Your hidden treasure, where and how found

Preface

I WROTE this little book for you, dear reader, but also to sanctify myself. I wrote, not for fame, but to satisfy my conscience and to do good to souls. And the souls I had in mind, though I wrote for all who will read, were mainly the young. My first thought went out to my friends, or rather to those who are, or had once been, my children; and my second thought went out to the young in general. The young were the object of my predilection all my lifetime. And even now, as I am growing old, my attention to them is the sweetest portion of my care. I always felt, and I still feel, that whatever good I do them is a good that reaches deep and far into the future. And what did I want to tell them ? I wanted to show them God in their lives. I wanted to show them, in the story of a real life gone through, how thankless, nay how dangerous, it would be in them to put God purposely from their souls, or even only to let Him there feel lonely from want of attention. In this consists the opening chapter of the book. Then I come to speak of that which beautifies, like nothing else, the hearts and souls and lives of the young, — of that, therefore, which, if they attain it, should be the fulfillment of their dreams. That portion constitutes the kernel of my work. It is that for which I undertook my task. The appendix vi PREFACE

consists of a few reflections calculated to keep the reader's mind in a receptive mood by bringing before it the tremendous meaning of eternity, and the blighting foot-prints of sin on nearly everything that belongs to time. Such a frame of mind is necessary to appreciate, at their full value, the imperishable treasures of self-immolation as found in chastity and humility.

The non-Catholic readers, if I should be so fortunate as to find any, will not find a single sentence to offend them or to reflect upon them. I did not write for them, nor did I even think of them from the beginning to the end, except in those few instances in which I had to give an answer to objections usually or at least often made. They should therefore read with the full assurance that there is not a syllable to hurt them, and that here is pure Catholic doctrine as Catholics understand it and practice it. After they have carefully read and understood me, they shall be at perfect liberty to judge themselves of the beauty of our teaching. I am not afraid to leave the verdict to them.

I wrote also for the purpose of saving vocations. That is the reason why I give, in the opening chapter, the history of a wonderful grace of vocation, of a grace lavishly bestowed, terribly trifled with, and very nearly lost. And are there not thousands, nay tens of thousands, who could tell a similar story, with perhaps only this difference, that they really and irrevocably threw that priceless treasure away? And what answer can they give in the hour of judgment to Him who will want to know what they did with it? The dearth of teachers for our parochial schools is growing greater

PREFACE vii

and greater. And what is the reason? Does God not provide for the needs of the Church by giving vocations? He does; but the vocations are lost — lost through the blighting influence of worldliness and passion and pleasure.

God grant that the young may give me a hearing. I trust that it is no presumption in me to think that I shall win them with what I have to say, if only they condescend to read me through to the end. Let them not imagine that it is a dull book on a dull subject which I invite them to peruse. Let them be generous enough to read, and I promise that I shall be interesting enough to fascinate.

I am not conscious of having traveled over a beaten road. My method, my arguments, my language, are entirely my own, though the truths are as old as the hills. Nowhere had I found them treated after my fashion, or with my attempted completeness and precision; and that is the reason I took up my pen. It is not for me but for the gentle reader to decide in how far, if at all, I have succeeded in my aim and object.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The History of a Vocation i

II. Chastity — Its Nature 24

Chapter I The History Of A Vocation

DEAR reader, I have something to say to you, something, I imagine, which will intensify your love and your admiration and your desire for what is great and good and beautiful in character. But, before broaching my subject, I have a story to tell. It is taken from real life, and there is no fiction about it. I wish you would bear that in mind as you read. It is the story of a soul pursued by grace — by the grace of conversion and by the grace of vocation. After you have perused this story to the end, pause, dear reader, and imagine, if you can, what the result would have been if the grace of God had not been victorious. Pause longer and reflect more seriously if you are still young, with a character still to mold, with a life still lying before you either to soil by sin or to consecrate by virtue, and with perhaps a vocation still in you either to save or to lose. It is difficult, in these noisy times of worldliness and of pleasure, to win attention and to awaken interest when speaking of the affairs of the soul, or of the ways of God, or of the things of eternity. It is for this reason that I introduce my subject with a rapid sketch, truthfully given, from a life which is still in its fullness, and which I happen to know as well as my own. It is that of Alan Alfred. He revealed it to me, and gave me permission to reveal it to others, provided only that the revelation glorifies God and does good to souls. Therefore, whatever cannot serve that purpose, I will take scrupulous care to omit. My story will not be one of praise. It will be one of sin, but of sin conquered by infinite mercy and by boundless grace. Look into Alan Alfred's heart, dear reader, as I open it to your view. Perhaps you can see in it, as in a mirror, much of what is in your heart also. Perhaps his sins will awaken a salutary remorse in your mind for yours. Perhaps the pleadings of grace and his deafness to those pleadings are a faithful portrayal of something similar in your own life. Perhaps you cannot look at the picture without a blush of shame and a feeling of alarm for yourself. At any rate, it is the concrete reality which awakens the senses, and makes a vivid and lasting impression on the memory. That is my reason for telling the story.

Alan Alfred was born with a nature so sensitive and so impressionable and so imaginative as to make peace and happiness almost impossible for him in his earlier years. Keenly alive to joy and pleasure, he drank them in too eagerly; and, on the other hand, he found, or rather created for himself, an immense amount of deep and needless pain. He loved those near him with an affection so intense as to make it a torture; and he constantly anticipated his sorrow of losing them by picturing to himself their possible death or departure. For the domestic animals on his father's farm he formed an attachment so tender that he wept, as over dear ones, when they died or were otherwise disposed of. Every little windstorm, in his imaginative mind, was a possible tornado; and every smoke on the distant horizon was a treacherous fire that might steal upon him in the night and burn him alive. From imagined wars and pestilences he suffered, foolishly, quite as much as if they had been actually raging around him. Everything else affected him in a like, proportionate manner. With these characteristics pointed out for a better understanding, I will now proceed to the details of my story.

Human nature, as we find it in the individual, is always a mixture of much good and evil. The good is a remnant of God's beautiful and original creation. The evil is a result of original and actual sin. In Alan Alfred's nature there was, even in his earliest childhood, an immense amount of either element. His passions were unusually strong, and he took but little pains to control them. He was peevish to the last degree when the work to which he was put did not suit him. For hours at a time he would secretly cry from anger and impatience and vexation. But this trouble seemed gradually to pass away, and disappeared at the age of about eight or nine. It was his misfortune, if this mild name can be given to his obstinacy, to have been a faithless child of grace from the beginning. Such a thing as innocence he does not remember to have existed for him. His sins go back as far as his recollection. And their number and wickedness are wellnigh unmentionable. It is no exaggeration and no affectation for him to claim that in this he was altogether unlike other children. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find parallel examples of such early perversion and of such deep and repeated falls. And the sinning went on, more or less, through his entire childhood, but never without remorse, and never without a secret yearning for virtue — a remorse and yearning which made him very miserable amid his sins. And what else was this misery but the fierce conflict of his passions with the grace of God in his soul?

In this condition he arrived at the age of eleven, when he was to make his first confession and communion. His conscience had afflicted him so much, and the grace of God had touched him so deeply and so continually, that he longed, almost with the strength of death, to put an end to his unhappiness by a thorough and true repentance. But the task seemed so enormous that his heart failed him. He examined his conscience for weeks ; but his sins seemed so multitudinous and great that he simply despaired. In his distress he went so far as to tempt Heaven for a miracle. He laid a pencil with big sheets of paper into a secret place for his guardian angel to write down the sins of his life for his coming confession, which he had utterly despaired of arranging in his memory, and then devoted some days to earnest prayer for the successful accomplishment of that miracle. It is needless to say that his hope was disappointed and his prayer not heard. Nor was this the end of his great trouble ; rather it was the beginning of it. The day for confession finally came. To tell what happened to him on that mournfully memorable day, it is necessary to call attention to a very strange characteristic of his nature. I may well call it strange, because I have never found it, in all the years of my experience, so far as I know, in any other child. This characteristic consisted in an invincible reticence. His little heart could keep secrets almost like the grave; and often, like the grave, it simply refused to give them up. He knew that this was a case in which his secrets had to be revealed, and he meant to reveal them ; but, when the moment came, a something seemed to seal his lips, and the necessary revelation was not made. He had the kindest of Fathers confessors; but his natural timidity and the imagined frightfulness of his story, acting upon him together, threw a deep silence over him after he had entered the confessional. After a somewhat painful pause, his confessor kindly asked him if he was not yet able to confess alone ; and he answered that he was not. The kind Father, not in the least suspecting a life like his, asked him the ordinary questions, gave him absolution, and dismissed him. The poor child arose, under a burden heavier than mountains and in a wretchedness that has no name, — ^and walked away.

He had not the heart to come back and repair. He had not the courage to undo what he had done. Time went on. The grace of God was not silent. It called him louder than ever. But it called him and touched him in vain. It is painful for him to remember, even at this distance of time, how the darkness of utter despair came over him at that time, and how desperately he attempted to reconcile himself to the thought of his future certain damnation. Whilst he was in that deplorable condition, five months, the most miserable of his life, passed away. And in that time, too, it happened that the angel of death came to him, if he ever came to one that is still alive. Acute Bright's disease after scarlet fever, the result of a cold drenching rain, filled his lungs completely with water within a few hours at night whilst he was supposed to be asleep in his bed. His lungs filled up till his breath completely failed him. In an agony of suffocation he fainted, and did not recover his consciousness till the crisis was over. Nobody, not even his physician, had any hope left for his recovery. But nobody, except himself, had the slightest intimation of the still more hopeless condition of his soul. And where and what would that soul now be if he had then died? And to whom does he owe it, except to God's infinite mercy, that he has not been dwelling, for already more than forty years with the devil, in eternal darkness ? But he did not die, and the five months mentioned above had passed away. It was a beautiful autumn day in October.

He heard it mentioned at the dinner table that a forty hours' adoration was to take place in his home parish on the first days of November. It meant confession, of course; and so he hated to hear of the coming devotion. His task after dinner was to drive the cattle to water about a mile away. The woods along the hillsides through which he passed on that blessed afternoon are still distinct in his memory. The oak-trees had just begun to shed their leaves; and some of those leaves were drifting in the warm autumn wind at his feet as he walked along. But most of them were still dangling from the branches overhead, richly colored in their fading beauty; and the October sun glanced sweetly through them where they did not hang too thick; and one by one they fell around him to the ground as he slowly passed along on his way. The grace of God had already been pleading in his bosom before he left the table. Louder and louder and sweeter and sweeter it became as he walked in the checkered shade of those trees that day. It took the touch of a divine eloquence to melt that heart of his ; but in boundless measure grace was there that day, and his heart melted. *'Sweet as remembered kisses after death," says the poet, in language that is inimitable, when speaking of what he considers as very beautiful and dear and cherished. But what is a remembered kiss of affection compared with the caress of God's grace in the soul? It is therefore not strange at all that Alan Alfred still has so distinct and so beautiful a picture in his mind of the time and place in which God's grace so visited and blessed his heart. But that was not yet the consummation of his change. It was only the beginning of his good intention. What anguish it cost him, and what self-conquest, to bring what he so generously resolved upon to a happy issue, it is not within my purpose here to explain. I have told what I must to make the story of God's grace and mercy intelligible; and the rest I choose to pass over in silence.

But here is another strange feature of grace, even stranger to me, and more wonderful, than what has already been told. Alan Alfred had a vocation to the priesthood. He has never had reason to doubt it, unless you will insist on his sins as a reason. In spite of all his sins, he had a profoundly religious nature. God and eternity and the things of eternity were ever before him. He dreamed of a hermit's life for months, nay even for years, in his boyhood. He passionately longed for the solitude of the desert, to be alone with God, and to pass his life in prayer and meditation. He sincerely wished that he might never see the world, and that he might never know it. A shepherd boy he had been from earliest childhood. Already at seven and eight he had to pass whole days away from home amid the timbered hills and the bleak bluffs to which he drove his father's stock before the time of the herdlaw. He had never known real innocence; but he used to cherish, with idolatrous affection, whatever reminded him of his imagined innocence ; that is to say, of his earlier and less sinful life. It was for that reason that he used to repair to certain spots in the wildwood where he remembered to have been on some long-gone, happier, and more innocent day; and that he would there linger for hours, indulge his melancholy reflections, and not seldom weep his little heart empty of its tears. It was a remnant and a memory of this feeling which one day arose in him in later years as he was reading a poem and came upon the scene in the wilderness where the unhappy hero is represented as saying: "Of objects all inanimate I made idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers, and rocks whereby they grew, a paradise, where I did lay me down within the shade of waving trees, and dreamed uncounted hours."

But this strange loneliness of heart, so strange in a child so young, and this passionate yearning, found at least a measurable relief as soon as the priesthood arose before him as the load-star of his soul, and as a dream sighing for realization. He cannot recall that anything earthly or unholy ever mingled with his love and desire for that priesthood. And that love and desire, pure and ardent and lofty beyond belief in one so young, kept up a constant vision in his soul, and remained unchanged through all the changes of his sinful boyhood. This it is that he finds so wonderful, so strange and incomprehensible, in the boundless generosity of God towards His thankless and wayward and perverted child. He has something else and still more astonishing to report about his vocation later on. Here he wants to call attention to its undoubted genuineness, to God's evident choice of the most worthless soul in the world. And he does not mean to imagine at all that other souls are not as generously dealt with. He feels certain that in other ways God is just as wonderful, just as good and merciful, in the lives of others as He was in his. He is certain also that he would have lost his vocation very soon if God had not made it so beautiful a vision to him from the beginning — another proof of the great condescending kindness of Providence.

An obstacle of insurmountable magnitude, as he imagined, arose very early before him. He was a dullard, a hopeless and incurable dullard. It was an erroneous supposition, as he later found out ; but at the time he was as firmly convinced of it as he was of his own existence. And that conviction did more to turn him from his purpose than anything else in the world could have done. He gave way to despair, and made positive and repeated and persistent efforts to forget his dream ; but he could not forget it. Brighter than ever the vision arose from that darkness of despair into which he had plunged it. The cause of his mistaken notion lay in his teachers. In the first years of his school life he was a bright boy and headed his class. But he was larger for his age than others ; and he attributes the bad judgment of his teachers in his case to that fact. But whatever the cause or reason may have been, they advanced him beyond his depth, and then abused him for his supposed laziness and stupidity. His sensitiveness was such as he never found, in his thirty years of experience with children, in any other child. He cannot remember that his nature ever hardened or rebelled under the bad treatment he received, though he now marvels that it did not ; but it sank down helplessly and hopelessly and completely into blank despair. He was a dullard. Every mark by which the dullard is known was upon him. His teachers and his schoolmates believed it ; and he himself believed it more firmly and more absolutely than they. From this delusion he was rescued only after he had entered college. Between his grade school and college a period of five years intervened. During this entire time he harbored his delusion with all the unsuspecting firmness of a deep and simple faith. He could hardly believe his senses, and he could hardly identify himself, when he discovered for the first time, as he sat, at the age of nineteen, the timidest and youngest, in a class of a hundred and fifty, nearly all of them experienced teachers, that his intellect was as keen and clear and ample as that of other mortals. How had he the courage to enter the doors of that normal school? It is a mystery to him still to-day. And how had he the heart, in his still younger years, to contemplate the vision which floated before him as his cherished future vocation? That is a still deeper mystery to him now. The only explanation of it is, that God in His goodness did not allow him to lose it from sight. But why did He not, considering the child he was and the life he led ? The following incident, painful both to recall and to relate, will greatly emphasize this question.

Alan Alfred had the measles. He was thirteen years old at the time. He remembers that one morning he suddenly and rapidly grew worse. It was only a few minutes till his mind was in a delirium. Then it was that the hidden evil of his heart leaped to his lips. To the utter astonishment and consternation of his mother, he began to blaspheme like a Turk. Nothing could silence him or make him behave with anything like decency. And the most alarming and discouraging part of it all was that the symptoms of approaching death were suddenly setting in. The poor startled and helpless mother called her daughter, and wanted to send her to the priest for her boy. But it soon seemed as if all would be over in a few moments. "No, you need not go, for he is already dying," said the mother to her daughter; and the awfulness of those words awakened him to consciousness. He faintly caught the sense of the last portion of that sentence, and it struck terror into his guilty soul. Anguish and trepidation followed, for he fully realized what a hopeless eternity was before him if, unconverted, he died. But the spell was over, over just in time to save him from death and damnation; and he rallied quickly after it. It is not necessary to make any reflections. A life-long reflection tl^e thing has, however, been to him. God's mercy be thanked! and God's grace be glorified !

Let us now pass away from his childhood to his young manhood, and see how the grace of God still manifestly pursued him — pursued him with all the persistency of a love that cannot be exhausted. If it were not for the fear of vanity, he should here have me tell in detail the most charming and consoling portion of his soul's history. Suffice it to say that between his boyhood and manhood the grace of God was victorious in his heart, and celebrated a triumph that is really worthy of the name. If he was worse than other children in his childhood, — and he was, — he was also bet-

THE HISTORY OF A VOCATION IS

ter than other young men In the beginning of his adolescence ; that is to say, if you do not include into the term other young men a few rare exceptions. In that period of transition he lived through some truly noble and grace-triumphant days. Alas! why were there not more of them? Whatever traits of character are worth appreciating in him to-day are easily traceable to that beautiful and blessed period. There was a time in his priesthood, in the earher years of it, when he sincerely tried to make his heart an empire for Grace to rule over without restriction; but even then it was not so docile to that grace's inspiration as it was in that other, earlier, and more effulgent period which lies between his boyhood and his manhood. How his memory loves to revert to it for consolation! And how that consoling memory teaches him to value only what is sweet with imperishable sweetness, and lovely with imperishable loveliness !

But, alas, poor Grace had but a transient triumph ! It was soon again resisted. Alan Alfred indeed never again returned to the vices of his childhood ; but other temptations came, with other attractions; and he allowed them to lure him on into other infidelities. Many of these infidelities were not exactly sins, but dangerous with a danger more ruinous than sins. The sins at least are known as sins, and no one that loves his soul can be contented with them. But there is a vanity and a worldliness and a sensuality which resist the grace of God and instill a subtle poison into the soul; and the poor soul throws itself wide open to their influence, incurs their fatal curse, and does not know that anything has happened. Alan Alfred's heart was at peace. He did not know the world. He did not want to know it He had heard of pomp and pleasure; but the words had no attraction for him, and not even a meaning. But the day came when his peace was disturbed. It was the day when his heart opened, and allowed the world with its loud noise to come in. There was an invitation to a dance. A dance did not mean anything to him. But it did not take long, and his deeply sensitive soul had found and appropriated the charm that lies in worldly pleasure. All the vanities of life, which before had left him cold and indifferent, now began to appeal to him, and that too with a sweetness which seemed altogether irresistible. The confusion of thought in his head was great, and the noise in his heart was still greater. A restlessness which agitated his soul continually and to its profoundest depths had supplanted the peace which he formerly enjoyed. He was really wretched, but he did not know it. Day and night he dreamed of a happiness which his excited fancy conjured up before him like that of another Eden; and day and night his newfound restlessness swept over his heart like a blighting wind. It may be that he was more susceptible of the delusive pleasures of the world than others ; but if he was, he has also reason to doubt whether others felt the disappointment of them as speedily and as deeply as he. Oh, how he would therefore like to warn all young folks against a mistake like his! and how he would like to plead with parents for their children's peace and hope and happiness !

And now I come to the kernel of my argument — to the description of his heart's hard conflict with the grace of God. Soon after he had been initiated into the world's ways, and had tasted its vanities, he positively made up his mind to throw his vocation away. The vision of other days sometimes haunted him still, haunted him in the midst of his noisy pleasures; but for a number of years he always made an effort to dispel it as soon as it arose ; and he went even so far as to offer up prayers to God, that He should take it forever away. But, do what he might, the vision always returned. An instance or two will sufflce to illustrate.

He had been at a dance, one of the most dangerous dances he ever attended. He had about him a reserve and a bashfulness which often annoyed him, but which he now knows to have been a valuable shelter ; and in that night, to use a Shakespearean phrase, they "did him yeoman's service." He had never encountered dangers as he did that night. Temptations of a peculiar kind, and of which he had not dreamed, came over him. But his melancholy mood, if not the grace of God, had given him a heavy heart that night, so that he was unsusceptible ; and thus his sadness, helped by his bashfulness and reserve, placed him within the circle of security. He returned, long before the dance was over, to his home, and tried to sleep, but could not. The music of the dance was in his ears, and the movements of the dancers in his memory, and the noise of it all in his heart; and, as he lay there in the silence of his chamber, weary and sick with what he had seen and gone through, his soul began to thirst and pine for something nobler and better than those foolish and empty vanities. And then the vision which he had so often dispelled, dispelled for what now seemed to him like the hollo west mockery, again arose before him in all its beauty and in all its glory. He did not dare to dispel it that night ; and yet he could not gaze upon it without confusion and shame. It was more attractive and alluring than ever; but he had extinguished his hope as he thought, and so he contemplated its inviting loveliness with sorrow and despair. The wind was rustling in the leaves of the cotton trees in front of his window, and moved them gently to and fro in the mild moonlight. He gazed for a long time on the waving trees, and on the silent moon sending her tender beams like a soothing opiate into his chamber; and then he wept with sorrow over his broken faith with grace, and longed for a hermit's life of solitude in the wilderness to atone for his vanities.