation, which Saint Francis de Sales, following the tradition of all the mystics, makes the chief means of progress in the mystic life. He takes some trouble to explain the difference between contemplation and medita- — tion. Contemplation is a permanent attention of the mind to divine things. In his language meditation is the mother of love and contemplation the daughter; in other words, there comes a time in the spiritual history of the soul when meditation becomes, or is changed into, contemplation. The second difference is that meditation considers in detail, and piece by piece, while contemplation takes a general and collected view. ‘“‘ Meditation is like some one who smells a pink, a rose, rosemary, thyme, jasmine, orange flower separately one after the other; but contemplation is like some one smelling the perfumed water, distilled from all STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 89 these flowers.’’ Again, another difference is that medita- tion is an effort, and is never made without effort, while contemplation is made without any exertion whatever. In contemplation the soul simply rests in God’s arms, the labour of thought is stilled, and, as Saint Francis says, “the soul thus recollected in her God would not change her repose for the greatest goods in the world.” Saint Francis de Sales laid also great stress on “ indif- ference.’’ He wished all his spiritual children to be able to echo the words, ‘‘ I have learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content.’’ This must not be confounded with resignation. A resigned soul submits to God’s will, but it still loves many other things. It would have things otherwise if it could. Whereas the soul which has arrived at the state of holy indifference cares for nothing but God. All other desire is gone. Resignation is like meditation: it demands effort and causes pain; indifference is like con- templation, because it has become effortless. ‘“‘ The in- different heart,’ says Saint Francis, “is like a ball of wax in the hands of its God,” it is ready to do anything and to be anything that God wishes. The will of the man is no longer *“ submitted ”’ to God’s will, it is absorbed in it. Conse- quently, indifference must be practised, and the chief way of practising it, according to Saint Francis, is by mortification. It is only in that way that self-love can be crushed. And if it is not quite true to say, with M. Olier, that Saint Francis is le plus mortifiant de tous les saints, yet in all his spiritual direction, even at the time when he wrote the Introduction, he laid the greatest stress on mortification and abjection. He thought, for example, that Saint Chantal valued his friendship and guidance too much, and he set himself to train her to do even without him. As time went on he saw her less and less. She submitted, but it was the last and hardest mortification of all. She wrote: Mon Dieu, mon vrai Pére, que le rasoir a pénétré avant !—Heélas, go AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION mon unique pére, il m’est venu aujourd’hui a la mémoire qu’un jour vous me commandiez de me dépouiller; je répondis: ‘‘ Je ne sais plus de quoi,” et vous me dites: ‘‘ Ne vous l’ai-je pas dit, ma fille, que je vous dépouillerais de tout?’’ Oh, Dieu! qu'il est aisé de quitter ce qui est autour de nous! Mais quitter sa peau, sa chair, ses os et pénétrer dans l’intime de la moelle, qui est, ce me semble, ce que nous avons fait, c’est une chose grande, difficile et impossible, sinon a la grace de Dieu. Who can help sympathising with this pathetic cry? It may be true, as is sometimes said, that Saint Francis de Sales was never more than a semi-mystic, and certainly it is true that he did not climb the highest peaks. You do not feel with him the spirit of romance, of adventure, that the greatest mystics know; but what he taught he practised himself, and in the course of Christian history there have been few souls more overflowing with the love of God, or who were more blessed to help others. Vv THE QUESTION OF QUIETISM Mysticism. ‘The subject has been too far removed from the things that usually occupy men’s minds to be either well-known or popular. The Mystics have com- monly led quiet, retired lives, away from the noise and bustle of the world, and have been contented to influence a few and to remain unknown outside a narrow circle. But once, in comparatively modern times, it was not so. In France during the long reign of Louis XIV, the grand monarque, questions of Mysticism became the absorbing topics of the day. Everybody talked about them, and everybody had the phraseology of Mysticism at his fingers’ ends. It was not only what one might call the professional religious circles that were interested; from the King and the idle courtiers of Versailles down to the shopkeepers of Paris the quarrel between Bossuet and Fénelon and the long controversy on the question of Quietism and disinterested love was the absorbing topic of conversation and dispute. As in the affaire Dreyfus of our own day, France was torn in two between contending parties; old friendships were broken ; characters were defamed; and controversy reached an extraordinary height of acrimony and bitterness. The cause of it all was a woman. Mme. de La Mothe- Guyon was born in 1648, and was married at a very early age. She was not happy, her home was dominated by a 4 (ies world generally has paid very small attention to 92 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION disagreeable and unkind mother-in-law, and she learned to find in religion the happiness which the world did not give her. She had been precociously religious as a child, and at one time had worn a piece of paper, with the name of Jesus written on it, sewn to her breast. Great difficulties were thrown in her way. M. Guyon did not care for his wife to be too religious, but he died, and the young widow found her- self free to follow her own inclinations. For some time she was in a state of religious uncertainty ; she felt the attrac- tion of prayer, and was evidently an anima naturaliter mystica, but she did not know what to do. She consulted her friends and her confessors, and at last a monk said to her, after she had explained her difficulties in prayer: ‘“‘ Madame, you are seeking without that which you have within. Accus- tom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will find Him.” After that all difficulties ceased; prayer became quite easy ; hours spent in it only seemed like minutes; and even when playing cards or going about her ordinary house- hold duties she seemed to possess God completely. She was already a Quietist. It was natural she should wish to een mais her discovery to others. Unfortunately she fell into unwise hands; she formed an innocent but unfortunate friendship with a Peére La Combe, a Barnabite monk, and accompanied by him she went from town to town in France. Usually she was well received at first, her real piety and her religious genius were manifest, but she seems to have become a regular nuisance and her visits nearly always ended in an ignominious expul- sion. This was largely due to her own follies. Good as she was, she was a prey to certain psychical excesses, and she had some hysterical symptoms very strongly marked. In later life she changed a good deal, but she never lived down the history of these early years. Her name, it seems, became a byword in the provinces for religious eccentricity, and grave unorthodoxy was more than hinted at. What she wanted STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 93 was a wise guide, and in the end she found this in Fénelon. It was at the house of the Duchesse de Charost that they first met. Mme. Guyon had been introduced to that pious coterie of which the most important members were the Duke and Duchess of Beauvilliers and the Duke and Duchess of Chevreuse. The soul of this coterie was the Abbé de Fénelon, who had already made a great name as one of the most brilliant of the younger Parisian clergy. He seemed to be marked out for the highest ecclesiastical preferment. He was distinguished by both worldly and spiritual advantages. Of aristocratic birth, he combined, as Saint-Simon, a not too friendly observer, said, seriousness and gaiety, and was not only the spiritually minded priest, but the graud seigneur as well. The little circle of duchesses fell in love with Mme. Guyon at once. Deeply interested as they were in the spiritual life, they welcomed her with open arms, and it was only natural that they should wish Fénelon also to become acquainted with her. A meeting was soon arranged, but it seems that at first sight he was not very favourably im- pressed. He was probably prejudiced against a woman taking on herself the position of a religious teacher, and it may be that what he had heard of Mme. Guyon was not entirely to her credit. But almost immediately the pre- judice was overcome. I la vit, says Saint-Simon, leur esprit se plut un a lautre, leur sublime s amalgama. It is not astonishing that Fenelon was made captive. His deepest interests were in the spiritual life, and though he was doubtless acquainted with the works of Saint Teresa and the other great Catholic Mystics, he had never been yet — brought into immediate contact with a soul of this type. He welcomed the opportunity. He recognized that he might be able to learn a great deal from her, and it is evident that he was quite convinced of her goodness and sincerity. He was undergoing the same experience as Saint Francis de Sales when he met Mme. de Chantal. It seemed to Fénelon that 94 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION Mme. Guyon had had spiritual experiences of which he him- self knew nothing. At any rate, he said later, and it was doubtless true, that the chief cause of his interest in her was that he believed her to have a distinct experimental knowledge of the inner life, and that, notwithstanding her ignorance on many points, he could learn a great deal by examining with her her experiences: far more than he could learn from other people, however learned, without the experience, or from books. One day a lady of his acquaintance having ex- pressed some doubt about something Mme. Guyon had said, Fénelon brusquely replied: “Mme. Guyon ought to be believed on that point; she has had experience of it.” To the world at large it seemed that Mme. Guyon was under the direction of Fénelon, but exactly the opposite was really the case, and she was teaching him. His whole conception of the spiritual life was changed. A letter he wrote, prob- ably to the Duchesse de Beauvilliers, before his meeting with Mme. Guyon shows what his original idea of piety was. It was a matter of rules, of mortifications, of meditation, and many vocal prayers, and the chief virtue to be aimed at was obedience. But afterwards all is changed. We hear of Christian liberty, of disinterested love, and of the prayer of quiet. All this is due to Mme. Guyon. She had the chief part in the moulding of hisinner life. Fénelon had always the - making of a Mystic in him, but it was Mme. Guyon who first woke the spark into flame. . For some time all went well. It seemed as if Mme. Guyon’s troubles were over, and that her persecutions were a thing of the past. Even Mme. de Maintenon, the last wife of Louis XIV, fell under the spell of the magician. She lived in Paris like a prophetess. People talked about her and © wanted to see her. Her books began to have an immense circulation. She was admitted into the intimacy of Saint- Cyr, the large girls’ school near Paris which was of all her interests the nearest to Mme. de Maintenon’s heart. Soon STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 95 the new Quietistic doctrines began to spread there. Lessons were neglected, and both pupils and teachers began to talk of nothing but the inner life and disinterested love. It was not healthy and could not last. Every soul is not fashioned for the Mystic ascent, and there is nothing more harmful to real religion than the adoption of mystical terminology because it is fashionable, and the attempt to climb to heights of devotion for which the soul is not prepared. People began to talk. Ugly stories began to be passed round, and soon Mme. de Maintenon took fright. She began to think she had gone too far. If there was one thing she dreaded it was unorthodoxy, and that was the one thing too that might imperil her influence with the King. She put the whole matter in the hands of her confessor, the Bishop of Chartres, and soon the storm burst. Fénelon might have saved him- self by abandoning his friend, but this he refused to do. Not only did he conceive himself bound by his honour as a gentle- man to defend her, but he was honestly convinced that she was a good woman, and that her spiritual doctrines, apart from some unwise statements due to ignorance, were true and in accordance with the mystical tradition of the Catholic Church. In an unwise moment he appealed to Bossuet, but soon found that by doing so he had not only not gained a defender, but had lost a friend. The quarrel that ensued between Bossuet and Fénelon was never healed, and is one of the saddest episodes of ecclesiastical history. Soon the hunt was in full cry. Neither Fénelon nor his friends, the pious duchesses, were without enemies. There was jealousy probably of his rapid advancement, and the whole of this part of his life shows how much a man’s career can be blasted by malignant and unscrupulous foes. Saint Francis de Sales made no enemies, and no one ever said a word against him; Fénelon did, and soon the whole pack was barking at him. ‘The opportunity was also seized by many to attack the Beauvilliers and the Chevreuses through Fénelon and 6 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION 9 Mme. Guyon. They were too good. There were many at Versailles who disliked them extremely, and were delighted to find an opportunity to do them an illturn. They were made suspect. No real accusations were made, but a horrible atmosphere of suspicion was created. The Court at Ver- sailles was honeycombed with jealousy, and, besides all this, there was probably an extreme unwillingness on the part of many to see the Court become devout. Under Mme. de Maintenon it had become this. An atmosphere of Puritanism overhung Versailles, and even the wit and anticlericalism of Moliére were powerless to disperse it. The best thing to do, from this point of view, was to make religion ridiculous, and witty and wicked stories were soon passed from mouth to mouth concerning Mme. Guyon and her disciples. Bossuet, little as he knew it, was acting as the tool of a very disreputable party. What was it all about? What was the teaching that engendered such merciless hostility ? It is best known under the name of Quietism, and though this is, in itself, as old or older than Christianity, it had revived in the seventeenth century through the teaching of a Spanish monk, Miguel de Molinos, at Rome. Molinos, after a period of great popu- larity and success, was condemned and ended his days in prison, but the ideas were in the air and broke out again. and again. Mme. Guyon was undoubtedly influenced largely by Molinos. All the principal points of his teaching are to be found in her little book, Moyen court et trés facile de fatre oraison, where she proposes to teach a kind of prayer that may be exercised at all times, “ which does not interfere with external occupations, which princes, kings, prelates, priests, magistrates, soldiers, children, artisans, labourers, - women, and the sick can practise. This prayer is not the prayer of the head, but of the heart.” “‘ Nothing is more easy,” she says, “‘ than to hear God and to enjoy Him. He is more in us than we ourselves.”’ The first degree of prayer STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 97 is meditative reading passing on to meditation ; but in this even, if the person feels an inclination to prayer and silence, he can stop the meditation for as long as the desire lasts. This wish for quiet and silence will grow—in it the soul really has an experimental knowledge of God—and, as it grows, the person is ready to pass to the second step, which is the prayer of simplicity. It is now found that God can be approached with ease; prayer becomes more and more delightful, and the soul, as it were, rests in God and has a full sense of His presence. More and more, as it advances in the knowledge of God, are words unnecessary, and more and more time is spent in silence. Next comes the third step, which is the prayer of abandonment. Abandonment is the key of the whole inner life. He who knows how to practise it properly will soon become perfect. “The practice of it ought to consist in losing all our own will in the will of God, in removing all our own inclinations, however good they may appear, as soon as they are born, in order to place ourselves in indifference, and only to wish what God has wished from eternity, in being indifferent to everything whether for the body or for the soul; indifferent to all goods temporal or eternal; in leaving the past in forgetfulness and the future to Providence, and in giving the present to God.”’ This is the practice of holy indifference, and the soul that adopts it is astonished to find God gradually taking entire possession of the whole being; “it now enjoys a continual sense of that presence, which is become as it were natural to it, and this, as well as prayer, is the result of habit. The soul feels an unusual serenity gradually being diffused through all its faculties, and silence now wholly constitutes its prayer.” It is necessary to cease from all action and self-exertion in order that God may act alone. Finally comes the state of infused prayer, when the soul feels, little by little, that God is taking entire possession of it. It should not now encumber 98 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION — itself with long vocal prayers, and whenever the desire comes to abandon vocal prayer and slip into the prayer of quiet it should be yielded to. It can hardly be denied that there is danger in all this. There can be no doubt that the tendency of this extreme Quietism is to induce an idle spirituality, and the neglect of the practice of the Christian virtues. In the higher states of disinterested love everything is indifferent ; even, it seems, the practice of virtue or vice. “It is a hard saying, this which I say,” wrote Mme. Guyon to Fenelon; “ you are a man not to be a saint or virtuous, but to be according to the heart of God.” A hard saying, indeed! and it is not surprising that it, and others like it, caused consternation and amazement when they became known. The thorough- going Quietist also nearly always loses the Catholic respect for the sacraments. It seems to him that he can get every- thing he wants without them. They may be all very well for souls at the beginning of the mystical life, but very soon the need for them is surpassed. Mme. Guyon was not exempt from this tendency. ‘It seems to me,” she wrote in another letter to Fénelon, “ that the Holy Communion adds nothing to that which I possess.’’ For Mystics of this type even the humanity of Jesus Christ is a stumbling-block. They often say that they must get beyond that to God. One can under- . stand something of the horror of Bossuet when he said, after he had learned what Mme. Guyon’s teaching really was: “ All religion disappears in it.’”’ Certainly in its ex- treme form all Christianity disappears. } But how about Fénelon? Was he a sympathiser with these dangerous and explosive theories? ‘There can be no doubt that he was not. What he was fighting for was not . even mainly the rescue of Mme. Guyon from her enemies, but for the general mystical tradition of the Church, the Mysticism of Saint Bernard, of Saint Teresa, of Saint John of the Cross, of Saint Francis de Sales. It seemed to him STUDIES IN MYSTICISM 99 that this was the real point of controversy. It mattered little if an ignorant woman like Mme. Guyon made some unguarded statements of which she did not understand the implica- tions; it mattered very much that the Church of France should not, through its highest prelates, make any statement that would be a condemnation of the great Catholic Mystics. If there was ignorance on the one side, there was ignorance, he felt quite sure, on the other, too. That he was right with regard to Bossuet there is no doubt. That excellent prelate entered into the controversy knowing little or nothing of Mysticism, and he picked up his knowledge as he went on. At the beginning he was shocked by statements which he found later to be quite orthodox and to have unimpeachable authority. So there can be no wonder that Fénelon sus- pected the competency of his judges, for that he, and not Mme. Guyon, was the real defendant he never doubted. And the methods of Bossuet were the worst that could be employed. He was an intellectual bully, who had constituted himself, it has been said, “the policeman of orthodoxy.”’ And the methods of the policeman were the last that were likely to persuade an aristocratic mind like Fénelon. Fénelon was, however, a supporter of the doctrine of disinterested love. He had learned that from Mme. Guyon, and he never retracted it. Directly after he was appointed Archbishop of Cambrai he published his Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la vie intérieuve, and in this book—it was the one condemned later by Rome—we have the substance of his mystical teaching. In it he distinguishes five different kinds of love—five different ways in which we can love God. ‘There is first a servile love, in which we love God not for Himself, but only for the things we obtain, or hope to obtain, from Him. Next follows a mercenary love, where we love God for Himself, and not only for the things we get from Him, but only as being Himself the cause and instrument of our happiness. ‘The third stage is where there is a combination 100 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION © of disinterested and interested love, when we still love God as being the author of our happiness, but are beginning to love Him for Himself. This is the love of hope. In the next stage disinterested love predominates, but there still remains a suspicion of interest. In the last stage even this disappears. . “One can love God with a love which is pure charity, where there is no self-interested motive mingled with it. Then one loves God in the middle of sufferings in such a way that one could not love Him more if He were to overwhelm the soul with consolations. Neither the fear of punishment nor the desire of reward have any part in this love. One no longer loves God for the merits, or for the perfection, or for the happiness that one ought to find in loving Him. One would love Him as much even if, by an impossible suppo- sition, He were to be ignorant of our love, or were to wish to render eternally unhappy all those who so loved Him.” This seems startling enough. We are to love God what- ever happens, even if we are to be eternally lost for doing so. It seems a dangerous way of putting it, but Fenelon was full of the mystical idea that heaven and hell are states, not places, and hence what he really means is apparently that there can be no hell for the soul that is full of the love of God. Such an one possesses heaven wherever he is. But | it is easy to see that these theories are perilous guests for non-mystical minds. ‘They can be easily twisted to mean that nothing matters, that a soul may be enfranchised from morality and from all search after Christian perfection, and history does not fail to provide examples of men who have drawn these appalling conclusions. It seems probable that Fénelon in later life recognised that his language was unwise, though to the end, notwithstanding the condemna- tion of his book, he held fast to the doctrine of disinterested love. He had all the more right to do this because the Pope, | in condemning the book, refused to do all that his enemies STUDIES IN MYSTICISM IoL wished and to condemn the explanations he gave of it. His attitude is shown in some words he used in an interview with a young English gentleman, the Chevalier de Ramsay, in 1710. Ramsay, who, as the result of much religious con- troversy, had lost nearly all religious belief, had heard of Fénelon and desired to meet him. His opportunity came when as a soldier in the French army—he was a fervent Jacobite—he was campaigning in the Netherlands near to Cambrai. Fenelon received him with the greatest kindness, avec cette bonté paternelle et insinuante qui gagne d’abord les ceurs. But Ramsay was not at once satisfied. He was not sure of Fénelon’s sincerity. It is likely that he had heard some of the stories against. Fenelon that were current in the circle of which Bossuet was the centre. So he asked for a private interview, and when this was granted he went to the point at once. “ Pardon me, Monsigneur, I suspect your candour, and I can no longer listen to you with docility. Tf the Church is infallible you have condemned the doctrine of disinterested love when you submitted to the condemna- tion of your book and condemned it yourself, or if you have not condemned that doctrine your submission is feigned.” In saying this he was so struck with the temerity of his words that he fell on his knees before Fénelon and burst into tears. The Archbishop raised him, embraced him with tenderness, and said: ‘‘ The Church has in no way condemned the doc- trine of disinterested love by condemning my book. This doctrine is taught in all Catholic theology. But the terms which I used to explain ‘t were not suited to a dogmatic work. My book is worth nothing. It was an abortion of my mind, and not at all the fruit of the unction of my heart. I do not wish you to read it.” If Fénelon meant what he said, and there is no reason to suspect his sincerity, it seems that he had come to recognize the danger of the language he had learned from Mme. Guyon, but that he was as devoted as ever to the great assertions of mystical theology. I02 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION | The dust of the great controversy has settled now, and we are able to judge fairly both the actors and the ideas concerned. We see it as a clash between the institutional and the mystical elements of religion. As Baron von Hiigel has pointed out, in all religion there is an institutional, a mystical, and an intellectual element. There should be a perfect balance of the three. But that seldom happens. One is often exalted at the expense of the rest. ‘Those who value one element greatly are inclined to depreciate the others. Bossuet was a man who valued the institutional beyond everything else, and this preoccupation led to the violent collision with the intellectual element represented by Richard Simon, and with the mystical element represented by Fénelon. He crushed Simon, but was not so successful in the Quietist controversy. The end of it was that it was recognized that both, the institutional and the mystical, had their drow de cité in the Catholic Church. Fénelon was condemned, but he gained all that he really fought for. It was fortunate that this was the case. A religion that is purely institutional might become a great and powerful political engine, but it could never satisfy the spiritual needs and hunger of mankind ; while, on the other hand, a religion that was predominantly mystical, and despised the institu- tional element, would soon degenerate into spiritual nihilism, | The exaggeration of the one means despotism, of the other anarchy. ‘This is the great lesson to learn from the Ouietist controversy. Mysticism asserted its right to, live in the Catholic Church, but it must submit to control if it is not to lead to the worst of heresies. Bossuet and Fénelon were both right. TWO FIGURES IN FRENCH RELIGION I ST. FRANCIS DE SALES AS SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR EARLY every priest has, in some measure or other, to be a director of souls. His work in the confes- sional will frequently entail the giving of advice, and it may be that the progress of souls in the interior life will depend largely on whether the advice he gives is good or not. It is obviously, therefore, of great importance that he should fit himself, as far as he can, to give wise and good direction. Doubtless he will learn much by experience, both the experience which comes to him from watching his.own spiritual states, and that which comes from dealing with others. But this alone, though it is all the knowledge that some priests possess, is not sufficient. ‘There is need also of study. We have a large body of literature, written by great spiritual guides in the course of their work, from which we can also learn. ‘These books form our professional litera- ture just as much as do the works of the great dogmatic theologians—St. Thomas Aquinas and others. If we study them we are on the way to make ourselves more efficient priests, and we shall approach with greater confidence the difficult problems of direction that come before us. It seems to me that it is a good practice, at any rate at the beginning, to make a thorough study of the direction of one man; to saturate oneself, as it were, with his methods, and to endea- vour to find out what it was that made him so supremely | efficient a guide of souls. In this paper an attempt is made to study St. Francis de Sales in this light. It is doubtful if I04. AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION we could find a better subject for study. M. Fortunat Strowski, the author of an admirable book on him, has called him, speaking of his spiritual direction, le maitre dans cet art difficile, and the men and women whom he guided were men and women living in a society not at all unlike ours at the present day. The devout people for whom and to whom he wrote in the seventeenth century were very like the devout people in Catholic circles in the twentieth. They had the same difficulties, the same weaknesses, and the same scruples. In saying that St. Francis de Sales wrote for devout people I intend to lay emphasis upon the kind of direction we may expect to findin him. He is not writing for beginners. The average priest, engaged in parochial work, will find that much of his direction is necessarily concerned with those who have hardly begun to make any advance. ‘They are still struggling, possibly with many relapses, with mortal sin. Their horizon is at present bounded by victory over that. They need skilled, common-sense advice, which most priests are capable of giving because they have passed through the same furnaces themselves. The help we get from St. Francis will be with regard to a different type of soul. In most congregations there are a number of devout people who are interested in the spiritual life, have made perhaps some progress, and are anxious to make more. Not all these, of course, have © the same spiritual capacities. Some of them may be only those who enjoy church-going, which is by no means always an indication of a vigorous interior life; while others may belong to that select band who are called to the higher paths of contemplative prayer. It is in their dealings with souls of this kind—the naturally devout, whatever their spiritual attainments—that Anglican priests often fail because they do not know what to advise. Souls under their direction never seem to go forward. ‘Their penitents, year after year, are still struggling with the same difficulties. And they may be so accustomed to this state of things that they do TWO FIGURES IN FRENCH RELIGION I05 not worry about it. Well, they will get a great deal of help from St. Francis de Sales. His books sprang from his direc- tion. The Introduction to the Devout Life had its origin in the guidance of Mme. de Charmoisy, a young society woman, living in the world and enjoying it, but eager for spiritual advance ; the book on The Love of God was built up from the saint’s guidance of that wonderfully gifted soul, Mme. de Chantal. No priest can study them from this point of view without being the wiser for it. He is putting himself to school with a good master. But it is in the volumes of his correspondence especially that we shall learn most of St. Francis’s methods of dealing with all sorts and conditions of men and women, with those in the world and those in the cloister. One thing the student will learn very quickly from him is to be on the look-out for amour propre, for self-love. Of course, directly we begin to know anything of ourselves we are appalled at the way self appears to thrust itself into everything. It seems that there is an admixture of evil even in our best acts. We are inclined to agree with the cynical maxims of La Rochefoucauld and to believe that everything we do, if only we can dig deep enough into motive, springs from fundamental amour propre. But St. Francis de Sales knew quite as much about amour propre as La Rochefoucauld. He knew that it was impossible altogether to root it out. But that did not mean that we were to give up the battle and to assume that spiritual perfection was beyond us. You cannot tear self-love, he says, out of the human heart, but you can check its manifestations, you can prevent the production of the sins which are its fruits. The skilled director will point out where sin comes in. Frequently he wili hear people accuse themselves in their confessions of self-love when in reality there is no sin, but only an im- patience with an obstacle to perfection. J1 faut donc avoir patience, says St. Francis; we must be patient with our 106 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION imperfections ; l’amour propre ne meurt jamais qu’avec nos corps. Sometimes even self-love may be found lurking behind our austerities, which then become les c@uvres de amour propre. It is easy to see how deception may come. It is possible, for instance, to conquer a sin by an appeal to self-love. It is a fairly short and easy way with some persons if one appeals to their pride when there is some fault, possibly a sin of the body, to be overcome. Schoolmasters will get certain results by insisting that gentlemen don’t do this or that. Scoutmasters often make the same appeal to their boys: “A scout doesn’t do this.’”’ But though the sin may be conguered, it is very doubtful if the person’s spiritual condition is any better than it was before. One sin is gone, it is true, but it has been replaced by something that is far more subtle, far more dangerous to the interior life. What has happened is that the publican has become a Pharisee. Doctors might often cure people by means of a drug, but they hesitate to do it because they know that they will be opening the door to a far graver peril. We can learn, in reading the constant warnings of St. Francis against amour propre, not lightly to enlist it as an ally against sin. Those who do this are like a country enlisting the help of one band of pirates to free them from another. The imme- diate end will be attained, but soon the country will be suffering from a still crueller and more grinding tyranny. I quoted St. Francis just now as saying that we must be patient with ourselves. His insistence on the need of this is one of the chief marks of his direction. He found so many people who were inclined to be discouraged if they were not able at once to get the better of their faults. Every con- — fessor comes across frequent instances of this. Penitents complain that they seem to make no progress. Some of them are continually changing their confessor on this account. It springs from an impatience which is not in the least justi- fied. This is what St. Francis says: TWO FIGURES IN FRENCH RELIGION 107 “You complain because certain imperfections and defects are found in your life, contrary to the desire which you have for perfection and for the purity of your love of God. I reply that it is not possible for us to get rid of ourselves entirely while we are still living here. We must then have patience, and not think that we can be healed in a day of all the bad habits we have contracted owing to the small amount of care we formerly had for our spiritual health.” Even, he says, there might be great danger that the soul would become proud and vain if in one moment it becomes perfectly mistress of itself. Here is another passage: “ Know that the virtue of patience is that which assures us most of perfection, and if it is necessary to have patience with others, it is necessary also to have it with oneself. Those who aspire to the pure love of God have not so much need of patience with others as need of patience with themselves. We must suffer our imperfection in order to have perfection ; I say suffer with patience, and not love or caress it: humility is nourished by this sufferance.”’ How beautifully the gentleness of St. Francis shows itself here. He is never rough; never tyrannizes over people and never frightens them. Always gentle with his penitents, he always sent them away comforted, but never allowed them to think that the way to perfection was easy. But he must always have made them feel that it was possible. Be patient with yourself! What a cordial for drooping courage, but what a powerful exercise also in humility! Certainly they never went away feeling that it was no use trying. Naturally we shall ask what St. Francis advises in cases of desolation and dryness. Such states are very common, and all souls who have begun to advance experience them. But nearly always there is great distress at first. It is thought that, if sensible sweetness is withdrawn, something must be seriously wrong. Some will even accuse themselves of this as if it were a sin, or at any rate will assume that it is necessarily 108 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION the result of sin. But St. Francis understands better. He urges that the service we render to God in the midst of dryness is more agreeable to Him than that which we give in the midst of consolations. We ought, he says to accept it, for very likely the state of dryness is more profitable to us, as the food we like is not always the food that agrees with us best. To encourage our suffering in this way he says: Notre Seigneur vous traite déja en brave fille, vivez ausst un peu comme cela. Probably the lady who received that letter felt that a new light was thrown over the whole situation. God was no longer treating her as a child to be encouraged by sweets, but as a grown-up person who could be trusted. ‘“‘ Better it is,’ St. Francis goes on in his own inimitable way, “to eat bread without sugar than sugar without bread.’ Especially he insists that communion should not be abandoned in time of desolation. Yet this is what many wish to do. They do not feel devotion ; consequently they think they should stay away. We learn better from St. Francis de Sales. St. Francis had a method in dealing with souls—what M. Strowski, in a book to which I have always-alluded, calls a pedagogy of souls. Those are three stages, as it were, through which he builds up the interior life in those who sought his assistance. ‘The first of them is the examination of conscience. Here, no doubt, we can trace something of the influence of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who had laid immense stress on the importance of self-examination, both general and particular. The object of this is to get a good diagnosis of the case, in order to understand fully what there is to be done. Next there comes the regular practice of meditation or mental prayer, than which there is nothing more powerful ' to influence the soul. As Marcus Aurelius said: “‘ The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts.’’ Or you may find the same idea in Emerson when he said: ‘‘ Our real action is in our silent moments.” St. Francis allowed nothing to TWO FIGURES IN FRENCH RELIGION 109 interfere with meditation. Writing to a busy person he says: *“ Half-an-hour daily, if possible; if not that, then a quarter of an hour, and, to gain time, you may make your medita- tion, if you will, when you are hearing mass. However difficult it is found it is not to be given up. ‘The trouble which you have will not lessen its value before God who perfers the services which one renders to Him in the midst of interior and exterior difficulties to those given when every- thing is easy and pleasant.” Finally, in this training of the soul, there comes the practice of virtues. Thought must issue in action. Habits must be formed. Quite a common heading to his letters is Exhortation a la pratique des vertus. He does not recommend a great amount of vocal prayer, and the director who takes him as a model will be on the watch against an Anglican tendency, fostered by books of devotion, to multiply such prayers. Finally, he is urgent about the distinction to be made between imperfection and venial sin. One who, besides being a great spiritual guide himself, has written on St. Francis, says that the saint one day, after hearing Mme. Acarie’s confession, “‘ remarked that she accused herself of a great many things which were not even venial faults but simple fragilities. He told her that she must not confuse imperfection, which marks our every action with the seal of human weakness, with venial sin, where there enters the deliberate will to offend God.” Hardly any advice is more needed than this. Everyone who hears confessions knows how frequently this confusion occurs. Involuntary wandering of thought in prayer, for instance, is often mentioned as a grave sin, and unless the distinction is pointed out souls are tendered unhappy and discouraged. Imperfection we cannot avoid; sin we can. Every director should be on the watch against this mistake. Amid all that is of value that we can learn from a study of St. Francis de Sales as a spiritual guide there is perhaps nothing more valuable than this. II A TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOLITARY*. writer, used, when they were young, to read the stories of the old hermits with a certain wistfulness. How much more interesting religion was in those days when the Egyptian desert was full of solitaries, or when St. Cuthbert retired to his lonely island. Still, all that belonged to the past. Hermits, we were brought up to believe, or took for granted, like pirates, no longer troubled the peace or the comfort of the modern world. They had disappeared before the advance of civilization, and were not now to be expected. Christianity had changed. No more miracles, no more hermits, no more supernatural heroism, but well-worked parishes, charming cathedral closes, and, abroad, medical and industrial missions, clothing the savage and teaching him to work. That is how religion presented itself to our minds; as something necessary, indeed, but inevitably a little dull, and as devoid of all romance as a solicitor’s office. One cannot help admiring the superior wisdom of the Church of Rome, teaching that you may expect a miracle or a hermit any day. Religion becomes at once an exciting thing, something to inflame the imagination of a generous-minded boy, and is no longer regarded merely as a tiresome tutor saying “ Don’t.” . Still, there must have been many who, in their heart of hearts, were rebellious against modern ideas. The love of | B seri there are not a few who, like the present *Charles de Foucauld: Explorateur de Maroc, Ermite au Sahara. Par René Bazin. (Paris, Plon-Nourrit et Cie. 1ofr.) TWO FIGURES IN FRENCH RELIGION IIil God had taken this form in the past; why should it not do so again? ‘Then came Kipling’s story, in The Second Jungle Book, of the Indian Prime Minister who, at the height of his career, abandoned everything to become a hermit in the Himalayas. If this was possible in Hinduism, surely it was possible, too, in Christianity. So the mind was tempted to play with the possibility. Why should not a hermit appear, say, on some Bahama cay, or on some lonely African mountain? Might not the coloured races be called to take up the succession? And all the time, though little we knew it, a white man was living the hermit life in the old fashion among the wild Mohammedan tribes of the African desert. Knowledge came of it in this way. ‘Turning over the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes one murky autumn afternoon in a London club, the writer came across a short notice of a new work by M. René Bazin, the novelist, which it appeared was the biography of a man who was described as “ Ex- plorer of Morocco. Hermit in the Sahara.” What, one said, a hermit, a real hermit, in these days! There was no delay in ordering that book. And, when it came, it was better even than expected. Here, indeed, was a career packed full of adventure, but showing at the same time the most extraordinary faith and the most merciless asceticism. Imagine a traveller some eight or ten years ago passing through the country of the savage Tuareg tribes in the middle of the Sahara. He would have found there a man, obviously a Frenchman, living quite alone; spending most of his time in prayer and the rest in study; saying Mass daily without any assistant, by special papal dispensation, since there might not be another Christian within hundreds of miles; and regarded with the greatest respect by all the natives and called by them “the Christian marabout.’”’ And, if he pursued his enquiries, he would find out that this shabby, middle-aged ascetic was Charles de Foucauld, a French viscount ; a distinguished soldier in his young days; one 112 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION of the earliest explorers of Morocco, with a brilliant exploit in disguise to his credit; who, just when the world seemed at his feet, threw it all up for this. M. Bazin’s story of his extraordinary career is one that all who can should read, for it is the record of perhaps the most marvellous exhibition of Christian love and fortitude that modern times have witnessed. If we ask what is the dominant idea which lies behind such a life as this, the answer must be, one supposes, that it is the desire for sacrifice. Charles de Foucauld, and men like him, wish to give up not something but everything. So we see them stripping themselves of all that makes life worth having for most of us—a successful career, intellectual enjoy- ment, pleasant food, agreeable companionship—in order to be entirely for Christ alone. It is the sacrifice of all earthly happiness in order to enjoy spiritual happiness more fully. A hermit does not give up now in order that he may enjoy hereafter ; he obtains his reward here and now. Charles de Foucauld was not miserable at Beni-Abbés or at Tamanrasset. Far from it; he was entirely happy. He did not know what loneliness was so long as he had God. Lives like his are a wonderful testimony to the value of spiritual things, and ptove that Christianity has not lost its ancient power. ‘They come, moreover, as a sharp challenge to all'of us concerning our Christian ideal. Probably there will be plenty to regard his as a wasted life, and to admire more the athletic Christian at the head of his troop of Boy Scouts. But which, after all, is in the best Christian tradition ? SOME RECENT FRENCH WORKS ON THEOLOGY AND RELIGION O write an article of this kind is less easy to-day then it was a few years ago. Not only does it seem to be harder for anyone living in England to obtain information about recent publications, but to procure the books themselves is not always the simple matter it was formerly. Thus, a new work on mystical theology by the Abbé Saudreau, though ordered by me months ago, for some reason or other has never come, despite more than one applica- tion. Moreover, the price of books, in Paris as in London, especially those of a more technical nature, has risen to an alarming extent. This article, therefore is not in any way exhaustive. It merely represents what one man, who tries to keep up with French literature generally, has come across of interest from a religious or theological point of view. The duel between faith and unbelief never comes to an end in France, and works of apologetics have consequently always held an important place in religious literature. One of the foremost of the defenders of the faith in the later yeats of the last century was Mer. d’Hulst, the brilliant and cultured rector of the Institut catholique of Paris... A man of striking personality, highly educated, the Lenten preacher at Notre Dame for several years, and, besides all this, a politician and one of the few clerics who have sat in the French Chamber of Deputies, he filled an important place in the world of his day.. The Abbé Bricout has now published a stout volume on Mgr. d’Hulst, Afologiste. Mgr. d’Hulst, he points out, believed that the great need of modern Chris- tianity was Christian learning, and the dream of his life was II4 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION to do for his own age what Bossuet did for his. It was an ambitious programme, and never fulfilled. The truth is, probably, that though he was a man of very wide reading, and touched many fields—the chapters of this book show that—yet he was generally not much more than the culti- vated amateur, not the professional expert. One wonders if he ever had difficulties himself. Loisy says somewhere that a report was current that Mgr. d’Hulst, hearing that someone had difficulties about the Papacy, remarked that, if he was inclined to doubt, it would be about the funda- mentals of the faith. Writing to a lady whom he directed, he startled her by saying that believing and loving were the same thing. “‘ When you seem to lack faith,’ he says, “replace it by love.” Tandis que votre esprit doute ou nie, livrez votre vie a votre ceur qui affirme. Had he himself ex- perienced black hours of uncertainty, and tried this argu- ment first of all in his own case? Another book which par- takes of the nature of apologetic is M. J. de Tonquédec’s G. K. Chesterton: ses 1dées et son caractére. It is the religious side of Mr. Chesterton’s work that mainly appeals to him, and he is one of the first Frenchmen to call attention to the great importance and influence of this work. He does not always understand him; he is obviously bewildered and puzzled by the humour, and he is inclined to patronize ; but, notwithstanding these defects, the book will do some- thing to bring a new current of thought into French Catholicism. | In theology proper there is perhaps nothing of greater importance than a new and thoroughly revised edition of the Abbé Jules Lebreton’s great work, Les origines du dogme de la Trinité. Among French theologians the names of M. Lebreton and the Abbé Riviére stand out beyond the rest, the one particularly a student of the dogma of the Holy Trinity ; the other of the Atonement. But it is worth while to call attention to La Parousie, by Cardinal Louis Billot, SOME RECENT FRENCH WORKS II5 which is, so far as I know, the first of this distinguished theologian’s works to appear in French. For many years Cardinal Billot has been among the first, if not the first, of Roman theologians, and he has generally been supposed to have been the mind behind the Encyclical Pascend:. In this work, written for a more popular audience than his Latin writings, Cardinal Billot will not listen for a moment to the suggestion that our Lord and the Apostles anticipated an early Second Coming. Duchesne especially, probably because he is a Catholic and ought, according to the Cardinal to know better, comes in for censure. He is described as being, like Melanchthon, a mere humanist, and, more sur- prising still, of being ignorant. The belief that the first Christian generation was obsessed with the idea of the ap- proaching end of the world is described as ouvertement con- traive a la fot catholique. Perhaps Cardinal Billot is inclined to find modernism everywhere. What would he say of the giant volume of nearly a thousand pages which M. Loisy has just published on Les Actes des Apdires? I remember years ago spending a day with M. Loisy at his home at Ceffonds in the Champagne country. It was not long after his excom- munication, and the idea of his candidature for the vacant chair of M. Jean Réville at the Collége de France had just been put forward. He told me that if he were chosen he would devote himself to a study of the earliest Christian communities. Later, after his election, he changed his mind, not wishing at the beginning of his professorship to touch such highly controversial subjects. But here it is at last. I have not yet seen it—the price is fifty francs—but, judging from some chapters which have appeared in M. Loisy’s periodi- cal, the Revue dhistotre et de littérature religieuses, it will not please the supporters of those more conservative views which have been popular lately. Paul’s career is summed up as having caused un pas énorme a la propagande chretienne du cote paien, tant par son activité apostolique, ainst que nous 116 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION venons de la voir, que par son inconsciente adaptation de Vv Evan- gile au courant de la mystique contemporaine, ainst qwil ap- paraitra dans Vexamen de sa doctrine. M. Loisy’s work is not so well known in England as it might be, but it has never been popular with Liberal Protestants of any kind. His reading of the early Christian documents is so very different from that on which they build their theology. Another theological work that will attract attention is Mgr. Pierre Batiffol’s Le catholicisme de Saint Augustin, in two volumes. This is the third part of a big work by Mgr. Batiffol on the history of the origins of Catholicism. ‘The first, L’Eglise natssante et le catholicisme, appeared a dozen years ago; the second, La paix constantimienne, in 1914; while the last, Le siege apostolique, is announced as in preparation. The writer is an expert theologian, and the book is for theologians. Turning to literary history, we have a large and attractive volume by M. Pierre de Labriolle on the Histotre.de la littéra- ture latine chrétienne. ‘This fills a gap. Years ago a book on the subject was promised by that distinguished Latin scholar, the Abbé Paul Lejay, in a series published by Lecoffre. It never appeared, but M. de Labriolle seems to have taken up the work, and his book is dedicated to M. Lejay—da la mémotre de mon ancien maitre. It is written in attractive style, and gives a fine bird’s-eye view of the Latin literature of the Church. Especially interesting, perhaps, are the chapters on Tertullian and on Minucius Felix. He explains the many omissions in the account of Christianity given in the latter’s Octavius on the ground that the book was sim- blement une sorte d’iniroduction a la doctrine chrétuenne, écrite a lusage des mondains cultivés. ‘There is an excellent account of St. Jerome’s work, and more than one chapter on Latin: Christian poetry. We come down to later times in L’Ocuvre des Bollandistes, 1615-1915, by Pére Hippolyte Delehaye. This is a short and brilliant account of a stupendous and learned work carried out by a handful of Belgian Jesuits. SOME RECENT FRENCH WORKS Lt? Beginning with Rosweyde and Bollandus himself, and follow- ing this up by a full relation of the wonderful work of Pape- broch, the author carries the story down to our own day. The Bollandists have had many troubles. ‘They have often been suspected by Catholics because of their devotion to scientific principles, and more than once the work has seemed likely to be completely wrecked. Hindrances have come from outside as well, the latest being the German occupation of Brussels, when Belgium became, as Pére Delehaye says, une vaste prison dans laquelle la vie scientifique comme tout autre action a &é supprimée par un régime ad oppression atroce. But those difficulties are over now. It is pleasant to hear that, hardly were the barriers fallen that separated Belgium from the rest of the world, than messages of friendship began to arrive at once from France, from England, and from Italy. Fortunately no great harm was done, though cigar-smoking Germans, at great risk of fire, rummaged the precious library and carried off some of the papers—among them a manu- script prepared for the Acta Sanctorum. I have left till now an account of what is perhaps the most important work of a religious nature that is being produced in France. This is the great undertaking of the Abbé Henri Bremond to write the Histoire littéraive du sentiment religieux en France from the beginning of the seventeenth century to our own days. ‘Two new volumes of this have quite recently appeared: one on Port-Royal; the other on Pére Lalle- mant and the mystical tradition among the Jesuits. It is the first of these that will attract most attention, owing to its subject, since most Frenchmen who read at all have read Sainte-Beuve. M. Bremond’s volume is extraordinarily interesting and brilliant, and he need not at all fear comparison with his great predecessor. Indeed, so great is his literary ability, so pure and epigrammatic his style, that one would not be surprised if he found his way to the French Academy. Literary merit alone, however, is not always taken into 118 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION account for that high honour. If it were, M. Bremond would have occupied a fauteusl before Mer. Baudrillart, gifted though the latter is, and an excellent representative of the French Church. It is interesting to notice that, in his account of Port-Royal, M. Bremond gives us a completely new view of the Abbé Saint-Cyran. To Sainte-Beuve he was a great man, a prince among directors. Many Catholics have seen in him a stnistre sectaive. M. Bremond agrees with neither. To him Saint-Cyran is a little man, a confused thinker, and not an original character. The Jansenists, indeed, cut no attractive figure in these pages. ‘The great Arnauld appears as a cold, inhuman theologian; hardly a man at all, but “a theological machine-gun, empty of all interior life.’ In him le docteur a tout engloutt. M. Bremond will greatly extend his reputation by these volumes. What an amount of reading and study lies behind them! Once people were inclined to think their author a facile and delightful writer, but slightly superficial ! One little book perhaps deserves a mention at the close. Le pauvre sous Vescalier is the text of a play by M. Henri Ghéon, which was produced at the Vieux-Colombier last January. It tells the story of St. Alexis, the fourth-century saint, but the writer evidently intends us also to picture it in a modern setting. ‘“‘ Fourth-century Rome,” he says, ““ was very like modern Paris; and though the scene is set at Rome, it is also plus généralement en temps de chrétienté.” M. Ghéon is interested in religion; he became a convert during the war, and described his experience in Témoignage d'un converti. Naturally, his religion shows itself in his art. To understand the development of French religious thought one has not only to know the work of philosophers, critics, © and theologians; one finds much also in the modern novel and play. There are theologians in England who would scorn to pay any attention to the works of, say, Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. H. G. Wells, but they are not really of such SOME RECENT FRENCH WORKS II9g little account. Even more in France this kind of work counts for much. M. Ghéon’s play is evidently intended as a challenge to think out the Christian point of view as ex- emplified in this story of the man who lived for many years as an unknown hermit in a small chamber beneath the stair- case in his father’s house. NASSAU: A SUB-TROPICAL CITY From the last Issue of ‘‘ The Treasury’ (September, 1920). HERE are few pleasures greater than those which come from the sense of contrast. To sit before a warm fire and hear the wind howl without, may make some feel uncomfortable, but gives to others just that feeling of comfort which comes from a realization of the opposite. You get the same feeling in Nassau when you are sitting on a pleasant piazza in January, revelling in the sunshine, tempered by a cool breeze from the north, and think of the cold, the slush and the bitter wind of distant London. One day last winter, when the steamer arrived from New York, it brought a tale of city streets choked with snow, of impeded traffic, of travellers forced to carry their own boxes to the wharf. Meanwhile here was Nassau, bathed in sun and colour, truly a haven of joy and rest to those who had escaped, if only for a week or two, from the wintry miseries of the | north. | Yet Nassau is little known in England. Few could tell its exact position on the map, while some are grotesquely wrong as to its whereabouts. Last winter one letter was addressed to me at Nassau, Florida, West Indies, and this, by the favour of the intelligence department of the Washing- ton Post Office, I received ; but another addressed to Nassau, South of France, never came to hand, and perhaps is still wandering disconsolately around Mediterranean post offices, — hoping one day to meet a clerk who has heard of the Bahamas. For these islands—I will make a secret of it no longer; they are the northernmost of the West Indies and the nearest of them lie less than a hundred miles from the south-eastern NASSAU : A’ SUB-TROPICAL CITY I21I coast of the United States—have not been unknown to history. It was on one of them that Columbus set his foot on that famous October day in 1492, when the New World first swam into the Old World’s ken. Later they were the home of the buccaneers; dirty scoundrels, probably, for the most part, but whom time has gilded with romance. ‘The quiet harbour of Nassau, full now of peaceable sponging schooners, must often then have been turned into a noisy inferno on the return from some piratical cruise of these apaches of the sea. Later still the American Civil War brought adventure and profit to the inhabitants of the Bahamas, for Nassau became the base from which intrepid blockade-runners started on their dangerous but highly remunerative voyages. Perhaps our own day is seeing some slight revival of these ancient glories. ‘The adoption of pro- hibition by the United States is once again making smuggling a popular and lucrative business, and there are still adven- turers in Bay Street who will run you a cargo if you are pre- pared to pay for it. Nassau last winter became a huge _ whisky warehouse, and the duties paid enabled the taxes to be lowered and the postage fees reduced. To one little corner of the world, at any rate, Mr. Pusseyfoot has brought pros- perity. There is a small island called Bimini, a mere rock about a mile long, but the nearest of the Bahamas to the coast of Florida, whose name a year or two ago was utterly unknown to the world at large. But everyone in the States knows of Bimini now, even as the inhabitants of an English village know the “ Red Lion’”’ at the street corner, for it is the nearest place where the thirsty and alcoholic-minded Yankee can satisfy his tastes. But Nassau is now a tired city. It has had its brief hour of glorious energy, but the sun of its prosperity seems to have set. Insome of the islands you can still come across the ruins ~ of the old planters’ mansions, silent and tenantless and over- grown by bush. For the plantations lived on slave labour, 122 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION and the emancipation of the slaves eighty years ago brought them to decay, and only a few stones here and there remain, like the ruins of the Roman villas in England, to witness to a civilization that has departed. Probably there is money to be made still in the Bahamas, but it is the energetic Ameri- can who is making it, not the inhabitants. As you approach Nassau from the sea, long before anything else of the town is visible, your eye falls upon the towering white mass of the Colonial Hotel, an American hotel built by American capital for American visitors. It is a symbol of American domination. Nassau is content with the crumbs that fall from the rich American’s table—the money spent in shops, for example—but nearly all the spoils go back to the States. Is it the fate of Nassau to become in the end a city run by Americans, as a pleasure city for themselves—like Palm Beach or Miami—a kind of Biarritz or Mentone of the New World ; a town of giant hotels and casinos, just waking into feverish activity for a few months, then comfortably dozing till the season comes round again? Forgotten and neglected by England, perhaps Nassau can do nothing else. She is like a lady who has come down in the world and makes a liveli- hood by taking in lodgers. After all, why shouldn’t she, if her rich relations will not help her? It is better to live in the basement of your own house and give up the drawing- room to visitors, than to adopt the alternative of bankruptcy. It is difficult to see what else Nassau could do. It is not situated on one of the great steamship lines. Business does not come its way. It may be compared to an old English country town, say Wantage, which the railway has missed and for which there is no future. But it is a pity if the American is to be king and to be able to dictate what shall or shall not be done. Especially is this the case if he brings, as he is sure to bring, his colour prejudices with him. It would be an evil day for the Bahamas if the coloured people came to be treated, even by visitors, in the way in which they are NASSAU : A SUB-TROPICAL CITY I23 treated in the Southern States. Suppose, for instance, it was refused to serve a British subject in an American-managed hotel because he was coloured, would the license be risked by such an act of intolerance? It may be doubted. Some- thing of the sort will almost certainly betried. The American is the least cosmopolitan of men. He tries to carry a corner of the United States with him wherever he goes. He wants his own clubs in foreign cities, from which all but Americans are excluded. ‘The wise traveller will try to enter into the life of the nations whom he visits, but the average American prefers his travel to be surrounded by an atmosphere which he carries with him from Chicago or New York. Nassau then is forgotten by England. It is a pity, for she has much to offer. Not only is her climate for a good part of the year almost perfect, but she possesses also the wonderful gift of beauty. Inland, it is true, there is not much to be seen. Thickly-growing bush covers everything. Standing on the top of Fort Fincastle in Nassau and looking southward over the island, it is just a sea of bush beating against the town and encroaching whenever the watchfulness of man is for a moment lessened. Nor is there the wonderful bird-life of the tropics. ‘There are, certainly, the humming-birds, which it is a perpetual delight to watch as, with wings whirring like electric fans, they seem suspended by their long bills from the flowers on which they feed; but there are few other birds at all. It is the colour of Nassau that is so wonderful; the colour of the sea in the first place, which it would need the pen of a Ruskin to describe, and the gorgeous colour of the town, in the second place. You may turn a corner and suddenly come across a mass of magenta-hued bougainvillea that almost takes your breath away, and pink oleanders and scarlet hibiscus are common enough. ‘The beauty of a town depends very largely upon its roofs. Let the traveller in England compare the warm red roofs of Worcester with the slated monstrosities of Nottingham or Cardiff. In Nassau the I24 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION houses are roofed with wooden shingles, and these change colour marvellously under different atmospheric conditions. They are at their best when wet after rain, for then, for a short time, till the sun dries them, they become a dark rich purple. Nassau owes everything to the sun and, naturally, there is wonderful and varied beauty in its sunrises and sun- sets. I have seen a sunset over the dark trees that looked exactly like a forest fire in the distance, for there was a heavy cloud like rolling smoke, just above it. And there is one beauty in the Bahamas which survives there when the rest of the world has almost lost it: the beauty of sailing ships. It used to be said that there was no more lovely sight in the world than that of a line-of-battle-ship leaving Portsmouth Harbour under full sail. Well, almost any day at Nassau you can see the fore and aft schooners of the spongers coming in, like white-winged birds, across the bar, and, sometimes, just before sunset, drifting in from the east, a four-masted schooner flying the flag that shows it has come from a foreign port. The rattle of the chain as it anchors, and the voices coming across the clear air of the harbour, remind one of how little things have changed at Nassau in this respect for two centuries. It was just the same in the days when Fort Charlotte was new and when the name of Blackbeard was a terror to all law-abiding travellers. There is one thing, however, that may keep the ie visitor away. If you dislike the coloured man, or feel any distaste for his proximity, as is the case with a.certain number of white men, then Nassau is not the place for you. For the coloured man is everywhere. In the town of Nassau he forms two-thirds of the population and, in the islands gene- tally, a far larger proportion. Coloured people will be the sailors on the boat by which you cross from Miami and coloured people will wait on you when you are here. You will see far more black faces than white in the streets. It is true that their numbers are growing less through emigration. NASSAU: A SUB-TROPICAL CITY I25 Money is not easily to be earned at home, while wages are high and labour in great demand in the United States. Every month a few more young men depart, like Whittington, to seek their fortune away from home. And once they have tasted the happiness of full pockets, and the joys and excite- ments of town life, it is few who will return to the sleepy settlements which nursed them. And when they return they come back changed ; no longer the happy-go-lucky, contented negroes of former days, but men with ideas—ideas of their own worth and of the future of their own race. This change is intensely distasteful to some, even to some of those who care most for the black man. Perhaps, however, it is not altogether to be deplored. Boys and girls, when they have left their childhood behind, pass nearly always through an awkward age, when they are bumptious, clumsy, and inclined to be self-assertive, and consequently to irritate their elders. So, if the experience of the individual summarizes in a few years the experience of the race, it can easily be seen that, if the coloured race is passing out of its childhood, these qualities will necessarily be present. While we often regret the growing-up of a child, and the loss of its little attractive ways, no one would wish it to remain a child for ever. So, although the new negro may not be so attractive as the old, those very qualities which we dislike may be the evidence that he is growing up to something better. The younger generation of coloured men, especially those who have been to the war, know something of what civilization and educa- tion mean. ‘They have had a glimpse into the promised land, and will never be content to slip back again into semi-bar- barous servitude. This advance in education will probably carry with it the death of many of the old superstitions. But they will die hard. In some of the islands particularly, and in all to some degree, the old African heathenism still survives. To this day you will sometimes find food placed on graves for the 126 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION use of the dead, or nails driven into the ground to keep the ghost from coming out. There are few among the coloured people who will willingly pass through a churchyard at night. Magic is frequently and quite openly used. To prevent theft of produce the owner of a field will often have recourse to a wizard or a witch to procure a bottle filled with grave sand and sea water and, maybe, other ingredients, which he will hang up on a tree and then leave his property with perfect safety. This is called “fixing” the field. No one, seeing that sinister bottle, will dare to touch a single fruit or vege- table. It is firmly believed that, should this be done, the thief will presently swell up and die. Men will tell you that they have known cases of this in their own personal experience. Perhaps, indeed, they have. Imagine a superstitious coloured woman stealing unwittingly from a field that had been “fixed” and then discovering that the dread magic had fallen upon her. Who will say what the result of mind on body might © not be in a case like this ? We should explain such swellings psychologically, not magically, but not so the uneducated coloured man. ‘This seems to him a perfectly obvious case of cause and effect. The person stole from a protected field, the dreaded swellings followed. No other. explanation will be listened to; indeed, what we believe to be the true one would be incomprehensible and ridiculous to him. And how- ever rare such a case may be, it would be widely talked about, and belief in the appalling efficacy of the magic will be ten- fold stronger. No doubt the more terrible cases of witch- craft are very rare, but it does not follow that these are entirely unknown. In the black republic of Hayti it seems certain that criminal practices are resorted to and children murdered for nefarious ends. Within the last twenty or thirty years children have also vanished in the Bahamas, though, not- withstanding grave suspicion, it has never been possible to prove anything. The religion of the Bahamian negro is Christian, but sometimes it is Christianity in its most debased NASSAU: A SUB-TROPICAL CITY 127 form, and many of the old heathen beliefs and practices flourish like nettles side by side with it. But this is not true of the religion of all the coloured people. The Church is strong in the Bahamas and the Christianity taught is of a robust Catholic type. ‘There ate some parts of the surface of the globe which are saturated with the memories of great missionaries. It must be difficult to sail in the Levant without the thought of the tireless voyages of St. Paul coming constantly into the mind, or in the Eastern seas without thinking of the amazing career of St. Francis Xavier. But the Bahamas have not been the scene of the labours of any of the great missionaries of history and have not witnessed any startling triumphs of the Cross. The ghosts that haunt these seas are the ghosts of the old Spanish adventurers; the buccaneers ; the great slaveholders of the past day. If one passion more than another has dominated the dreams of the brave men who have sailed these waters it has been the love of money; the desire for El Dorado; not the golden city of the Apocalypse, but the material wealth of the millionaire. You must not count on finding intellectual and spiritual interests to flourish vigorously in the tropics. The climate seems often to have a tendency to suck all energy out of aman. ‘The white men of the tropics will generally be found to be pleasant, easy-going, men of the world, sharp as a needle for a bargain, but con- temptuous of ideas. It is energy that is lacking. In the Bahamas the business adventurers come from America; the clergy from England. It is the rarest thing in the world to find in the islands a white recruit for the priesthood. ‘The white population of Nassau desire, when they belong to the Church, a placid Georgian Church of Englandism, and their place of worship, Christ Church Cathedral, is the outward and visible symbolofthis. Itisathorough English building, looking as if it had somehow strayed from Cheltenham or Bath and were uncomfortable in its new surroundings. In the semi-tropical 128 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION environment of Nassau it strikes one with the same sense of incongruity as would a man in frock coat and tall hat if you met him in Bay Street. It is among the coloured popula- tion that you find the romance of religion in a living Catho- licism. They love and practise their faith in a way that puts many white men to shame. ‘Terribly weak, as they often are, and unsatisfactory from a moral point of view, they need in their religion the strong discipline which Catholicism pro- vides. The practices of some of the less respectable Protestant sects have a direct tendency to minister to their weakness in self-control. } The clergy, I have already said, mainly come from England. There are some who look upon the missionary career as one that is only adopted by those who, for one reason or another, are unable to find work in England. Such a belief could not survive a knowledge of the clergy in the Nassau diocese and their work. In the eighteenth century there was . a government that held the reins of power for a short time in England, that was called the ministry of All the Talents. The same name might be applied to the clergy in the Bahamas. It is not only their proficiency in their professional work to which I allude, but their many-sided abilities outside it. You will find among them painters, architects, pianists, organ- builders, boat-builders ; indeed, I hesitate to say what you will not find. If there is anything that needs to be done, from building a church to tuning a piano, you will find some- one to do it and do it well. No doubt the circumstances of life on the islands force a man to learn how to do things for himself, and the scarcity of money is a great incentive to inven- tion. If you cannot buy a new sanctuary lamp you must figure out some way of manufacturing one for yourself. It is a life that would be attractive to many who have the love of God and the spirit of adventure in their hearts, and are not afraid of poverty or hardship in the service of the Cross. Hardship, certainly, there is. The possibility of famine, in NASSAU : A SUB-TROPICAL CITY I29 the first place, for food is often terribly scarce, and the priest may have to subsist for weeks at a time on nothing but peas and rice, the native dish. Then there is the danger and the difficulty of travelling. All this has to be done in small sailing vessels. Imagine a voyage of several days in a tiny schooner, the deck perhaps crowded with live stock or piled high with tomato crates, with no room or hardly any room to move, so that where you take your seat at the start you have to remain till the end of the voyage, with none of the comforts or even the decencies of European existence; imagine all that and you know something of what the clergy in the Bahamas take smilingly as a matter of course. It is a career to bring out all that is best in a man, and many qualities which, in ordinary civilized life, would never have the opportunity to show them- selves. These men, at any rate, have not succumbed to the listlessness of the tropics. Probably it is the difficulty of access that prevents English people from visiting Nassau in greater numbers. At present, if you wish to go, you must travel vza the United States, and be prepared, as likely as not, to put up with some discomforts on the journey. If, only occasionally, a vessel sailed direct from England, things might be different. For Nassau has much to offer: a’ perfect climate, natural loveliness, an experience of semi-tropical life and a charming and wonderfully hospitable white population. PART III CONGRESS PAPERS, ETC. I MEDITATION AND MYSTICISM chapter of theological writing that has appeared in this generation—the second chapter in the first volume of Baron F. von Hiigel’s The Mystical Element in Religion— it is pointed out that all religion should consist of three ele- ments: the institutional, the speculative, and the mystical or experimental. Should any one of these be missing, either in the religion of a body or in the religion of an individual, there will be something lacking which entails a real loss. Yet how rare the combination of all three is in any one individual, our knowledge either of history or of the religious personalities of our own day will tell us. Among contemporary figures whose work shows the vivifying presence of the three elements, are Baron von Higel him- self, and that striking mind and personality—the gap made by whose loss we must all be specially feeling this week— the late John Neville Figgis. To this many-sidedness is due the great influence, intellectual and spiritual, which these men have exercised. Probably no one would deny, however, that the coming of the Catholic revival in this country has been mainly— I should also say necessarily—characterised by a strong insistence on the institutional element. ‘There was, and still is, in English religion, a tendency to thrust it into the background; and this tendency has been fostered by that | ie what is perhaps the most illuminating and helpful 134. AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION Continental Protestant influence which has been so power- ful, pervading, and disastrous an influence both in our Uni- versities and in much popular religious thought. Never- theless, we suffer if the other elements are obscured, and, whether justly or not, I do not think we can deny that we have come under the charge of laying an exaggerated stress on the institutional, to the detriment of the intellectual and the mystical. ‘This afternoon’s session, dealing with personal religion, is intended obviously to cancel such a tendency, and to give the mystical element its own prominence as a necessary and healthy element in our spiritual life. I The aim of the mystic is union with God. He sets this before himself as the end of all his religious discipline and all his religious practices. He asserts, moreover, that he obtains it; that there are golden moments when he experiences the bliss of union with the Divine, and thus enjoys a foretaste of Heaven itself. He does not argue about it, and he cannot describe it. He simply says that he has had a certain ex- perience, and others must take his word for. it or leave it. If such testimony were a rare thing and confined to only a few souls, we should naturally be inclined to disbelieve it or to regard the experience as utterly abnormal. But the evidence of the mystic is unanimous here. ‘There is a great cloud of witnesses which can only, I think, be disregarded by those who make light of all religious experience. Why, indeed, should we doubt the possibility of such union ? ‘There is, within the experience of all of us, a union of souls in the emotions of friendship and love. We understand these because we have felt them ourselves. In such cases there is a union which is a reality, though we may find it difficult to explain or to define. ‘The friend or the lover knows, how- ever, that such union is a fact, and he will not listen with MEDITATION AND MYSTICISM 135 patience to the cynic who denies it. Now the mystic speaks in similar language. He has reached his knowledge of union as a fact in the same way; not, that is, as the conclusion of an argument, but as the result of an experience. Indeed, he often uses the language of human love as providing the best symbols by which to explain this real and vivid emotion. In human love people have often believed in some kind of affinity between souls. Falling in love seems to imply that certain souls fly instinctively to each other through some inward attraction. The mystic would say more: that there is, in addition to this affinity between human souls, a natural affinity between the human soul and the Divine, and he would make his own the well-known words of St. Augustine: Feczstz nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te. In a word, the mystic is one who has fallen in love with God, and ever after the world appears different. George Meredith, in a wonderful passage on human love, speaks of “ love’s electric messenger’ rushing “‘ from heart to heart, knocking at each, till it surged tumultuously against the bars of its prison, crying out for its mate.’’ And describing the after- emotions, he says: “‘ But it was no more the world of yester- day. The marvellous splendours had sown seeds in him, ready to spring up and bloom at her gaze; and in his bosom now the vivid conjuration of her tones, her face, her shape, makes them leap and illumine him like fitful summer light- nings—ghosts of the vanished sun.’’ It would need the change of four words to transform that passage into one very like what many of the mystics have used. We are here, it cannot be denied, in a totally different circle of ideas from that which surrounds the life of the average Christian. He walks in it at first with some uneasi- ness and suspicion, as in a strange land. Can we explain this doctrine of mystical attraction in the terms of modern psychology? Itistemptingtotry, but would almost certainly be unwise in the present changing state of that science. It 136 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION may be that beneath the surface—and, remember, a notable tendency of modern psychology is to emphasise the existence of the unconscious soul—souls enjoy a closer union than is commonly supposed. It was the late William James, 1 think, who suggested that we may be like the trees of a forest, separate above the surface, but with their roots commingled below. Others may be captivated by the unanimistic theories of M. Jules Romains, the French Poet, founded on the belief in a group soul; a theory which, however, has an older history, and at one time had some attraction for the restless mind of George Tyrrell; a belief, that is, “‘ that our several souls are not like so many grains of corn, wholly separate and mentally exclusive, but are rather like the distinct and individuated fingers of the same hand meeting in it, and with it forming one thing.” These are, perhaps, fruit- less speculations, possibly perilous ones. But that there is something which can be best described by the word “‘ union” is a fact, both between human beings and between man and God. The latter is the mystical fact. And, it must be remembered, the evidence for the fact comes, not mainly from unbalanced and romantic men and women, but from men and women who were obviously sane, sound-minded, and level-headed. The attempt to prove that the mystics, as a class, were abnormal persons has failed. It can only be done by begging the question at issue. But, if the ex- perience is genuine, it follows we are offered for our inner life not merely a monotonous round of pedestrian duties, but a wildly exciting spiritual adventure. It is this fact that is the root of all religion and that is the secret of spiritual strength. M. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, has pointed out that the origin of religion is not to be found in thought; not, that is, in intellectual curiosity puzzling out the explanation of things, but in an experience which men have of a force which dominates them, but at the same time sustains them and raises them above themselves. A MEDITATION AND MYSTICISM I37 philosophy is holier in an atmosphere of quiet meditation ; but a faith is, beyond all else, warmth, life, enthusiasm, exaltation; and these, he thinks, only spring from men assembled in groups. We should not agree entirely with M. Durkheim here, but we should carry off some of his honey to our hive, finding our explanation, however, of that ex- perience of strength and power, not in social psychology, but in the conviction of a realised union with the Divine. II But how is this union to be obtained ? What is the road by which it is reached? The answer is quite clear, and there is no disagreement among mystics on this point at least. It is by mental prayer, and especially, at first, by that kind of mental prayer which we call meditation. Let us try to keep close to experience. It is a matter of observa- tion that, as Marcus Aurelius said, our souls are dyed the eolour of our thoughts. There are possibly still some who believe that it does not much matter what a man thinks, and that his silent moments have little or nothing to do with the development of his character. But these are growing less and less. The importance of meditation is generally recognised, and there are few who would gainsay the wisdom of St. Paul’s advice: ‘* Whatsoever things are true, what- soever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, what- soever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, what- soever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”” ‘The mind must first of all be set to work. Much has been noted of recent years of the power of suggestion. It is probably not too much to say that this is the secret of the influence of many preachers and many political orators. Certainly very few of us form our opinions apart from the strong suggestive influence of our surroundings, our friends, our teachers. If 138 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION we are wise we shall be careful with regard to the influences to which we expose ourselves. Knowing, too, the power of auto-suggestion, we should use it wisely in the development of our spiritual life. Now Christian mysticism springs from concrete facts, and at the beginning of the mystic’s flight to God there is deep and continued meditation on the concrete facts of our Lord’s earthly life. It is not by chance that the three synoptic gospels precede the Fourth Gospel, which is so deeply mystical intone. Inthe experience of the first generation of Christians, the facts of our Lord’s life came first. There was a hungry desire, it seems, to know what happened, and even to know more of what our Lord said and did in Galilee and Jerusalem. We can imagine little rolls containing, one a few parables, another the record of a few miracles, another an eye-witness’s teport of the Passion, being passed from hand to hand in common lodging-houses in Corinth orin Rome. So, in answer to this demand, there came into being the three synoptic gospels, giving the facts, the words of our Lord, but as yet only slightly penetrated by the mystical spirit and interpreta- tion. Later, as the result of profound meditation on the spiritual significance of the concrete facts, came the Fourth Gospel, penetrated through and through by the great mystical ideas of light, love, and eternal life. The danger that attends all mysticism is to ignore or belittle the importance of his- torical facts, and wherever it does this it is not, or it ceases to be, Christian. Christianity is the religion of the Incarna- tion, and a sound Christ-mysticism will always remember this and found itself on those facts. The sacraments, of course, are essential parts and forces of it. The Fourth Gospel, indeed, is saturated with this sacramental mysticism. Or take another example. Probably no book has had a larger share in the cultivation of the spiritual life of Catholics in the last three hundred years than the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. It is hard, for instance, to imagine MEDITATION AND MYSTICISM I39 a tetreat that is not founded in some way or other on this wonderful book. In it, after, through the exercises of the first week, perfect intellectual clearness as to the end of life has been obtained, and the soul has recognised the true nature of sin, it must go on in the second week to contem- plate Christ. By this Ignatius means that we are to keep before us the facts and mysteries of the life of Christ, and it is only from this base that further advance in the spiritual ascent can be safely attempted. No doubt he was writing out of his personal experience. ‘The lonely crippled soldier in the castle of Loyola, through long pondering over the facts of the earthly life of Christ, was able to rise to the ineffable joys of mystical union. What the soul gains here is the realisation of the tireless love of Christ. It was this experience that inspired such a poem as Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, with its marvellous image of “ those strong feet which followed,’ and could make a modern Jesuit, the late Father William Doyle, write such words as these: “ What you say is indeed true. Jesus has been ‘hunting’ me during these past days, trying to wound my heart with His arrows of love. He has been so gentle, so patient, tender, loving, I do not know at times where to turn, and yet I somehow feel that much of this grace is given me for others. I long to get back to my little room at night, to calm and quiet, and yet I dread it, for He is often so loving there. I feel He is near heaven, I cannot go to Him in the Tabernacle. It is such a helpless feeling to be tossed about as it were on the waves of love, to feel the ardent, burning love of His heart, to know He asks for love, and then to notice one human heart so tiny.’’ Thus speaks the true Christ-mystic. Til Would it be true, then, to say that meditation is sufficient for those who wish to advance along the road to union? I40 AN. ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION Possibly. At any rate there are some who would discourage anything else, pointing out that it has proved sufficient for many heroic souls. To men like these the dangers that un- doubtedly attend the practice of the higher forms of prayer —the danger of heresy, the danger of self-deception—are so threatening that they would almost regard with pity a soul who was called to them. ‘True calling of this nature they would look upon as very rare, and only to be followed with the most meticulous precautions. I doubt if this is in the best mystical tradition. There may be more souls than we think who are called to leave the well-trodden road and to adventure on the more difficult, even if the more perilous, paths. ‘There is nothing, I believe, to prevent souls who have followed the purgative way, who are anxiously trying, day and night, to die to self, from aspiring to the simpler forms of contemplative prayer. I mean such forms as affec- tive prayer; the practice of the Presence of God, and the prayer of quiet. Of course, the practice of meditation and the practice of vocal prayer should never be despised. Vocal prayer, at any rate, should never be abandoned. But there are some souls who will be better helped by the use of a more formless prayer. Perhaps we have not recognised this enough. We are not met in this Congress to blow our own trumpet, and it may be sincerely asked whether a grave weakness of the Catholic revival amongst ourselves has not been a failure to lead souls on to the higher forms of prayer and a failure to produce vocations to the contemplative life. We have been satisfied with a high type of unmystical piety. It is likely enough that among the poor, especially, there may be many who could be led on to some kind of contemplation, and who would find far more happiness and satisfaction in that than in more formal prayer. The same may be true of those whom, in our utterly uncivilised pride, we pat- tonizingly call the child-races. I have made careful enquiries of those who work among the natives of Central Africa and MEDITATION AND MYSTICISM I4r among the coloured people of the West Indies, and there seems to be ground for believing that they, while quite unable to meditate in the Ignatian manner, may nevertheless be able to reach a very high type of mystical devotion. When you find a wholly uneducated coloured man—I am not quoting an imaginary case—saying quite simply that he is perfectly happy during his lonely day of work in the fields because he prays to God all the time, it reminds one of Brother Lawrence in his kitchen, and one may be sure that such owe all that they have attained to some kind of contemplative prayer. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and not only among the leisured middle classes. Certainly such tendencies need to be tested, and the test will be to examine the dispositions of the soul after such prayer of quiet. Is it less self-occupied, more teady for work, more willing to suffer obscurity or to undergo humiliation? ‘Then the prayer is genuine. Or is it, on the other hand, more distracted, more eager for notice, less ready for hardship or desolation? ‘Then the prayer is false. I think there is little doubt that a battle lies before us. Perhaps the minor peace of the Catholic party is ending. And in that conflict the theologians and the men of action upon whose patience, wisdom, and tenacity so much will depend, and upon whose figures the eyes of the Church and the world will be fixed, will occupy the foreground. But alone they will not suffice. In the background we need an army of contemplatives generating spiritual power, if I may take a metaphor from modern science. ‘The late Dr. Bigg declared that the world needs reservoirs of spiritual force, and certainly it is by possessing such reservoirs as these that a religious movement can hope to be successful. How much, for instance, of the commanding spiritual influence of Port-Royal in the seventeenth century in France was due to the controversial meetings of Arnauld and Pascal, and how much to the steady volume of prayer that came from the small band of devoted laymen behind them? The English- I42 ~* AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION man generally has little but scorn for lives spent in prayer. He tolerates religious orders in proportion to their activity. But let part of our ideal, at least, be a great increase in the number of those who practise contemplative prayer. And let us not forget this need in our intercessions. II THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER A Paper read at the Newcastle Anglo-Catholic Congress. interesting volume on his many years’ practice among the rough people of the moorland districts said, speaking of the clergy, that he found them very bad patients. They were more nervous in illness, more afraid of death, than most people. He watched them carefully, he said, because he hoped to learn from them something of the way to meet sickness, and something of the way to meet death; but he was disappointed. Possibly he was unfortunate in his clerical patients, and in another practice he might have had another tale to tell; I only mention it here as an illustration of how closely we are watched. Nor is this the case with regard to the clergy only. All practising Christians are carefully watched, not only with the desire to find fault and to criticize, but to find out if something can be learned from them of the art of living. Life is difficult, especially difficult perhaps to-day, and many are on the look out for a satisfactory philosophy of life. Some are contented with doctrines of pure selfishness. ‘“‘ One must live one’s own life. We're only here once,” says one of the characters in Mr. E. V. Tyicas’s latest novel, and that is what a vast number of the young are saying to-day. But others are different, and there are many, I think, who look with a certain wistfulness at the Christian character, wondering if in it is to be found the secret of true success in life. Will the possession of that character, or the strife after it, make people happier or better A YORKSHIRE doctor, who published recently an 144 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION or more useful? Has the practising Christian anything valuable to teach in the art of living? If he has, then it will not only be the Church’s teaching, it will not only be the Church’s sacraments, it will be the living of the Christian life, the exhibition before the world of the Christian character, that will help to convert the world. I If we ask what the Christian character is, the answer, of course, is that it is the character which is founded on the imitation of Jesus Christ. We must not confuse it with anything else. ‘There are other ideals, and though these may be combined with the Christian character they are not identical with it. ‘There is the ideal of the gentleman, for example. Newman in noble language describes it as follows : “The true gentleman carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast ; all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion or gloom, or resentment ; his great concern being to make everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eye on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd ; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of him- self except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out.” THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 145 We have there an attractive picture of an ethical type. We shall admire it, no doubt, but we must be clear-headed enough to recognize that it is not the same thing as the Christian character. In another passage Newman describes the educated philosophic mind: ‘“‘ He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent ; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready but never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon ; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which has re- sources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment hasacharm. ‘The art which tends to make a man all this, is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, and less tangible, less certain, less complete in its result.” There again you have another picture of a character, but neither is this a character which is necessarily Christian. It describes perhaps more the serenity of a Goethe in his later life than the passionate love and sacrifice of the Christian saint. A man can show the Christian character without being either a scholar or a gentleman. It is not a mistake which has brought about the canonization of that strange vagabond, St. Benedict Labre, who in the latter half of the eighteenth century tramped his verminous way over Europe from shrine to shrine, though to many his life would appear merely disgusting and fantastic and unworthy of any admira- tion, much less imitation. But the Christian character is 146 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION not the highest type of worldly character combined with Christian belief; it is something which stands by itself because it is founded on the imitation of Jesus Christ. No one Christian, of course, reproduces the whole character of Jesus Christ, but each will devote himself to the exhibition of some points in it. St. Thomas says that each religious order is intended to honour by imitation some particular virtue of Jesus Christ, and that no new order should be founded unless it had some new special aim. Thus the Franciscans were to show the world the imitation of the poverty of Jesus Christ; the Dominicans, his preaching ; the Augustinians, his charity; the Carthusians, his love of solitude; the Carmelites, his long hours of contemplative prayer. What is true of religious orders may be true also of individuals. We shall best form the Christian character in ourselves by concentration and limitation. The advice that priests often give their penitents is, not to attack sin all round, not to aim at virtue all round, but to limit the effort by attacking one sin or aiming at one virtue. When we have been successful in that we shall probably find we have been successful in more besides, without ever having aimed at it. So in the imitation of Jesus Christ and the formation of the Christian character one person will perhaps have a special devotion to Him as the Good Samaritan—one feels that women like Elizabeth Fry or Florence Nightingale must have had this—another to Him as the Good Shepherd, and perhaps this will be the point of imitation adopted by most priests. St. Benedict Labre, whom I mentioned a moment ago, set himself to imitate in his own way the asceticism, the utter indifference to personal comfort, that we find in our Lord, with the result that he is now on the list of the Church’s saints, a position which that splendid example of a Christian gentle- man, the great Archbishop Fénelon, has never attained. The Christian character then is watched to see how it helps us to live. Other ideals, of course, compete with it and some THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER I47 would doubtless say that they compete with it successfully. That is especially the case with what we have been consider- ing, namely, the ideal of a gentleman. ‘“‘ A gentleman doesn’t do that,’ is what has been said to many a boy, and it has often proved extraordinarily powerful in the development of character. But this is not in itself Christian, and the motives which are called into play are not Christian. The Christian character must always be judged by its likeness to Jesus Christ. During the last century a form of Christianity which went by the name of muscular Christianity, enjoyed some popularity. Charles Kingsley and others preached its virtues. But you have only to look at the typical muscular Christian and his methods, and then look at the divine figure in the Gospels, in order to see that there is no true imitation here. II The Christian character, then, must justify itself by the help it gives us in the art of living. Unless it obviously gives such help it is not likely that it will be a converting power. It is no good teaching the Catholic Faith if the Catholic life which results from it seems to be lacking in vigour and use- fulness. Is it helping us to-day beyond all contradiction to do the really hard things? ‘There comes a point where most philosophies fail. ‘They are excellent to a certain point, but no more. ‘The ideal of a gentleman fails in certain con- tingencies, as the history of the public schools and univer- sities shows. Now one of the states which it is hardest to bear is the state of poverty, especially if this comes suddenly and unexpectedly and the previous life has been no preparation for it. ‘There are thousands to-day who are in this hard case and who find it very difficult to endure. Among those who ate suffering in this way are many of the clergy. You may be sure they are being very closely watched to see if the possession of the Christian character is helping them to bear 148 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION this in a different way from the average man, without com- plaint, without resentment, without impatience, without unhappiness. Does it enable them to be cheerful under the affliction? Arethey, by their attitude, making poverty easier for others to bear? Clerical poverty does not always do this. In Anthony Trollope’s description of Mr. Crawley, the parson of Hogglestock, you have an unforgettable picture of a fine character soured and hardened through it. His parishioners learned a great deal from Mr. Crawley’s faithful ministry, but they did not learn certain lessons in the art of living. It may be that the English clergy are being given a great opportunity to show the excellence and the value oi the Christian character in their anxious and depressing cir- cumstances, even as the clergy of the Eastern Church have been called to show its value in the fiery trial of persecution. Akin to this is the endurance of pain or sickness or sorrow. If we can meet them without being defeated by them, with- out coming out worse men than we were before, if, notwith- standing them, we can be happy, then we have got hold of a key which is worth having, and of which others will envy us the possession. But, as it says in the “ Imitation,” paucz ex infirmitate meliorantur, few are made better by suffering ; and the Christian character, as we show it, sometimes fails. Again, nothing is harder than to forgive injuries. You find this both in communities and in individuals. ‘There are “national hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire.” To forgive is a heroical gesture which is beyond many even of those who profess and call themselves Christians. In all these cases there is needed a touch of the supernatural. It is the presence of that, the vision of the supernatural in action, which captivates people. We have to persuade others by our own example that the Christian character, that the imitation of Christ, can do what no other ideal, however lofty or attractive, can do, because other ideals ‘are natural and it is supernatural. Other ideals may do THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER I49 much; the Christian character alone is capable of heroic virtue. III _ This is the way then in which all Catholics may become missionaries and sharers in any great evangelistic movement to convert the unfriendly and the indifferent. The work of the Holy Ghost is done through the words of teachers; it is done through the supernatural grace of the Sacraments, but it is done also, perhaps especially, when the Christian character is shown in all its power and beauty. It was one of the Fathers, I think, who said that if all Christians would live like Christians for a single day the world would be con- verted by nightfall. Why then do we fail so frequently and so lamentably ? Well, perhaps the reason is not very far to seek. There is a passage in R. L. Stevenson’s fine novel, The Master of Ballantrae, where the old steward says to the master: ‘“‘I do not think you could be so bad a man if you had not all the machinery to be a good one.”’ “ No, not all.” says he, “ not all. You are there in error. The malady of not wanting, my evangelist.”’ It may be that this is the reason why the characters of many are not more Christian. It is the malady of not wanting. ‘They are afraid that they may be committed to they do not know what. ‘They are afraid that it may mean that happiness and the joy of life, as at present conceived, may vanish. They are afraid, and the lives of the saints fortify this apprehension, that if we give one thing God may go on to ask more. So they remain on the lower plane ; they do not exhibit the Christian character to the world; and they do nothing to make others desire a share of their strength. This may be the cause of much impotence. We generally use the phrase “ a good Catholic” to describe the person who holds the Catholic Faith in its fulness, but creed without the resultant character will be more likely to repel than to attract. A good Catholic is one I50 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION who professes the Catholic Faith and possesses the Catholic character. It was its effect on life and character that made the enquiring pagans of the Roman imperial age eager to find out more about the early Church. But nowadays people simply do not believe that we have any special secret con- cerning the art of life which is worth having. It is a pity, because we feel that if only we could add the supernatural virtues and outlook to the natural gifts of the English character, it would mean so much. We have such splendid material in the English people. They are full of the natural virtues: kindly, hospitable, generous, helpful, tolerant, unselfish. The other day, owing to a mistake, I arrived at St. Pancras Station only a minute before the Manchester express was due to start. Hobbling on two sticks it was quite impossible for me to reach No. 3 platform in time and I was abandoning the attempt. But the porter and an inspector were determined that I should catch the train. They made me sit on a luggage trolley and galloped at top speed to the platform, helping me to a seat just as the train began to move. No large tip could have been expected from a clergyman travelling third class; it was pure kindness of heart. Yes; if only we could combine the supernatural virtues with the English natural virtues, what a character it would be! Til CONFESSION AND DIRECTION in Paris an elderly priest, the Abbé Huvelin, whose name was little known to the outside world, although it still lives treasured in the memories of a number of the faithful. He held no important place in the Church; for thirty-five years he had been fifth vicaire of the large Church of Saint-Augustine, in the neighbourhood of the Gare St. Lazare. But he was a prince of directors; one of the wisest and most gifted guides of souls that modern times have seen. His confessional in one of the side chapels of Saint- Augustine was the scene of many spiritual dramas, and, in later years, when his health had utterly broken down, and he was suffering prolonged agonies from the tortures of theumatic gout, being compelled to lie all day on a couch, he still received visitors and continued his work among souls. To use his own words of another, his task was ‘‘ to write in souls.”’ Now that is our task, too. It may be very profitable and very necessary that we should engage in a multitude of other works: that we should manage clubs and run troops of boy-scouts; that we should try to forward temperance work, and join generally in necessary social betterment. But all these activities (I do not depreciate them)—the paraphernalia of a well-worked parish—are no excuse for neglecting that for which we were put into a parish, namely: — the cure of souls. We are directors of souls, and this work is largely done in the confessional. Here it is most important Ft ves years ago this month (July, rg21) there died I52 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION that we should know our craft. Amateurism in the confes- sional is as unpardonable and as disastrous as amateurism in the doctor’s consulting-room. Our people have no right to expect that we should be eloquent preachers or skilled musicians or acquisitions to country society; they have a right to expect that, like good general practitioners in medi- cine, we shall know how to deal with all ordinary cases, and know, moreover, where our knowledge ends, and it is necessary to seek the advice of a specialist. But it is just here that we so often fail. I Probably it would not be an unfair criticism of modern Anglicanism to say that, while it has produced both among men and women, to a remarkable extent, a sober, attractive goodness, it has, nevertheless, failed to produce the heroic types of sanctity. We do not produce, in any numbers, those who tread securely the higher walks of prayer, nor do we produce any great ascetics. Yet asceticism is part of Christianity. How inexpressibly poorer Christianity would be without the lives of the ascetic saints. ‘The result is, how- ever, that, as we do not produce them, we are losing the capacity to appreciate them. We cannot, I am sure, argue truly that our failure to produce these types is due to the fact that our northern temperament has no natural capacity to give birth to contemplatives or saints. Fiery souls are not only found in the tropics; nor are lukewarm souls the inevitable offspring of a temperate climate. The dearth is due to our own faults, to our own failures in direction. Souls with their glorious and tremendous gifts have not been detected. ‘They have been forced into moulds for which they were not fitted, to the Church’s enormous loss. People sometimes call the Church of England uninteresting. If it is uninteresting it is simply because she does not give birth to souls of the heroic type. The glamour which the late CONFESSION AND DIRECTION Lo Mgr. Benson threw over the Church of Rome was because, in all his novels, he depicted her as producing souls of this type: contemplatives, ascetics, mystics. A modern writer has developed the distinction between what he calls perfect souls and what he calls virtuous souls. The perfect soul lives constantly in the presence of God, and is no longer swayed by human considerations; the love of God has become the dominant motive in life. The virtuous soul is still very imperfect. Its inner life is largely occupied with the struggle against defects and the attempt to keep the prescribedrule. Atlthis has developed piety and strengthened virtue. But the heroic is lacking. The passionate desire for sacrifice is absent. There is the wish to please God, and to work for Him, but without any very great renunciation. Now we are inclined to cater almost entirely for souls of this type. Our direction generally has them and their needs in view. But I am afraid the souls which have a capacity for higher and more heroic things suffer. They are hungry sheep which look up and are not fed. Many a priest, when he comes across a soul of this type, is bewildered; unless, alas! he is entirely ignorant that the case is a difficult one and needs special treatment. A Roman Catholic friend of mine told me the other day that an Anglican clergyman had appealed to him, although a total stranger, for advice with regard to a case which showed all the marks of a vocation to mystical contemplation. He was entirely competent to advise and did so willingly, but this surely shows that the priest who asked for help did not know where he could obtain itin hisown communion. Of course, there may not be many souls of this type. But probably every confessor comes across such cases now and then—souls which themselves are quite unaware of the meaning of their experiences. If he directs them wrongly the Church is impoverished. Our failure to produce the heroic type must, I think, be attributed to faulty direction. 154 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION II “What is the main work of a director? He finds himself face to face in the confessional with a soul full of sins and evil tendencies but with many good dispositions and desires. . He will say to himself, very likely, that his work is to help the penitent to stamp down those evil tendencies, and he will make recommendations with this end in view. Now I am convinced that the wise director will not allow himself to think chiefly of the sins of his penitent. He has to build up in the soul a good state of health, in order to render it immune to the attacks of spiritual disease. This he does mainly by helping souls to live an interior life. That is his real work. He will find that many of those who come to him, although with plenty of good-will, have really no interior life at all. Itis not, I think, difficult to explain what is meant | by this phrase. A really educated man possesses an interior - life—a mental life—owing to his intellectual experiences and interests. A distinguished man of letters once wrote some articles on his intellectual history, and he called it, “‘ Ad- ventures among Books.’ Another described an intellectual man as one who would not mind being left: to wait for three hours at a way-side railway-station, because he had resources against boredom within himself. Now, transfer these ideas into the spiritual domain. ‘The person with an interior life is one who can retire at will and happily into a world of spiritual experiences and interests. He is not solely occupied with external things. He has a garden of the soul in which he spends many profitable and delightful hours. If he has to spend an hour before the Blessed Sacrament the time no more seems long than an hour with Charles Lamb seems long to the lover of letters, or an hour in the National Gallery to the painter. That is then what we have to do. We must cultivate in souls the interior life. We have not simply to aim at getting men and women to live the moral CONFESSION AND DIRECTION 155 life. We have to teach them to pray, to meditate, to ex- amine their consciences, to practise the presence of God. And in this cultivation of the interior life we must not wait to begin till the soul has conquered its sins. As it grows in this life it will lose them, almost without fighting them. The longer I live the more I am convinced that sins are not con- quered ; they are crowded out. The energies are directed intoafreshchannel. The disappearance of sin and the growth in the interior life are not successive but parallel movements. I am not sure it may not even be dangerous simply to con- quer sins in the sense of stamping down the demon. Modern psychology has much to say on the evils of repression. Sins suppressed in this way will find an outlet somewhere—perhaps will break out again in middle life. Paul Bourget, the dis- tinguished French writer, has given us a novel which he has called, “‘ le Démon de Midi ’’—the noonday devil. ‘The title is taken from a passage in the Psalms, which in the English version runs “‘from the sickness which destroyeth in the noonday,’” but which in the Latin version is demonio meri- diano. ‘The idea is that early middle age is a time of great spiritual danger and frequent shipwreck. This is almost certainly true to life. Many, both among priests and faithful, ate greatly troubled because at that age there often comes a horrible and violent recurrence of some temptation which years before had been apparently vanquished. They are much distressed, and they worry because they think their experience is peculiar. Itis not. But the secret is probably to be found in the fact that the evil was simply repressed, and not, to use the modern phrase, sublimated. ‘The energies were not transformed. ‘The director has to provide new interests and a new love, and this is why I say that, as directors, we should mainly devote ourselves to creating and cultivating an interior life in our penitents. I might put the same idea in a different way. ‘The good director is one who gives the soul he directs a light. I spoke just now of 156 AN ANGLO-CATHOLIC’S THOUGHTS ON RELIGION the great Parisian director, the Abbé Huvelin. One who — experienced that direction has told me that the result of it for him was that a light was thrown over the whole of the inner life. Everything appeared as it were differently. He saw what he had not seen before. The principles of the interior life became clear. He had got something for good, and he hardly needed the help of the Abbé Huvelin any more. That is the true director ; not the man who is for ever guiding and interfering and laying down minute rules, but the man who turns a lantern upon the interior life and makes every- thing vivid where before it was only darkness. Ill But, if this is so, it is plain that the director must be a man of knowledge. If he is really to help souls there will be the need of much hard work and study which will lie © behind the success. We are not born with the power of dealing with souls. Indeed, every art demands such hard preliminary work. ‘The late Phil May would dash off a brilliant sketch with a wonderful economy of line. It looked so easy that it seemed as if almost anyone could doit. But what hours of hard work were the foundation of that facility ! So with regard to out own art—the art of guiding souls. We must study Ascetic Theology. Do notlet us, in our awakened zeal for the study of Moral Theology, forget this equally important study. May I make one suggestion with regard to it. It is that we should form, where it is possible, small study-circles in order to go deeply into the subject.