Life and letters of Janet Erskine Stuart, Superior General of the Society of the Sacred Heart, 1857-1914

Front matter

PRINCETON - NEW JERSEY

C=): FROM THE LIBRARY OF ROBERT ELLIOTT SPEER

Monahan, Maud.

Introduction

In the ordinary Providence of God each human life, even of those holding high public position in Church or State, exercises but a restricted and usually transient effect on the lives of others. Within a limited circle and for a few brief years the power flowing from such a life is felt. It grows gradually weaker and in the end ceases to be operative. When, therefore, a life clearly transcends the normal average of human influence, it is of great importance to succeeding generations that the lessons which it taught, and continues to teach, should be set forth in as full detail as may be possible.

In recent years God manifestly willed that the veil, which habitually shrouds from observation the marvellous supernatural existences of Carmel, should be lifted in the case of the little Sister Thérése, to give to the world fresh joy and courage in the knowledge of high sanctity and close union with God, attained by such simple and childlike means.

No less, as it seems to me, is it necessary that the passage through this life of Mother Stuart, both in its purely natural and in its supernatural aspects, should be known not only in the religious family of which she became for too short a space the chief authority, but to all who care to follow and study God’s dealings with His creatures.

It is indeed a very wonderful history. Of Scottish race, the youngest daughter of a clergyman of the Established Church of England, deprived of a mother’s care and love in babyhood, losing apparently in girlhood any living faith, Janet Stuart was destined to become the Mother General of an institute of world-wide extent; to attain an intensity of religious faith and purpose, and to live a life of intimate union with God, such as have not often been surpassed ;

vi INTRODUCTION and to exercise a Mother’s spiritual sway over innumerable souls, both within and beyond the direct influence of the Society of the Sacred Heart.

No such life can ever be fully told. The record of it, to which I gratefully offer these few words of preface, ample and admirable though it be, leaves many things unsaid : some because they are too precious and too intimate, many others because there must be a limit to such telling, a vast multitude because they are in their fullness known to God alone. But, nevertheless, we have through this Life the privilege of knowing, in outline at least, the development of the mind, character, and heart of Janet Erskine Stuart, the gift of whose friendship is to so many of us one of the great possessions of our lives. And I may, perhaps, be allowed to single out as worthy of special attention some few characteristic features which stand out before me in special prominence, either as I read the story of her life or as I recall it in my memory of those days in which it was granted me to receive her friendship and to enjoy her confidence.

The history of her girlhood is of extreme significance and importance at the present day, for it sets before us a mental stage probably much more common than many people suppose, and often not understood by Catholics, especially in the continental countries. It is a condition of mind which must very often exist in those brought up outside the Catholic Church. I believe it also to occur among others who, bred into a traditional Catholicity, and even prepared for and admitted to the Sacraments, have yet never really assimilated and made their own the truth of the Catholic faith. Passing through the dimly conceived mysteries of life and death in childhood, faced by the shock of mental development in adolescence, without guide, or with one that may not be trustworthy, they are confronted by a veil of mist which for a time obscures all real conception of God or His dealings with mankind. They are called, they may call themselves, Agnostics. Are they really so ? Their hearts and minds remain, in many cases, firm in the pursuit of truth, of beauty, of honour, of purity, and of high ideals. May we not say that instinctively, though they seem to know it not, their lives are striving after God ?

INTRODUCTION vil

May we not hope that, when by His grace the sun of His enlightenment shall scatter this veil of mist, they will give themselves wholeheartedly to His service? Janet Stuart, who was not spared this darkness and uncertainty, came forth from it to attain great sanctity and to be the Mother General of the Society of the Sacred Heart. She had learnt, as she was often to teach in the future, that all our past is, under God, to be never an obstacle, but always a help and preparation for the work that He gives us to undertake.

Then I would dwell upon her quite extraordinary power of uplifting others: of making them understand their own powers and the consequent responsibility of exerting those powers to the utmost ; of causing them to realise that there is no ground for discouragement in past faults and failures, but only new reason for fresh endeavour, with solid ground of hope for success. No one who knew her but would bear testimony to this exceptional gift which has made so many souls for ever her grateful debtors.

In a long intercourse with those entitled to write or to speak on spiritual things I have never known anyone who realised, as Mother Stuart did, the essential separate individuality of each soul in its service of God, nor one who respected more sacredly than she did that God-given individuality. Often souls are led to model themselves too minutely upon some exemplar—either the founder or foundress of the institute to which they belong, or the master or mistress who has trained them in God’s service, or a spiritual guide, or some purely human tradition. The result has been constraint, much suffering, sterile uniformity, ultimate impotence, final decay. And individual existences, with their special gifts and powers, have been sacrificed all the time. Mother Stuart with a saintly boldness insisted upon God’s rights in the individual soul, and upon the rights of the individual soul in God. She would not have her sisters or her daughters aim at being mere copies even of their own Blessed Foundress. For this outspoken teaching, arrived at after long experience, and after much painful striving in ways and methods which, by God’s guidance, she had long outgrown, an immense debt of gratitude is due to Mother Stuart from those who cherish the liberty of the sons

Vili INTRODUCTION of God. After all our Divine Master is alone our true model, — and as in His teaching so in His example it is multifariam multisque modis that He is pleased to live again as generation succeeds generation on this earth. While rules, and institutes, and methods will always have their own intrinsic and necessary use, they must ever remain but means, and never usurp the place of the one essential end, the union of the individual soul with God. Mother Stuart grasped and taught this truth with a clearness that I have never found surpassed elsewhere.

There are many other things upon which one would be glad to dwell, but it must be left to each reader to take and to choose from the rich harvest of teaching that the pages of this Life unfold. As the book is closed with deep thankfulness for all that is taught upon its pages, every reader will ask, ‘ Why did such an existence, so rich in experience, so full of promise, to human foresight so urgently needed, come to an end so soon?’ In one of her letters Mother Stuart wrote: ‘ My head is full of plans and dreams of what might be done, but I must be patient: people are not ready yet.’ Itis, no doubt, God’s Will that those whom He calls to govern should have their heads full of plans and dreams. It is not always His Will that these should be carried out. And when she wrote those words her working life was nearly at an end. We have no right to know God’s purpose, but can we faintly discern it in the death of Mother Stuart at the comparatively early age of fifty-seven, in the first days of the Great War? There are two reasons that, as I look back, seem to satisfy me when I try to explain to myself the opportuneness of a death which, when it occurred, seemed to baffle all human reasons or expectation.

I see, in the first place, God’s great and special goodness to His well-tried and utterly devoted servant. By the summer of 1914 Mother Stuart was physically wholly exhausted. Who can contemplate what the moral agony of the prolonged war would have meant to her intensely sensitive nature, with her religious family made up of members from all the belligerent nations and set in their very midst ? God in His mercy had compassion upon His

INTRODUCTION ix handmaid ; and, even in the keenness of their loss, her daughters and friends are grateful to Him.

Secondly, in 1922 we see, as we could not see in Ior4, that her real work was done. By her repeated journeyings she had visited practically all the houses of the Society of the Sacred Heart. By example, by precept, by sympathy, by individual intercourse, she thus held them, and the various nationalities of which they are composed, united in a mutual knowledge and understanding which had never been more urgently needed. Thus in her death she passed on to her children a bond of union and affection strong enough to withstand and to overcome all the disintegrating forces and misunderstandings which even in religious hearts are too often the almost inevitable outcome of universal war. Could she have given them a more welcome, a more necessary legacy ? Have we not also, as we read her Life, solid reason to believe that already she has power to help her religious children and her friends such as would not yet have belonged to her had God allowed her continued sojourning in their midst ?

We have reason to bless God for the life of Mother Stuart. To those who knew her, no written record is needed to recall her memory. She will ever be a strong and holy influence in their lives. But they are glad to dwell upon their memories of her and to have them enhanced by a fuller and wider knowledge of details and events beyond their own experience. To those, however, who did not know her personally, and to the generations that will succeed our own, this living picture of a very great and saintly personality will, I feel convinced, be a treasurehouse of high aspiration, generous endeavour, and great achievement—things surely of extreme moment to the future of the Catholic Church in England, of which in these modern days the late Mother General of the Society of the Sacred Heart will ever be one of the great glories and possessions.

FRANCIS CARDINAL BOURNE,

Archbishop of Westminster.

Whit-Sunday, June 4, 1922.

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CHAP.

XXII.

Contents

INTRODUCTION. é : . ‘ ‘ > . FAMILY AND CHILDHOOD. 1857 TO 1870 . ‘ . WONDERLAND. THE First Catt. 1870 To 1878 . . CONVERSION. 1878 AND 1879 : . ‘WAITING AT THE COVERT SIDE.’ SEARCH FOR

VOCATION. 1879 TO 1882 : : é

. THE NovicEsHIP. THE SECOND CALL. A GREAT

Chapter II

WONDERLAND. THE FIRST CALL

‘ How poor a life is in which there is not thirst. Craving and longing, and the restlessness which goes with them are a sort of consolatign in themselves, and a hint of likeness with Him ; and it is craving and longing, more than anything else, which makes the difference between one’s good and bad days. The greatest trouble is to be without them.’

From ‘ Notes of a Meditation,’ J. Stuart.

From fourteen to twenty-one is the wonderland of our life, the age of our mysticism, the years of ideals. We are then the discoverers of our own lives. Our world is new every day. Either we are sailing towards new shores, daring mariners in search of the unknown, and day by day the horizon dips lower and our stars rise higher, or we are explorers by land, and new wonders reveal themselves on each day’s march. Some of us go by sea and others by land all through our lives. We do not love the glories of these years less, now that we can look back and see that some of them were clouds and some were mirages of the desert. They did their work, and they were the band of yellow, clear gold in our lives. We would not be without a day of them. In those years each morning brought its message ‘Onward,’ each evening asked ‘ Whither?’ and the morning answered ‘ Onward again.’ 4

This ‘ wonderland ’ was now opening for Janet, and in these few lines she gives a picture of her own life from thirteen to twenty-one. “When I was twelve years old,’ she told her sister, ‘I began to think, and I was happy ever after.’

She turned her thoughts to many things, self-discipline among others. She was still a little girl when she forced herself to go into the big village church, alone, in the dark, just because she was afraid. She persevered till the fear was controlled. She would be master in her own soul. So again, when, absorbed in an interesting book, she felt the desire to finish it

1 Essay on Colour, in Highways and By-ways, J. Stuart.

begin to rise strong within, she would get up, and putting the book upon the table, deliberately walk near it till the unruly movement was quelled.

It was about the same time that the gentle, shy girl said that ‘firmness ’ was the quality she admired most in a woman.

But into the midst of this happy child-life there came a great awakening. She described it as ‘my first movement towards conversion—a negative one.’ One evening when Janet was thirteen, she was sitting alone with her brother Douglas in the schoolroom. Brother and sister were working in silence, when Douglas looked up from the book he was reading :

‘Aristotle says every rational being must have a felos. What is yours?’ When he had explained that a ¢elos was a last end, I had to confess that I did not know, and so had he. But it seemed to me to be a very serious thing, to be thirteen years old, and not to know my last end. JI made up my mind that it must be found. The search lasted seven years, and was one of the happiest times of my life. It began by my examining the grounds of my faith, and they all melted away.!

Her mind gradually became conscious of its resources. And she set out on her adventurous journey, feeling, searching for light and beauty and truth. She began to realise that life was full of unanswered questions and deep mysteries. She observed, reflected, and studied other people, thinking to herself : “Do you know? Doyou understand? Can youexplain?’ But she never ventured to express what was passing in her own mind. The loneliness of spirit from which she suffered all her life began even at this early age. It was partly due to the want of a mother’s love, and partly to the loss at this time of her eldest sister’s special care; for when Janet was about fourteen, Dody became an invalid, and though she still ruled the little household, and was still the loved centre of the whole, the children were thrown very much on their own resources and left to their governesses. ‘If Dody had lived, that wave of agnosticism would never have swept over my life,’ wrote Janet in later years; ‘nor,’ added her brother Douglas, ‘would Janet have left home.’ But now she had to wrestle alone with the great problems opening before her.

1 The account of her conversion given in this and the following chapters is taken from a paper which she wrote at Mother Digby’s request during her noviceship in 1883. The greater part of it has already been printed in the Memoirs of Father Gallwey, S.J., in the chapter dealing with converts. This book was published in 1913 by Messrs. Burns and

Oates, by whose courtesy the whole letter of Mother Stuart’s is here reproduced.

16 JANET ERSKINE STUART [CHAP. 11

Her loneliness was probably also the penalty of her gifted Daur Making a poet out of a man: The true gods sigh for the cost and pain— For the reed which grows never more again As a reed with the reeds in the river.

It was the loneliness of the artistic temperament, which finds mysteries everywhere. And above all, it came from that ‘home-longing’’ for God, the true keynote of her life. ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our heart is restless, till it rests in Thee’: true of every human soul; but God, like man, has His friendships with His creatures, and coveting, more especially, the love of some human hearts, He plants in them a stronger yearning for Himself.

As to the loneliness [she wrote long years after], I think it is a sort of thing that almost belongs to human life, and certainly to all that is best in it; it is a sort of home-longing for God, and nothing else will satisfy it... . He is the home of the soul. But heaven is coming, life is a moment, and then the loneliness will be over.

There were, she said in later years, three clearly marked stages in her life, three stages in the growth of the spirit, and each was heralded by a call from God. The first call came now ‘thro’ the mountains, mist, and ocean.’

In the first stage, I sought God everywhere in His creatures. He seemed to me to be in the heart of creation, drawing all things to Himself. This idea gave me my first living knowledge of Him.

God’s Fatherhood was very real to her then, before she began to doubt the truth of her religion.

She revelled in nature and art, and lived in a dream-world of light and beauty. Nature spoke to her, and sang to her, awakening song in her inmost being, and opening out the loveliest horizons.

The ‘call of the wild’ with all its fascination was very strong, and as she said herself, speaking of these years, ‘ her spirit strayed like a vagabond among God’s creatures.’ As a girl, her father allowed her to roam alone miles from home. In these solitary walks she loved to stand listening to silence, believing that words would frame in answer to unspoken questions. She watched the play of light and shade and colour in the woods, and it gave her the sense of the unseen pressing on her. She heard the undertones of nature, and had strange fears of the unknown and the unseen, but yet was drawn to al! that was invisible, longing to find the mystery at the heart of things. Sights and sounds seemed to her full of symbol. She loved unknown and unexpected paths. ‘ By-ways whose terminus is often nothing at all . . . where the mysteries call us onward, and the shy nightingales sing, and the stress of life is lifted off, and the ticking of time is still . . . where life seems larger, because of silence and calm, where the soul may be invaded and taken captive, unresisting, by the powers of the world tocome....’ Written in 1909, these words give some insight into this period of her life.

Colour, beauty of form and of scenery drew her soul out of itself, and she found her way, instinctively, to what was best in art and music. They spoke to her, each with its own message, and with a thrill that, even in those early days, went very deep. Greek art especially delighted her. Its proportion and restraint appealed to her perfectly balanced nature. ‘Nothing too much, appeared to me as an ideal canon of art, even in girlhood. But it seemed far too tame, as a principle of conduct, till many years later.’ Even as a little girl of ten or eleven the beauty of the Greek myths had taken hold of her. About that time a playfellow of the Cottesmore children had a narrow escape from drowning. ‘He floated,’ wrote Janet, ‘for he could not swim, and his head was kept up by waterlilies, which seemed to me such an ideal and wonderful lifesaving apparatus for a beautiful boy as he was. I thought it was like a Greek myth.’

But ‘ young, vigorous, full-grown life needs room to expand in action, it needs the clash of thought with other minds, it needs conflict and adversity, experience, humiliations and stripes, efforts intense and long-sustained even unto weariness, to bring its powers to maturity. There are lessons in all this for life, and they are beyond the language of the woods and rills.’ In this second education Janet was now to begin to have her share.

When she was about fourteen, a remarkable woman came to Cottesmore as German governess. The daughter of a well-known Protestant theologian, Fraulein Rinz von Biirger was a brilliant woman, and Janet became deeply attached to her. Under the influence of this lady, the children’s interest in Germany and German thought developed. It was shortly after

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8 JANET ERSKINE STUART [CHAP. II the Franco-German war, and in one of their visits to Kissingen, where they went for their father’s health, they planned all walks and expeditions with one object, to get a glimpse of Bismarck, then in the town. Their efforts were at length rewarded by one good look, and even by a recognition on the part of the prince.

Of far greater importance than this passing hero-worship was the influence of the books which Fraulein Rinz brought with her to Cottesmore. These she lent freely to Janet, who, with their help, made her way through the intricacies of German schools of thought. For a time the fascination of Goethe held her fast, and she hoped to find in him an answer to all her questions.

Her own religion having failed her,

I tried [she says] to bring up systems of my own, chiefly from German books which my governess brought into the house. I would not let anyone know I was doing so. I used to study at night, waiting till my sister was asleep, and then getting up and sitting under the table that the light might not wake her. My belief went through many phases. I never completely gave up the belief in the existence of God, a word of Spinoza’s held me to that, to the effect that, if God were not, then thought could conceive something greater than that which exists, which would be impossible. It is ontologism, of course, but it was more than good enough to hold me at the moment. At twenty I reached a point that was more agnosticism than anything else. I had left off praying and seemed stuck fast.

In some notes of meditation written more than thirty years later, when God’s presence had become her living joy and the central fact in her life, she said:

I look back to the time when the longing that there should be a God persuaded me that He must really be ; very imperfect reasoning . . . but enough for me at the time, and a great joy that the thought of Him should be its own proof of His being to me; that was like the satisfaction of the thirst of one’s life.

During these years of inward stress and spiritual adventure, the happy outward life went on as before. Only with advancing years came keener joys and more strenuous duties. ‘Sixteen was the nicest time of my life,’ and the search for truth and God, far from causing a strain of sadness or of gloom, was an unending interest and delight.

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1870-1878] WONDERLAND 1g

No one could live with Janet Stuart and not realise that she was unlike others; unlike in some wonderful power of attractiveness. But her superiority of mind and gifts never weighed on those about her.

The impression left by her early life [writes her eldest brother] was that of a staunch and true friend, and of a clear, calm, candid spirit, exercising a wise and practical judgment in an unobtrusive manner about the affairs of life; looking always with a serene and cheerful spirit on the bright side of things, and not without a touch of humour of a distinct kind, with which the darker side, when unavoidable, was contemplated without fear.

Her special friendship with her brother Horace dates from this period, and began in a trifling incident. A large party was walking home one evening from a gathering at some neighbouring house. It was very dark, and Horace, aged twenty-one, fell into a deep ditch. The others were much amused, and instead of offering any assistance laughed at him unmercifully, to the young man’s mortification. But Janet did all she could to help him out, and cheered him up the remainder of the way, all splashed with mud and dripping from the unwelcome plunge. From that time the two were fast friends, and for years she wrote to him every week, when they were apart. Brother and sister had many gifts in common, both were good musicians. Janet had a very sweet voice, and at this time delighted in German songs, Horace singing with her or accompanying her; a good office which she in her turn performed for him.

A frequent visitor at the rectory at Cottesmore, during her childhood and girlhood, was Edward Thring. ‘No one,’ she said in after years, “was more welcome. We children loved him almost as our own father.’ This affection based on childhood’s intuition of true worth gave place later to unbounded admiration, as she realised something of the magnificent faith and courage of the man. Not a few of his ideals became those of her maturer life.

The years from 1853 to 1878 saw the rise, threatened annihilation and wonderful resurrection of his school at Uppingham. Like many hundreds of that generation she fell ‘ under the spell of his strangely stimulating and inspiring personality ’ ; and the ideas of the work of education as an enthralling interest, and of the schoolmaster as a true hero, took root in her mind.

And so, while her interest in the farmers and their affairs

20 JANET ERSKINE STUART [CHAP. II was as keen as ever, it began to extend itself to their children, and the Cottesmore school became the object of her great solicitude. She visited it as frequently as she could. On weekdays, lessons, farm duties, and various calls of home kept her very busy, but Sundays were all her own. In the mornings she taught in the usual Sunday school. This was a great pleasure, far surpassed however by the joys of the afternoon, when she was free, with her father’s full approval, to organise matters as she chose. Every second week she had three successive classes at two o'clock, three o’clock, and four o’clock, for the older children of the village. One of these, known as the Young Men’s Class, thought a great deal of itself. A still surviving member, one of. the seven sons of the Cottesmore schoolmaster, who themselves all became schoolmasters, writes :

I first knew Miss Janet as the teacher of the Young Men’s Class at Cottesmore, and as I was preparing for the teaching profession, she took special interest in my career, she also having studied school method and organisation. She lent me various text-books on the subject, which contained her own copious notes. Her lessons for the class were evidently prepared with the greatest pains. She was a frequent visitor at the village school, making the older children her chief care, observing and studying the methods employed. She had a vigorous personality, overflowing with health and spirits, entering thoroughly into every duty she undertook, obtaining respect and attention from all her pupils, upon whom her influence left a lasting impression for good.

On alternate Sundays she walked across the fields to Barrow, a hamlet a mile or so away, where she had brought a little Sunday school into being. After a happy hour with all the children she could gather round her, she played the harmonium at the service which her father held, and then walked home with him.

The love of teaching was an inborn taste, and it was not only at Cottesmore that Janet helped the schoolmaster. In her frequent visits to Scotland she made friends with an old Scotch teacher, of whom she speaks in her book, written many years later, on the Education of Catholic Girls. ‘ He urged his scholars on by his personal enthusiasm for knowledge. Having no assistant, his own personality was the soul of the school. The boys had the best of it, lassies were not deemed worthy of the classics, and the classics were everything to him.’ But

1870-1878] WONDERLAND AL though he more than once expressed to her ,his opinion that “lassies be mostly daft,’ he accepted help from his visitor and gladly gave her a class to teach.

On one of these visits to Scotland she made a special expedition to Anwoth, ‘fair Anwoth by the Solway,’ for ‘“Emmanuel’s Land’! was already very dear to her, and she insisted on seeing the place which had inspired Rutherford with love so great that