Hard sayings; a selection of meditations and studies

Front matter

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Introduction

Although the following conferences and meditations were in no way originally designed to be parts of a whole, written, as they were, at sundry times and in divers manners, yet there has been some imperfect attempt at method in their selection and arrangement which, though not very apparent on the surface, may make itself felt in the unity of their effect upon the reader's mind. Their purport is to illustrate and, so to say, turn over in various ways a very few of the deepest and most wide-reaching principles of Catholic Christianity, by which they are pervaded and upon which they have been built up with a somewhat dialectical severity which can hardly escape unfavourable criticism, as seeming to encourage an excessive rationalizing in matters too delicate for the coarse hands of the logician. The writer has had this danger continually before his mind as something to guard against, but since his aim has been confessedly to simplify, explain, and co-ordinate, it would be too viii INTRODUCTION.

much to hope that he has avoided all the errors and extremes which usually beset such an undertaking.

For indeed there is a most unpardonable narrowness as well as impertinence in the desire to represent the intercourse between the created spirit and its indwelling Creator in terms as sharp and exact as those which describe the dealings of father and son, master and servant, ruler and subject, husband and spouse. These familiar relationships bear a distant analogy to those subsisting between God and the soul, but fall immeasurably short of the reality. They are as a few rough, suggestive strokes drawn by a skilful hand, which will serve to bring to our mind all the meaning and expression of a face if only it be already familiar to us by experience. But an inordinate love of clearness, an overpressing of analogies and similitudes is a form of rationalism very fruitful in fallacies, and not very uncommon in ascetical writings. If, however, we use these metaphors with a full reflex consciousness of their imperfection, then indeed we may do so fearlessly and abundantly, trusting that where one is weak another may be strong, and that from many faultv adumbrations some vague image of the whole truth may shape itself in the mind.

What we have to guard against is the narrow pride of that rationalism which inclines some to be impatient of all ideas that are in any way obscure

INTRODUCTION, and imperfectly defined ; to cast out of the mind as worthless those that are not clear and distinct ; to apply the methods and criteria of the "exact sciences'* to matters of a wholly different order; to be abhorrent of all that savours of mysticism. For this is to forget that every new idea that enters our soul, so far as it is new and incomparable, and unlike what we have previously known, is fringed with mystery, and is only very gradually defined and analyzed as to its full contents ; it is to ignore the simple fact that our mind comprehends fully only what it has itself created — forms and numbers, and figures and relations ; and that of the least atom of God's creations it can at best grasp a side or a surface or a corner, but can penetrate nothing. Still more evident is it that most of the truths relating to the commerce of God with the soul are necessarily veiled^ aad obscure to us in our present embodied condition, since they can never be properly expressed in terms of anything that falls under our senses — in terms of the only language we are skilled in. Ultimate truths, those which are concerned with the Alpha and Omega of our existence, are from their very nature set at the extreme limit of our intellectual horizon, so that we never see all round them or beyond them. Our mind is made for what lies between : for movements and processes and the laws by which they are governed ; but

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before the " Ultimates/* the unchanging realities of the timeless, spaceless world, whose existence is postulated in our every thought, our progress is abruptly arrested as by a dead wall, behind which all is impenetrable mystery : " Hitherto shalt thou come and no further, and here shalt thou break thy swelling waves."

Yet these are the truths most essential to our spiritual life, and ignorance of which is chiefly to be deplored. They are, moreover, truths for which man has by nature a most insatiable intellectual curiosity that breaks out everywhere, even in the most barbaric and uncultivated minds ; and yet with regard to which he is as helpless, as much in need of God, as the babe is of its mother's breast ; and if his craving for the mysterious, the wonderful, the supernatural, be not fed by true religion, it will feed itself on the garbage of any superstition that is offered to it.

Indeed, the soul will never be raised higher or further strengthened by any truth which it has once thoroughly penetrated or comprehended, and which therefore retains for it no element of mystery or wonder, for it is only by straining to comprehend what exceeds its present grasp that it grows great.

Mysticism deals with such half-veiled, halfrevealed truths as we speak of. There is no doubt a false mysticism which values obscurity for its

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own sake, and wraps up the simplest truisms of morality in clouds of confusion till they loom great and mysterious ; and which on this score lays claim to special gnosis and prophetic insight. But this child of affectation, or self-delusion, or ignorance, no more discredits the true mysticism of i Kempis or of St. Teresa, than spiritualism discredits spirits^ or jugglery discredits the miracles of Christ.

Havii^g thus insisted on the reasonableness and necessity of mysticism, as opposed to crude rationalism and to the non-sense of soi-disant "common sense '* in spiritual things, we must equally insist on the importance of using all the light and help that reason rightly used affords us in these matters ; of recpgnizing here, as elsewhere, progress and development in our understanding of Divine truth (itself unchanging) — a progress in distinctness and coherence of idea and statement ; a continual and faithful retranslation of the words and forms of one age or country into those of another; an adaptation of immutable principles, to the ever mutable circumstances of human life. For where this work is neglected, the language and conceptions of a former generation become, first, tasteless and commonplace; and then distasteful and repugnant to the changing fashions of thought and speech in succeeding generations — except in the case of those rare works of genius and inspiration which, like

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the Scriptures or the Imitation^ are catholic and \ eternal.

Thus muchy then^ in justification of what might seem to be a too dialectical treatment of subjects to a great extent beyond the reach of so rude a method.

Again, the writer may be reproached with a certain indecency and irreverence in attempting to make bare to the public gaze many, of those deeper mysteries of our holy religion which the instinct of more delicate minds has ever hidden in a language *' not understanded of the people." This disciplina arcani the Church has learnt from her Divine Master, whose parables were ** words to the wise," mercifully veiling from the many the light which they could not bear, and which would have been only to their ruin and not to their resurrection. Also there is a sacred duty of guarding the higher truths of the Eternal Kingdom from the profanation of being discussed, perhaps ridiculed and blasphemed by those whose minds and hearts are void of the first principles whence a sympathetic understanding of them might be evolved. As it is, there is scarce a hireling journalist who is not as ready with his flippant criticisms on the mysteries of the Kingdom of God as he is with those on political or scientific or literary topics. Nothing is sacred from his omniscient pen. Is it then season-

INTRODUCTION. ziU able thus to cast pearls before those who will but trample them under foot and turn again and rend us ?

If after some hesitation the writer has determined to face the possibility of such ill-consequenceSy it has been from a conviction that it is rather through an insight into the high and all-satisfying ethical conceptions of the Catholic religion that men are drawn to embrace it than through any more speculative considerations. Loqtiere ad cor populi hujus — Speak unto the heart of this people, was the Prophet's commission ; nor can it be denied that it was because He knew what was in man that Christ had such irresistible power over the hearts of men ; for here if anywhere knowledge is power. So there is nothing that establishes and confirms our implicit faith in the Catholic religion of Christ more than the clear conviction that she alone knows what is in man, and holds the secrets of life's problems ; that she alone has balm for the healing of the nations; that she alone can answer firmly and infallibly what all are asking, with an answer harsh at first sounding, and austere, but on reflection kind and consolatory, and, like the "hard sayings" of her Master, " full of grace and truth."

It is not till men's hearts are deeply drawn towards the Church for one reason or another, that their minds are sufiiciently freed from the xiv INTRODUCTION.

natural bias against a creed so exacting and imperions in many ways, to make them desirous or capable of listening to her claims.

For this reason, therefore, it is to the heart we must make our first appeal, by bringing together as far as we can those various truths which embody the Church's explanation of life as we find it ; by showing their mutual bearings, their harmony with one another, and with the stern facts they deal with and explain. If the Church has an answer which will give a meaning to pain and temptation and sin and sorrow, which will point to law and order where otherwise there is nothing apparent but painful darkness and confusion, which will verify and connect what is to all seeming manifold and disconnected, even though that answer be hard and repulsive in its very simplicity, surely it should make every honest truth-seeking mind pause to see if indeed these things be so, if indeed darkness can be so touched with light, and sorrow so turned into joy. If the solution fits the problem it may indeed be the result of chance, but it is a chance that becomes ever more incredible as the conditions of the problem are seen to be multiple and intricate : and the more we know of life's complications on the one hand and of the Church's simplification on the other, the less possible is it for us to doubt that she is from on high, the work of those hands which

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fashioned the human soul, and which provide for the needs of every creature they have fashioned.

We do not mean that our needs demand and explain every point of Catholic teaching, as though that religion were merely the complement of our nature's exigencies, and were not also supernatural, giving more than our heart as yet knows how to desire. But the whole idea of personal trust and faith is that those whom we have found loving and true to us in matters we can test, should ever be accredited with the same love and truth in matters beyond our criticism. So it is with faith in God, with faith in Christ, with faith in the Catholic Church ; we understand enough to warrant full trust in what we cannot understand, or cannot even expect to understand.

It is, then, the belief that a deeper and more comprehensive view of the Church's ethical and spiritual ideals; of her conception as to the capacities, the dignity and destiny of the human soul, of the hope that she inspires in the midst of so much that is otherwise disheartening, of the light which she sheds over the dark abyss of sin and temptation and sorrow — it is the belief that such a comprehensive view may in some cases serve far more effectually than any direct apologetic to win, to establish, or to confirm an abiding faith in her divine origin and operation, that must partly excuse

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or justify an otherwise reprehensible popularizing of the " secrets of the King."

Not indeed that any one mind however broad and deep can ever hope to grasp the Catholic idea in its entirety, or can ever count itself to have comprehended perfectly what by reason of its magnitude must elude all but an infinite thought. If every advance in the knowledge of Nature advances us in knowledge of our ignorance of Nature, the same holds good of our study of the Christian revelation, of the idea of Christ and the Church. Man's brain grows-to and outgrows religions that are its own creation, the provisional expression and images of that Reality which touches him in conscience, and cries out to him in Nature. But it does not, and cannot, outgrow that revelation in which God has expressed for him, albeit in faltering human language, realities which are beyond all reason and experience. Our conception of one whom we meet and observe daily will grow in depth, in volume, in accuracy; but our conception of one whom wo know only by hearsay cannot go beyond what is contained in that hearsay. Yet this content may be infinite in potentiality, like some mathematical expression from which a process of endless buildingup can be started. And so it is with that conception of Himself and of His Christ and of His Church which God has given us in the Christian revelation.

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It is an idea which admits of infinite evolution, which the Church keeps and broods over and ponders in her heart ; in which the best thought of every age finds its highest ideals satisfied and surpassed. Superficial critics who shrink firom the labour of a wide induction, are perpetually treating this idea as it is found in some particular mind or nationality or period, and by consequence con* founding what is accidental with what is essential, and failing to distinguish its morbid firom its legitimate developments.

And indeed it is to the Church, who watches over this process, that we must look for our guidance as to results already obtained. But starting where she leaves oflf and following in the direction of the lines she has laid down, the minds of her children will ever press on towards a fiiller intelligence of the mysteries of faith, turning back at times to gain her approval or to receive her rebuke or to listen to her counsel; and thus, under her supervision, they will purify the Catholic idea more and more from all foreign admixture and build it up member by member, nearing, yet never reaching, a perfect disclosure of its organic unity, its simplicity in complexity, its transcendent beauty.

Finally, in choosing Hard Sayings for a title, allusion is made to the occasion when many of the disciples of Jesus turned back and walked with Him xvUi INTRODUCTION.

no more, because of His doctrine concerning the great Mystery of Divine Love, in which all the other mysteries of the Catholic faith are gathered up. That this Man should give us His Flesh to eat, that bread should be His Body, is indeed a "hard saying" for the many who are the slaves of their imagination, and who fancy that they know something of the constitution of matter and the limits of Divine omnipotence. But for the more thoughtful it is a far harder sa3dng that God should so care for man's love as to come down from Heaven, and take flesh that He might woo man in man's own language — the language of suffering. And if these things are hard to the understanding, it is still harder for the weak will to hear that God must be loved back as He has loved us, with a love that yields pain for pain, sacrifice for sacrifice, death for death.

Here the Church has ever been faithful to her Master. Others have, with false kindness, mitigated the " hard sayings," and prophesied smooth things, and drawn away the weak from her side. But with all her human frailty, ever shrinking from the stern ideal of the Cross, from the bitterness of the Chalice of her Passion, when asked she has but one ruthless answer, namely, that it is only through many tribulations that we can enter the Kingdom of God; that Christ's yoke is easy, not because

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it is painless, but because love makes the pain welcome.

To whom then shall we go but to her who has the words of eternal life, who for two thousand years has kept all these sayings and pondered them in her heart ?

G. T.

Wimbledon.

SS. Peter and Panl, i8g«.