The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 64

"Yes, it is he," cried the huntsman, as he entered and offered his hand to his astonished sister. From the arms of his sister he hastened to embrace his manly nephew, while the joyful Agnes, with the Bible in her arms, now ran up to her mother, now {404} to her uncle, and then to her brother, who beheld the book with astonishment, and began faintly to suspect what happened.

When the first tempest of delight had subsided, and given place to a more quiet though not less deep joy, question crowded upon question, and answer upon answer.

The uncle first related how after the marriage of his sister he had entered into the service of the Count of Maxenstein as upper game-keeper; how he had often tried to obtain intelligence of his dear sister; twice had taken a journey himself to their native place, and could learn nothing of her; how he had searched all the newspapers; and at length, when all means and efforts had failed, how be sorrowfully gave up the hope of ever seeing her again. Then he told her how he had come to this place on business for the count, his master; had visited the Christmas fair and the stall of the antiquary, and had there unexpectedly found his father's Bible and Agnes, and through them his sister and nephew.

Then affectionately clasping Ernest by the hand he begged his sister to relate her history.

"My history," she replied, "is short, and yet varied with many sorrows that the Lord has laid upon me. You knew that my husband left his native place to seek a better living in Eichstadt. But in this he was deceived. Then, in spite of my entreaties, he entered the French service as surgeon, and came to Saarlouis, where his regiment lay in garrison. Soon after his arrival a malignant fever broke out among the soldiers, which carried away great numbers, and among them my husband.

G.o.d give him his kingdom," said she drying her tears. "His death was the more dreadful for me, because I was alone in a foreign land without friends or help, and had but just risen from my bed after the birth of Agnes. In my need I wrote several letters to you and to our relatives at Settenberg, but received no answer. At first I thought this was caused by irregularities of the post-route, which was everywhere embarra.s.sed by the disturbances of the war; but I soon learned, to my great sorrow, that our Settenberg had been sacked and burned by the French. Imagine, my dear brother, my condition! What a happiness for me that, some months after the death of my husband, an old aunt of his made me the offer to go to her, and she would support me as well as she was able. I was not terrified by the length of the way, and received from her a cordial welcome. But, alas! this happiness was not long to last. My good aunt died, leaving me her heir, but she had other relations who disputed the will, and, after a law-suit of three years' continuance, an agreement was made by which most of the property fell into the hands of the judges and lawyers.

Hardly a fourth part of it remained after the costs were paid. I had nothing now but care and trouble; but I ever found a firm support in my dear Ernest. May G.o.d reward him! But now, dear brother, now, if I only have you, again all care will be over." And the good woman, deeply affected, pressed his hand.

"Oh, my dear ones!" cried he, after listening to his sister's narrative with lively sympathy, "let us all thank our Heavenly Father that he has to-day brought us all together again, in so wonderful a manner, by means of this book; for I had already determined to leave this place in the morning."

Ernest related how hard it had been for him to part with the precious book, how he had been encouraged by the pa.s.sage in Matthew, what mean treatment he had met with from the antiquary, and how he had almost made up his mind to take back the book with him.

Little Agnes, on her side, thought it had been no very easy matter to bring dame Margaret to the antiquary, and she had gone through trouble and {405} terror enough "until the Christ-child sent my uncle."

He pressed the little one to his heart, but she seized him fast by the hand, and coaxingly begging him, said: "Now uncle, you never will go away; you will stay with us?"

"How could I leave you so soon, my dear ones, just as I have found you again? No, no, we will never separate; we will always remain together," cried the uncle. "You must go with me to Peinegg, sister, where I am head-forester; it is a beautiful and splendid place there, and I have everything in abundance."

"With you and my children I would go to the ends of the earth," said she cheerfully.

Then Ernest, upon a hint from his mother, brought out the bottle of wine and the biscuit, and offered them to his uncle. A slight meal, prepared in haste by dame Margaret, seasoned with cheerful conversation, enlivened the evening, to which Ernest and his mother had looked forward only a few hours before with such pain and anxiety.

Joy and deep satisfaction lighted every countenance, but the mother said with deep feeling: "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted."

"Amen," responded the uncle, devoutly raising his eyes to heaven.

Ernest and Agnes wept tears of joy and grat.i.tude.

X.

It was not long before their mother was entirely recovered and accompanied her beloved brother to Peinegg, where he arranged everything in a manner to make her life agreeable. It may easily be imagined that the Bible was not forgotten. Every Christmas evening was pa.s.sed with far more festivity and joy than the evening which united again the long separated. At the end of two years Ernest celebrated his first ma.s.s at Peinegg. The good apothecary was invited to be present, and esteemed this day as the happiest of his life. Sixteen years after, Ernest was established as parish priest at Peinegg, where he still exercises his holy office with extraordinary zeal.

From The Month.

THOUGHTS ON ST. GERTRUDE.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.

When a voice from the thirteenth century comes to us amid the din of the nineteenth, it is difficult for those interested in the cause of human progress not to feel their attention strongly challenged. Such a voice appeals to us in a work which has now first appeared in an English version. [Footnote 59]

[Footnote 59: "The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude, Virgin and Abbess." By a Religious of the Order of Poor Clares.]

We owe it to a religious of the order of Poor Clares; a daughter of St. Francis thus paying to St. Benedict a portion of that debt which all the religious orders of the West owe to their great patriarch. The book possesses a profound interest, and that of a character wholly apart from polemics. The thirteenth century, the n.o.blest of those included in the "ages of faith," was a troubled time; but high as the contentions of rival princes and feudal chiefs swelled, we have here a proof that

"Birds of calm sat brooding on the charmed wave."

Not less quieting is the influence of {406} such records in our own time. They make their way--music being more penetrating than mere sound--amid the storm of industrialism and its million wheels.

Controversialists may here forget their strifes, and listen to the annals of that interior and spiritual life which is built up in peace and without the sound of the builder's hammer, much less of sword or axe. There is here no necessary or direct contest between rival forms of belief. Monasteries have been pulled down and sold in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries; and in the latter also are to be found men whose highest aspiration is to rebuild them, and restore the calm strength and sacred labors which they once protected. Such books are not so much a protest against any age as the a.s.sertion of those great and universal principles of truth and peace which can alone enable each successive age to correct its errors, supply its defects, and turn its special opportunities to account. It is not in a literary point of view that they interest us chiefly, although they include not a little which reminds us of Dante, and reveal to us one of the chief sources from which the great Christian poet drew his inspiration.

Their interest is mainly human. They show us what the human being can reach, and by what personal influences, never more potent than when their touch is softest, society, in its rougher no less than in its milder periods, is capable of being moulded.

The "Revelations of St. Gertrude" were first translated into Latin, as is affirmed, by Lamberto Luscorino in 1390. This work was, however, apparently never published; and the first Latin version by which they became generally known was that put forth under the name of "_Insinuationes Divinae Pietatis_," by Lanspergius, who wrote at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The work has appeared in several of the modern languages; but the French translation, by which it has. .h.i.therto been chiefly known among us, has many inaccuracies. The present English translation has been carefully made from the Latin of Lanspergius and the original is frequently quoted in the foot-notes. The "_Insinuationes_" consist of five books.

Of these the second only came from the hand of the saint, the rest being compiled by a religious of her monastery, partly from personal knowledge and partly from the papers of St. Gertrude. Two works by the saint, her "Prayers" and her "Exercises," have lately appeared in an English version.

St. Gertrude was born at Eisleben, in the county of Mansfield, on the 6th of January, 1263, just sixty-nine years after the birth of St.

Clare, the great Italian saint from whose convent at a.s.sisi so many others had already sprung in all parts of Europe, and whose name had already become a living power in Germany and Poland, as well as in the sunny south. [Footnote 60] St. Gertrude was descended from an ill.u.s.trious house, that of the Counts of Lackenborn. When but five years old she exchanged her paternal home for the Benedictine Abbey of Rodersdorf, where she was soon after joined by her sister, afterward the far-famed St. Mechtilde. When about twenty-six she first began to be visited by those visions which never afterward ceased for any considerable time. At thirty she was chosen abbess; and for forty years she ruled a sisterhood whom she loved as her children. The year after she became abbess she removed with her charge to another but neighboring convent, that of Heldelfs. No other change took place in her outward lot. Her life lay within. As her present biographer remarks, "she lived at home with her Spouse."

[Footnote 60: An interesting life of this saint and of her earlier companions has lately been published in English: "St. Clare, St.

Colette, and the Poor Clares: by a Religions of the Order of Poor Clares." J. F. Fowler, Dublin.]

The visions of St. Gertrude are an endless parable of spiritual truths, as well as a record of wonderful graces. From the days when our divine Lord himself taught from the hillside and {407} the anch.o.r.ed s.h.i.+p, it has been largely through parables that divine lore has been communicated to man. Religious and symbolic art is a parable of truths that can only be expressed in types. The legends through which the earlier ages continue to swell the feebler veins of later times with the pure freshness of the Church's youth are for the most part facts which buried themselves deep in human sympathies and recollections, because in them the particular shadowed forth the universal. It is the same thing in philosophy itself; and that _Philosophia Prima_ which, as Bacon tells us, discerns a common law in things as remote as sounds are from colors, and thus traces the "same footsteps of nature" in the most widely separated regions of her domain, finds constantly in the visible and familiar a parable of the invisible and unknown. The very essence of poetry also consists in this, that not only in its metaphors and figures, but in its whole spirit, it is a parable, imparting to material objects at once their most beautiful expression and that one which reveals their spiritual meaning. So long as the imagination is a part of human intellect, it must have a place in all that interprets between the natural and the spiritual worlds.

The following characteristic pa.s.sage, while it shows that St. Gertrude made no confusion between allegory and vision, yet suggests to us that so poetical a mind might, under peculiar circ.u.mstances, be more easily favored with visions than another:

"Whilst thou didst act so lovingly toward me, and didst not cease to draw my soul from vanity to thyself, it happened on a certain day, between the festival of the resurrection and the ascension, that I went into court before prime, and seated myself near the fountain; and I began to consider the beauty of the place, which charmed me on account of the clear and flowing stream, the verdure of the trees which surrounded it, and the flights of the birds, and particularly of the doves--above all, the sweet calm--apart from all, considering within myself what would make this place most useful to me, I thought it would be the friends.h.i.+p of a wise and intimate companion, who would sweeten my solitude or render it useful to others; when thou, my Lord and my G.o.d, who art a torrent of inestimable pleasures, after having inspired me with the first impulse of this desire, thou didst will also to be the end of it; inspiring me with the thought that if by my continual grat.i.tude I return thy graces to thee, as a stream returns to its source; if, increasing in the love of virtue, I put forth, like the trees, the flowers of good works; furthermore, if, despising the things of earth, I fly upward, freely, like the birds, and thus free my senses from the distraction of exterior things, my soul would then be empty, and my heart would be an agreeable abode for thee" (p. 76).

If in this pa.s.sage we see how the natural yearning for sympathy and companions.h.i.+p may rise into the heavenly aspirations from which mere nature would divert the heart, we find in the following one a type of that compensation which is made to unreserved loyalty. The religion of the incarnation gives back, in a human as well as a divine form, all that human instincts had renounced. "It was on that most sacred night in which the sweet dew of divine grace fell on all the world, and the heavens dropped sweetness, that my soul, exposed like a mystic fleece in the court of the sanctuary, having received in meditation this celestial rain, was prepared to a.s.sist at this divine birth, in which a Virgin brought forth a Son, true G.o.d and man, even as a star produces its ray. In this night, I say, my soul beheld before it suddenly a delicate child, but just born, in whom were concealed the greatest gifts of perfection. I imagined that I received this precious deposit in my bosom" (p. 85). One of the chief tests as to the divine origin of visions consists in their tending toward humility; for those {408} which come from a human or worse than human source tend to pride. The humility of St. Gertrude was profound as the purity of which humility is the guardian was spotless. "One day, after I had washed my hands, and was standing at the table with the community, perplexed in mind, considering the brightness of the sun, which was in its full strength, I said within myself, 'If the Lord who has created the sun, and whose beauty is said to be the admiration of the sun and moon; if he who is a consuming fire is as truly in me as he shows himself frequently before me, how is it possible that my heart continues like ice, and that I lead so evil a life?'" (p. 106).

There can be no stronger argument in favor of the supernatural origin of St. Gertrude's visions than their subjects. The highest of her flights, far from carrying her beyond the limits of sound belief, or subst.i.tuting the fanciful for the fruitful, but bears her deeper into the heart of the great Christian verities. She soars to heaven to find there, in a resplendent form, the simplest of those truths which are our food upon earth. As the glorified bodies of the blessed will be the same bodies which they wore during their earthly pilgrimage, so the doctrines, "sun-clad," in her "Revelations" are still but the primary articles of the Creed. Her special gift was that of realization: what others admitted, she believed; what others believed, she saw. It was thus that she felt the co-presence of the supernatural with the natural, the kingdom of spirit not to her being a future world, but a wider circle clasping a smaller one. From this feeling followed her intense appreciation of the fact that all earthly things have immediate effect on high. If a prayer is said on earth, she sees the scepter in the hand of the heavenly King blossom with another flower; if a sacrament is worthily received, the glory on his face flashes lightning round all the armies of the blessed. That such things should be seen by us may well seem wonderful; that they should _exist_ can appear strange to no one who realizes the statement, that when a sinner repents there is joy among the angels in heaven.

A vision, from which we learn the belief of one of G.o.d's humblest creatures that something was lost to his honor by her compulsory absence from choir, but that he was more than compensated for the loss by the holy patience with which she submitted to illness (p. 180), is not more wonderful than the fact that G.o.d's glory should be our constant aim, or that G.o.d should have joy in those that love him. The marvel is, that the saint was always believing what we profess to believe. She lived in an everlasting jubilee of divine and human love: it was always to her what a beaming firmament might be to one who for the first time had walked up out of a cave. She was ever seeing in visible types the tokens of a transcendent union between G.o.d and man --a deification, so to speak, of man in heaven. Is this more wonderful than the words that bow the foreheads and bend the knees of the faithful, "He was made man?" If such things be true, the wonder is, not that a few saints realize them, living accordingly in contemplation and in acts of love, but that a whole world should stand upon such truths as its sole ground of hope, and yet practically ignore them.

Neither in ordinary Christian literature nor in the ordinary Christian life do we find what might have been antic.i.p.ated eighteen centuries ago by those who then first received the doctrines of the incarnation and the communion of saints. How many have written as if Christianity were merely a regulative principle, introduced to correct the aberrations of natural instincts! Yet even under the old dispensation the sacred thirst of the creature for the Creator was confessed: "As longeth the hart for the water-springs, so longeth my soul after thee, O Lord." The royal son of the {409} great Psalmist had sang in the Book of Canticles the love of the Creator for the creature. What might not have been expected from Christian times!

How much is not actually found in all those Christian writings the inspiration of which, in the highest sense of the word, is _de fide!_ How supernatural at once and familiar is that divine and human relations.h.i.+p set forth by our Lord in his parables! What closeness of union! what omnipotence of prayer! Some perhaps might say, "If our Lord were visibly on earth as he was during the thirty-three years, then indeed the closeness of intercourse between him and his own would be transcendent." But the exact contrary is the fact. The closest intercourse is in the spirit, and apart from all that is sensual; the sense is a hindrance to it. So long as he was visibly with them, the affection of the apostles themselves for their Lord was too material to be capable of its utmost closeness. Even earthly affections are perfected by absence, and crowned by death. Till they are purified by the immortalizing fire of suffering, sense clings to the best of them more than we know; not by necessity corrupting them, but limiting, dulling, depressing, and depriving them of penetration and buoyancy.

While he was with them, the apostles sometimes could not understand their Master's teaching--where to the Christian now it seems plain--and replied to it by the words, "Be it far from thee!" When the feast of Pentecost was come, they loved him so that they did not fear to die for him; but they no longer so loved him as to see in him but the restorer of a visible Israel, and to lament his death. But this Pentecost has continued ever since in the Christian Church! What, then, was to be expected except a fulfilment of the earlier promises: "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh;" and as a natural consequence of perfected love, the development of the spiritual sight: "Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions" (Joel ii. 28)? Such was the condition of that renewed world for which the apostles wrote, and to which they promised the spiritual gift and the hidden life. More plainly than the Jewish king they proclaimed that the union between the Creator and the creature was no dream, but that the servants of sense and pride were dreamers; and, in words like a musical echo from the canticle of Canticles, they affirmed that between Christ and his Church there exists a union, the nearest type of which is to be found in the bridal bond. This was the doctrine that made the world in which St. Gertrude lived. The clear-sighted will see that the charges brought against her and her Church are charges brought against the Bible no less.

But all is not said when it is affirmed that the ascetics, like the apostles, enjoyed a closer union with their Lord in his spirit because he had withdrawn his visible presence from the earth. Sense may separate those whom it seems to unite; but there is a nearness notwithstanding, which has no such paradoxical effect. No one can even approach the subject of the visions of the saints unless he duly appreciates the real presence, not only as a doctrine, but in its practical effects. The saints had a closeness to their Lord denied to the Jewish prophets. He was absent as regards visibility; but he was present in the blessed eucharist. If the absence made the love more reverential, the presence made it more vivid. A large proportion of the visions of the saints were connected with the blessed sacrament.

In it the veil was not lifted; but the veiled nearness quickened that love which perfects faith. To sense all remained dark; but the spirit was no longer enthralled by sense, and it conversed with its deliverer.

There are those who could not be happy if they did not believe that the {410} world abounds in persona n.o.bler than themselves. There are others who are affluent but in cavils. The visions of saints must, according to them, be illusory, because they are not demonstrably divine! But are the ordinary graces of Christians distinguished from illusions by demonstration? Is penitence, or humility, or simplicity demonstrable? Do we believe that nothing is an object of prayer, or an occasion for thanksgiving, till it is proved to be such? Those who know that religion has its vast theological region of certainty know also that there exists an outward region in which, though credulity is an evil, yet needless contentiousness is the note of a petty mind. Or the visions must be fabulous, because the caviller does not understand the mode of spiritual operation to which they are referable! But how much do we know as to the separate or joint action of our bodily, intellectual, and moral powers? We believe in results; but we understand little of processes.

The only visions received as _de fide_ are those recorded in the Holy Scriptures. Do we know by what process even these came to exist? Were they external manifestations, such as, if shown to two persons, must have worn for both the same semblance; or may they have had an existence only within the mind of the seer? Is not the real question this--whether or not they had a divine origin; not whether he who sent them worked on the mind from without, or stimulated its action from within? In this case the visions of some event--such as the crucifixion--possessed by two different saints, might not have been the less authentic although different from each other in some particulars. Who can say to what extent habitual grace may not determine the action of the imaginative faculty, as of other faculties, so as to produce vision in one man while it produces prudence or wisdom in another? That grace acts on the mind as well as on the heart no one will deny, since some of the gifts of the Holy Ghost are of an intellectual order, and it is through spiritual discernment that we understand religious truth. It seems, indeed, but natural to suppose that grace should operate on the imagination, and thus counterwork the seductions by which an evil power a.s.sails that faculty--a form of temptation often, but not consistently, insisted on by those who scoff at visions. If this be granted, then, as we can neither measure the different degrees in which grace is granted, and increased by co-operation, nor ascertain the intellectual shape and proportions of those to whom it is accorded, who can affect to determine to what extent that grace may not suffice, in some cases, to produce vision, even when accorded mainly for other purposes?

But this is not all. The imagination does not act by itself; the other faculties work along with it; by them also the vision is shaped in part; and as they are developed, directed, and harmonized in a large measure by grace, in the same degree the vision must, even when not miraculous, be affected by a supernatural influence. Once more: G.o.d works upon us through his providence as well as through his grace; and the color of our thoughts is constantly the result of some external trifle, apparently accidental. A dream is modified by a momentary sound; and a conclusion may be shaped not without aid from a flying gleam or the shadow of a cloud. Our thoughts are "fearfully and wonderfully made," partly for us and partly by us, and through influences internal and external, which we trace but in part. We can draw a line between the visions which command our acceptance and those which only invite it; but in dealing with the latter cla.s.s, it seems impossible to determine _a priori_ how far they may or may not be accounted supernatural. It will depend upon their evidence, their consequences, their character, and the character of those to whom they belonged.

{411}

"But," the caviller will object, "una.s.sisted genius has visions of its own." What then? Does that circ.u.mstance discredit all visions that claim to be supernatural? Far from it; the visions of genius are elevated by virtue. They are not only purified thus, but edged with insight and enriched with wisdom. Has virtue, then, nothing of the supernatural? or would Dante have "seen" as much if, instead of following her voice, he had followed that of the siren? Again, simplicity of character, and what Holy Scripture calls "the single eye," have a close affinity with genius; for which reason the poor possess many characteristics of it denied to the rich--its honest apprehension of great ideas, for instance, and the inspiration of good sense; its power of realizing the essential and of ignoring the accidental; its freshness in impressions and loyalty in sentiment. But simplicity is a divine gift. Above all, faith communicates often what resembles genius to persons who would otherwise, perhaps, have narrow minds and wavering hearts. It appears, then, that the whole of our moral and spiritual being--which is of course under supernatural influence--admits of such a development as is favorable to genius, and may eminently promote that natural "vision" which belongs to it.

Education and life may do the same. What disperses the faculties over a vast field of heterogeneous knowledge saps genius; what gives unity to the being strengthens it. It evaporates in vanity; it is deepened by humility. Society dissipates its energies and chills them; solitude concentrates and heats them. Indulgence relaxes it; severity invigorates it. It is dazzled by the importunate suns.h.i.+ne of the present; its eyes grow wider in the twilight of the past and the future. All the circ.u.mstances, exterior and interior, that favor genius are thus indirectly connected with grace or with providence.

What, then, is not to be thought in a case like that of St. Gertrude, in which we find, not genius trained on toward sanct.i.ty, but sanct.i.ty enriched with genius?

It is, however, to be remembered that we in no degree disparage the claim to a divine character possessed by St. Gertrude's visions in admitting that some of them may not claim that character. In one favored with such high gifts, it is not unphilosophical to suppose that the natural qualities, as well as supernatural graces, which lend themselves to visions would probably exist in a marked decree. We have no reason, indeed, to conclude that the Hebrew prophets, to whom visions were sent by G.o.d, never possessed, when not thus honored, anything that resembled them--anything beyond what belongs to ordinary men. They, too, may have had unrecorded visions of a lower type, in which the loftiest of their thoughts and deepest of their experiences became visible to them; and if so, they had probably something ancillary to vision in their natural faculties and habits, independently of their supernatural gifts. Among the peculiar natural characteristics of St. Gertrude may be reckoned an extraordinary _literalness_ of mind, strangely ignited with a generalizing power.