Pius a Sp. Sancto

“ He certainly had no time to spare or throw away, but he had always enough for any purpose in which charity or obedience could claim him. His days were indeed full days, and he scarcely ever went to bed until he had shaken himself out of nodding asleep over his table three or four times. No one ever heard him say that he was tired and required rest; rest he never had, except on his hard bed or in his quiet grave. If any man ever ate his bread in the sweat of his brow, it was Father Ignatius of St. Paul, the ever-toiling Passionist. ”

“ The religion that civilized England, and consecrated every remarkable spot in it to the service of God, had become a thing of the past, and the relics of Catholic piety that studded the land were looked upon as the gravestones of its corse, or the trophies of vanquishing Protestantism. Not only was Catholicity supposed to be dead in England, but its memory was in execration; nurses frightened the children with phantoms of monks, and mountebank preachers took their inspiration from the prejudices they had imbibed in childhood. ”

“ I will not venture to recount a life which would ask days of speech or volumes of writing, but I will endeavour at least to point to some of those principles which animated that life, and were its stay as well as guidance. For principles are like the luminaries of Heaven, or like the eyes that cover the wings of the Cherubs that sustain the Chariot of God in the vision of Ezechiel. ”

“ With many, no doubt, the life in London is the time for going to the full depth of all the evil of which Oxford or Cambridge have given the first relish. My father and mother were not like many aged veterans in dissipation—whom in the days when the fashionable world was most accounted of by me, I have looked on with pity—who to the last of their strength keep up what they can of youth, in pursuing still the round of the gay parties of one rising generation after another. ”

“ This is a fair specimen of how a candid, prejudiced Protestant stares at Catholic services. He puts down as undisputed that all is absurd before he goes, and if the Man of Sin himself, the poor Pope, is in the middle of it, it rises to the very highest pitch of abomination. A man who could consider holiday attire and exultation impious on Easter Sunday, and the mourning and fasting and processions of Good Friday something worse, cannot be very well qualified to comprehend the Ascension and Corpus Christi in Rome. ”

“ Infinite peril attends the setting our duties and religious notions in too austere a point of view, and seeming mystic and obscure modes of speech when describing religious sentiments; and disparaging every effort to do right except it tallies exactly with some indescribable rule of faith which cannot be comprehended by simple-minded and quiet-tempered piety, is of all things the most dangerous, since the risk is dreadful either of disgusting, or repelling, or alarming into despair. Nothing proves the perfect ignorance of human character and the art of persuasion than this process. ”

“ They find the Priest hurrying off through Latin prayers, and producing breathless attention by his own silence; they see him arrayed in unintelligible attire, moving one way and another, bowing, genuflecting, standing still, or blessing. They scarcely understand a word or gesture, and feel perfectly sure that the old woman who beats her breast and counts her beads by the side of their staring effrontery is as much in the dark as themselves, if not more. ”

“ But Father Ignatius consulted the light and grace of his own soul, he penetrated to the true principle, he recalled his own history, he saw that conversion is the work of God, that the work itself is the work of grace, and that all that man can do, is to invoke God to put forth His power. Prayer that is pure, sincere, earnest, and of many souls, God always hears and inclines to grant. ”

“ We have tried to do our best, and no one can do more. If any expressions have escaped us that may appear offensive, we are ready to make the most ample apology, but not at the sacrifice of a particle of truth. If, through ignorance or inadvertence, errors have been committed, we hold ourselves ready to retract them; and retract, beforehand, anything that may, in the slightest degree, be injurious, not to say contrary, to Catholic doctrine, and submit ourselves unreservedly in this point to the judgment of ecclesiastical authority. ”

“ With all this, we like to bask our memory in those sunny days: we love to look at our cradles, at where we made and spoiled our little castles, and we recall the smallest incidents to mind, as if to try and fancy we could be children again. This natural sentiment makes us anxious to know all about the infancy and childhood of those whose life has an interest for us; {2} although knowing that there can be nothing very strange about it; and even, if there be, that it cannot have much weight in moulding the character of our hero, and less still in influencing our own. ”

“ Their joint aspirations for England had brought them together, and their love of the Cross made them of one mind, and after the first ironic rebuff with which the spirit of the petitioner was tested, I can imagine the smile with which that man of God, so austere to himself whilst so loving to his neighbour, recalled the time, long past, when they wondered if ever they should meet in the flesh face to face. ”

“ In trials and crosses we are like a sick child, when its mother wants it to take some disagreeable medicine. The child kicks and screams and sprawls, and spits the medicine in its mother's face. That is just what we do when God sends us crosses and trials. But, like the mother, who will persevere in giving the medicine until the child has taken enough of it, God will send us crosses and trials until we have sufficient of them for the health of our souls. ”

“ Yet, for your own sake and the sake of others, who will of course be more disposed to attend to you if they see you {192} candid and still humble and doubtful of your own judgment, I wish you to resolve that you will meet me as I come to you, determined that we will, with the blessing of God, come to one mind, at the cost of all our respective prejudices. We should not meet as polemics determined on victory, but in the spirit of meekness and mutual forbearance. Then God, who sees the heart, if he sees us truly thus disposed, will know how to make his truth shine clearly to us both. ”

“ The most remarkable of the pilgrims unquestionably was Cardinal Wiseman, who came to preside over the procession and solemnities of the last day. He sung mass, and preached his first sermon in France, which was one of the most eloquent I ever heard from him, or any one, notwithstanding his imperfect diction. It was all to the point of moving the French Episcopate and nation to prayers for the conversion of England. So, if I live, I have little or no doubt of succeeding in time, but, meanwhile, I must poke here and poke there for money, till it begins to come freely of itself. ”

“ Let us plead to God through the Mother of God, and let her plead for her sons on earth to her Son in Heaven, and behold our prayer is tripled in its strength. So Ignatius looked to God through the eyes of Mary, prayed to God through the heart of Mary, and appealed through the purity of Mary, for a people who had forgotten her. And he went forth on his Apostleship of prayer over Italy and France, and Hungary and Austria, and the rest of Germany; and over Belgium and England, and Ireland and Scotland, and he corresponded with the other kingdoms of Christendom. ”

“ As far as I am concerned, in my character of examiner, it is impossible that I could ever entertain any idea of subjecting a gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted as I am with yours, to any examination except one as a matter of form, for which a verse in the Greek Testament, and an Article of the Church of England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient. With regard to the doctrinal part of the examination, that is taken by the Bishop himself, but it is confined entirely to the prepared questions, which are a test of opinions, not of scholarship. ”

“ Strange fact, the Honourable George Spencer a beggar! And happier, under all the trials and crosses incident to such a life, than if he had lived in the luxury of Althorp. Religion is carrying out to-day what its Founder began eighteen hundred years ago. He left the kingdom of heaven to live on the charity of His own creatures. ”

“ Pride, when we come to pray, is our most dangerous enemy, and I think no better security can be given against it than to pray as the poor and ignorant do. Do we then wish that God should judge us by the standard of the wise who know their duty, or by that of the poor little ones? If by the latter, why spurn the prayers instituted for them, and say, 'We will not use them, but the prayers better suited to the learned.' The 'Our Father' was appointed and drawn up for men who said 'Lord, teach us how to pray.' It is a prayer for the ignorant, as is the Rosary. ”

“ It is a high point of wisdom to know and understand other men; but we know nothing that will indeed avail us if we know not ourselves. Hence, while I am undertaking a history of myself for the instruction of others, I purpose, at the same time, and in the first place, to gain from my researches instruction for myself. In now recollecting and declaring the doings of God towards me, and my doings towards Him, I most earnestly desire an advancement in myself of love and humility; would that it might be an advancement in perfection! ”

“ We must use reason to come to the evidence of faith, but faith once obtained must never be left at the mercy of the fickleness and weakness of any individual's understanding or power of argument.
To lay down the proposition we animadvert on, would be equivalent to denying the objectivity of faith altogether. Whether a Catholic reasons well or ill, answers arguments or is confounded, his faith is the same; it is not his faith simply, but the faith of the Catholic Church, the faith given by God, which no man can add to or take from. ”

“ Why is it that the truth on these things is so constantly withheld from children; and, instead of being taught by constant, repeated, unremitting lessons that the world and all that it has is worth nothing; that, if they gain all, but lose their souls, they gain nothing; if they lose all and gain their souls, they gain all? Why is it that they are to be encouraged to do right by promises of pleasure, deterred from evil by worldly fear, and so trained up, as it seems, to put a false value on all things? ”

“ So much has to be said about the exterior actions of Father Ignatius, that one is apt, in reading them, to forget the spirit in which they were done. It is true that it is by the nature of the actions themselves a judgment can be formed of what that spirit must have been, but then they are liable to a false construction.
He was chiefly remarkable for his spirit of poverty. It was not alone that he loved poverty, and tried to observe his vow, but he refined this observance to an exquisite degree, by trying to treat himself and get others to treat him like a mean beggar. ”

“ Where did Calvin find this doctrine? As I observe, he did not learn it in the schools, nor in any book, nor in his own family, nor in the temple of God; the innovation was universally opposed; a million voices remonstrated against his impiety. What right had he to be believed? He proposed only the interpretation which he gave to the words of Jesus Christ, This is my body. He supported his opinion in no other way, he proved it by no miracles, and therefore did not deserve belief, since he gave no proofs of a divine mission. ”