Chapter XVIII. The Office of Spiritual Director

The present chapter brings us to the most vexed ques* kion of the whole spiritual life, the office of a spiritual director. There is no subject about which there is a more harmonious consent up to a certain point, nor one upon which beyond that point there is a greater discrepancy of conflicting opinions. Writers, who live in communities and are members of religious houses are prone to exaggerate the director's office, to confound it with that of a religious superior or a novice-master, and to make it unreal to persons living in the world. For when we make a man try to do more than he can, he inevitably ends by doing less, and the fault is ours, not his. On the other hand, if we take vague or lax views of the matter, we run the risk of coming under the censure of the eleventh proposition of the Illuminati and the sixty-sixth of Molinos, propositions unwittingly enunciated, almost in the words condemned, by Catholics in common conversation again and again. It is difficult, therefore, to write of this subject with becoming moderation, and yet it is as necessary as it is difficult. The present chapter will contain no theory, but report fairly both sides of the Catholic tradition as it is to be found both in ancient books and modern, inclining perhaps a little to the ancient, because on this point of asceticism as on most others, I find in them an absence of exaggeration which I often desiderate in modern systems. My object will be to prevent any opinion of my own escaping on the subject; or if I fail in this, that it should be only such an expression of opinion as is unavoidable when an author is commenting on those who have gone before him.

The first thing is to be clear, and to be clear we must sometimes be guilty of some repetition, which, however, is a less evil than obscurity. I shall divide my subject then as follows. First, I shall speak of the importance of a director; secondly, I shall show what is the meaning of having one; thirdly, the necessity of him; fourthly, the choice of him; fifthly, the change of hiin; sixthly, the true Catholic idea of our intercourse with him; and seventhly, the suffering he causes us. It is not easy always to decide under what head to arrange particular things, but when we have handled these seven points, we shall certainly leave no important question unconsidered

I am to speak first of the importance of having a director. The practical and devotional system of the Catholic Church is almost a greater trial of our faith than its doctrinal system. No part of it has been more attacked than this office of a spiritual director, not only by heretics outside the Church, but by ill-read or lukewarm Catholics in it. We may say, therefore, what we are in the habit of saying of devotion to our B. Lady, that this dead set against it is the measure of the devil's dislike and dread of it. The vital energies of the Church are often laid up very secretly and in unlikely places, and the miserable instincts of heresy may often perform for Catholics the same office that certain dogs are said to do for men hunting for a particular sort of earth-nut. Thus, heresy not only, gets our truth defined, but it indicates the 28

32G THE OFFICE OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR.

hidden virtue of each particular truth. It is certainly t* take a yoke upon ourselves to have a director. But unless we are prepared for it, it is really useless, not unfrequently worse than useless, to attempt a spiritual or interior life. We may possibly be safe without a director, if we choose to sit down in the dust and ashes of low attainment; but not otherwise. Not only do very good people go wrong for want of a director, and that in external work for the Church as well as in the management of their devotional privacy; but it often seems as if the amount of their goodness only increased the extent and mischief of their error. This comes to pass in two ways. In the one case it is self-love which is always making a man drift imperceptibly away from high principle, so that, undirected, he is continually settling down to a lower level than the first aspired to, or actually believes himself to be occupying; and these settlements, like those of a new house, are only discovered by the ugly irregular cracks afterwards. In the other case, it is the want of discretion which does the evil. It makes a man afraid that his fervor is going, because his sensible ardor is less j and this runs him first into singularity and then into downright folly. These are the two ways in which devout laymen are often broken to pieces, and cast aside by God as unmanageable and misshapen vessels. They who might have been a St. Edmund, St. Louis, or St. Elzear, turn out to be thorns in the side of the Church, wounding her as far as their littleness can go. This is the reason why so many who live to reform abuses die out of grace. It would not be surprising to know that the Church had actually lost great saints by this mistake When we look over the multitude of devout souls, what is it that excites our keenest regret? It is the waste of grace, it is the evaporation of high principles, it is the brittleness of noble purposes; and by far the greatest proportion of this is from the want of a spiritual director. Can more be said to show his importance? All the saints are of one mind: to have i director, to be open and full with him, and to obey him without scruple and without bondage, behold! this is half the battle of the spiritual life!

Secondly, we must consider what the having a director means, what it looks like as an external fact. It gives to the life of a person in the world the similitude of a monastic life, as if they were members of an uncloistered order. For it is impossible he should stop at being a merely spiritual counsellor. Prayer and mortification, temptations and the sacraments, are certainly very difficult matters, and give rise to a multitude of cases of con. science, which it would be neither safe nor easy for us to decide for ourselves. But I doubt whether external conduct and temporal affairs are not more prolific of casuistry, and do not breed a much greater amount of spiritual perplexity. The adjustment of domestic duties requires as much discernment as turning a point in mental prayer. The exactions of society are far more bewildering to see our way through, than the uncertainties of a cloudy vocation. It is a marvel to me that persons should fancy that a director in purely spiritual things, should be a person of higher attainments than one who is to guide us in spiritualizing worldly things. It seems to me that this last requires so much more wisdom, so much more science, so much closer a union with God. It is generally the case that the proofs of authors who write good hands are more full of mistakes, than the proofs of those who write bad hands; because the good hands are given to the boys, the orabbed ones to skilful men. So it may be in the matter of direction. A priest may be bold to direct a good nun in a supernatural state of prayer, who if he were humble and sagacious, would tremble to steer a princess to perfection through the intricacies of town court, and country life.

The spiritual life does not so much consist in a quantity of devotions, ceremonies, beliefs, and peculiar exercises, as in the supernaturalizing of our common life; in a word, it does not consist so much in certain things as in a manner of doing all things. Thus every temporal affair, every worldly relationship, and every social duty, brings its own case of conscience along with it, and, though men can solve many of these for themselves at once, and get an increasing facility of solving others, yet persons in the world see so little ahead of themselves, because of the dust that is round about them, that there must always remain a number of problems which they must be content to leave to the solution of others. Nothing then can be more shallow than the complaints which men make of spiritual direction as meddling with temporal affairs. Its very office is to spiritualize these by infusing into them supernatural motives, and helping the blindness or the cowardice of self-love to bring them all under the obedience of Christ, and into subjection to the maxims of the Gospel.

No experience can hinder the astonishment which we must all of us feel at occasional interior revelations of the.mmense hold which the world still has upon us, when wo have been serving God for years. Quite irrespectively of liu, worldly principles possess us. They have shaped our minds, saturated our affections, warped our will, and influenced even the way in which our senses report external objects. They lie imbedded in our language, and our language tells upon our thoughts, and our thoughts insinuate motive lightning-like into the very first steps of our actions. Now spiritual direction, simply regarded as a fact, is a witness against the world, and we commit ourselves to its testimony. It ignores the world's own view of itself in everything, treats its pretensions with contempt, speaks of it as an imposture, and defines it to be merely a vile criminal condemned to be burnt, and the hour of its execution only uncertainly delayed. The world, therefore, finds a voice in such men as Michelet, and expresses its natural resentment with a strength which is amusing. I say, natural resentment, because it must necessarily misunderstand the nature of spiritual direction, and it certainly exaggerates both its influence and its extent. Direction must needs have a look of conspiracy to the world's eye, which is peculiarly odious. Yet the view is not wholly incorrect; for what is the Church but a divine conspiracy against the world? Moreover, just as certain words, seemingly innocuous in themselves, drive lunatics into a phrensy, so the interference of an ecclesiastical tie with natural ones exasperates the world in a preternatural way. We Catholics must bear this in mind when the world talks to us of spiritual direction. The interior life is necessarily an unflinching life-long variance with the world.

Our third consideration must be of the necessity of a director. This is a most important part of our subject, and I shall attempt to prove it from six different 28* sources, from authority, from common sense, from the nature of the thing, from the peculiarity of the spiritual life, from the genius of the director's office, and from the universality of the need.

The argument from authority may be divided into three heads, the practice of the Church, the condemnation of heresy, and the drawings of the Holy Ghost acknowledged by orthodox writers on the discernment of spirits.

According to the teaching of the fathers, the office of spiritual director is shadowed forth in Scripture in the relations of Samuel to Heli, Peter to Cornelius, and Ananias to Paul. But without stopping to inquire if the inference is not somewhat wide, let us look at the undoubted practice of the Church. In the dialogues of St. Gregory, Peter asks if Honoratus had a director. Simeon Metaphrastes says that when Pachomius wished to learn the secrets of a more perfect life, he took Palemon for his director. He also tells us that S. Chrysostom was made spiritual director in his monastery, and the same office was imposed on S. Dorotheus, who was also the special director of S. Dositheus. St. John Damascene was appointed spiritual director to the novices in his Laura. Euthymius told Sabas to take Theoctistus for his director. S. Dorotheus himself had been directed by Seridus, so that the spiritual direction of Dositheus was by that time a formed tradition. John the Prophet was directed by Barsanuphius; and George the Arsilate was the spiritual director of St. John Slimacus. Theodore the Studite put himself under the direction of the monk Plato, who had been formed by the direction of Theoctistus, which he thus handed on, as S. Sabas handed on (tie same tradition in his monastery. S. Romuaid was directed by Marinus, and Peter Damian by Leo the Hermit, who he says was not merely his " accomplice" and his friend, but his father, doctor, master, and elected lord, who so excelled in the profundity of spiritual counsels that his words were oracles to all who consulted him. St. Antoninus was so famous a spiritual director in hia day that he was called the Father of Counsels. John Cantacuzene tells us, and this brings us to the spiritual direction of laymen in the world, that when the emperor Andronicus was near his death, he asked for his director, and when the master of the palace sent a monk whom the emperor did not know, he burst into tears and insisted upon having his own director. The emperor Manuel made Macarius, whom he designates as his spiritual director, one of the executors of his will. When the emperor John went to the council of Ferrara, he took with him, it is said, his spiritual director Gregory, a cenobite who was afterwards patriarch of Constantinople, as Pontanus mentions in his notes to the history of George Phrantzes, where he shows that these men were not mere confessors but spiritual directors in the strict sense of the word. The modern tradition is too well known to make instances necessary.

In accordance with the practice of the Church have been her condemnations of those who taught an opposite doctrine. In 1623 the Illuminati taught that there was no need of a spiritual director, but that each soul was to trust to the sacred inspirations of the Holy Ghost, and to follow them at all hazards. This doctrine was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition whose judgment is applauded by theologians. Molinos held that the Catho/ic notion of a spiritual director was ludicrous and new (doctriua risu digna et nova in ecclesia Dei), and this proposition was condemned together with the sixty-eighth, in which he dispenses spiritual men from direction as able to guide themselves by their own private spirit.

Madame de Chantal recognized by certain signs that St. Francis of Sales was the man whom God had destined to be her spiritual director; and mystical writers give us certain indications as being assuredly from the Holy Ghost in this matter. One of them is an indefinable attraction which in our best times we never distrust, and which impels us to repose entire confidence in some servant of God, and forms a union of grace between his soul and ours. Another is a peace which spreads all through our soul like a quiet inundation, whenever he speaks to us, resolves our doubts, or dissipates our scruples. He seems as it were to magnetize us with a holy joy, which is entirely free from any natural esteem or personal attachment t6 himself. Another is a certain ardor or vehement desire to be all for God, which comes over us when we are with him, or is inspired in us by his words; and another is a certain impression of mingled respect, obedience, and docility, which makes us see God, and God only, in him and his guidance.

The second argument for the necessity of a director is from common sense. Cases of conscience are continually arising; many of them are very difficult, and these difficulties can only be surmounted by practice, experience, study, and authority. The generality of men obviously are without these requisites. That of authority is especially to be dwelt upon. Knots which cannot be untied must be cut; and this authority alone can do. We must consider also the proverbial impossibility of judging in

ur own cause; and if in addition to this we w^igh well the character of self-love, with which unfortunately we have only too intimate an acquaintance, we shall be convinced that the place, which a spiritual director occupies in the ascetical system of the Church, is nothing more than an expression of her maternal common sense.

The third argument is very like its predecessor; it is from the reason of the thing. The interior life is, as we shall see by and by, full of delusions and dangers. This being so, the analogy of all other arts and sciences would go to prove that we must have a pedagogue, some one to teach us, to keep us in the right way, to prevent our losing time and name in making old discoveries, to hinder our following the fatuous fires which have led others into absurdity or ruin, to show us how to observe, to operate, or to experimentalize, to test our results, to correct our processes, and to cheer our fatigue. The spiritual life is a daily dying to self and a daily carrying of the cross; and who has the courage to go on chastising himself all his life long, if he has not some one by his side at once to animate and moderate, prohibit or suspend, his holy cruelty? We have all of us great confidence in ourselves; yet none of us have sufficient self-dependence to enable us to attach much weight to our own consolations of ourselves. No man can console himself. He does not believe in himself with sufficient infallibility. Consolation is a social thing. And can any one, until he is actually fabricated into a saint, live an unworldly lif? without consolation? A man is always very wise and right in his own eyes; yet I doubt if the man is to be found who can habitually act without scruple on his own ideas No man has invariably light to find out when he d34 THE OFFICE OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR.

is wrong, nor patience to wait when he ought to wait, and to refrain himself in trial. Our faculty of deceiving ourselves is uncommonly versatile; and prayer, suffering, and action, the three departments of a director, are from their own nature the favorite provinces of self-deceit. To walk alone is impossible; and to wish to walk alone is against humility, and the lack of humility bars all progress, even in merely moral excellence. Moreover experience shows, however little it was to have been expected beforehand, that a man without a director runs at last into mere external practices and a barren formality. For a man only grows interior in proportion as he gains the habit of renouncing his own favorite views, or wills, or ways. Hence, as a question of metaphysics, it must result partly from the nature of man's mind and partly from this subject of the spiritual life to which it is applying itself, that a man who stands alone will have an exceedingly limited range of vision, and will often see objects dim and distorted even within that narrow range.

My fourth argument has been almost anticipated in the third. It proposes to show the necessity of a director from the nature of the spiritual life. All animals suffer when they are called upon to live out of their own elt ment. The suffering is brief, because death mercifully interferes. Now the spiritual life is, to a fallen soul, like the life of a fish out of water. First of all it is suffering, and secondly, it cannot be sustained except by supernatural interferences. Life in a battle with eyes blinded with smoke and ears bleeding with the percussion of the artillery, or life in a diving-bell with eyes starting, ears ringing, and pulses galloping, are pictures of it. Its character is supernatural and can only be administered to dj scientific study. Temptations taset it in invisible multitudes, some silent' and some clamorous. The delusions that dazzle it are as various and as changeful as the colored flashes from a pigeon's neck. It requires as many consolations as a sick child, and a disburdened spirit is such a necessity to it that it cannot live without it. When we can see in the dark, breathe in a void, and grasp the impalpable, then can we manage ourselves in an ascetic life; but not till then. Godinez in his Praxis of Mystical Theology says, "Of a thousand souls whom God calls to perfection, scarcely ten respond to the call, and of a hundred whom God calls to contemplation, ninety-nine stop short. Hence I say, many are called but very few are chosen. For besides other great difficulties, almost insuperable by our frail nature, and which surround this business of perfection, one of the chief causes of the failure of so many is to be found in the fewness of spiritual directors to guide our souls, with the pilotage of divine grace, over this unknown sea of the spiritual life." A fifth argument for the necessity of a director may be drawn from the nature of a director's office. His business is not that of a pioneer. It is rather to go behind, and to watch God going before. He must keep his eye fixed on God, who is in the dimness ahead. He does not lead his penitents. The Holy Ghost leads them. He holds out his hands from behind, as a mother does to her tottering child, to balance his uncertain steps as he sways overmuch, now on one side, now on another. He is not td have a way of his own, to be applied to every one. This is what a novice-master does with his novices. He leads them by an acknowledged tradition, and animates them With the definite fixed spirit of the order, and models

. ft5 THE OFFICE OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR.

them, as a faithful copyist, on their sainted Founder But this is not at all the function of a spiritual director He only knows that we are in the way which is right for us when he sees God in front. Then he keeps us superstitiously in the Blessed Foot-prints left behind. He looks after our advance, and when he sees God increasing the distance between Himself and the soul, he spurs on the latter, discreetly and gently, yet firmly and uninterruptedly. He gains as much light from prayer, as from his knowledge of character and his personal observation of ourselves. His oflBce is very supernatural, but it is very natural also; and he will not direct us well if he overshadows the natural by the supernatural. It would be a safer mistake if he attributed a light to his natural penetration and sagacity, the divination of his own genius, which was really due to a gratuitous and supernatural discernment of spirits, than if he took that for supernatural which was really natural. It is a perilous thing to make a superstition of direction. Hence a director would rather say supernatural things in a natural way, than emit oracles, observe odd intervals of silence, say pompous obscure words, or talk grandiloquently about God having put things into his mind. To such an one it is almost strange that his guardian angel does not impatiently break Bilence and say, "All things are God's gifts: go to, simpleton! and help your neighbor to the best of your abilities with a good-humored diligence, and neither make so much of it, nor throw a mystery around it." Yes, above all, let us have no mysteries in direction.

Our director must also look to his own purity of conscience and disinterestedness of conduct, so as to be open to receive supernatural lights and helps when God chooses

He will not talk too much to us, nor care if he be a downright trial to us by his silence. God's past work in each will be the exemplar of his own work for that soul. He will found all he does and all he endeavors in the evidences of God's past grace. How can such an office as this be a mere ornament or accessary? Must it not be at least an integral part of any system, of which it is a part at all?

But sixthly, a necessity must be a very real necessity, if it is universal. Now what class of persons trying to be good does not stand in need of a director? Poor fellows who are trying to extricate themselves out of habits of sin, who have everything to learn, everything to begin, who have no arms and yet the enemy is down upon them, with traitors in their own souls, yet who can scarcely discern the treachery until its fatal consummation by some fresh act of sin, blind and blundering, weak and excited, cowardly and presumptuous, deceitful and disappointing, tiresome and exasperating, yet with a great thick mantle of God's dearest love and glorious converting grace thrown all over them, — do they not need a spiritual father? and who is the man who would not be a father to them, and die for their grand immortal souls, if he might, and if our Lord had not already taken all that luxury for Himself and left us scarce a share?

Are beginners in a perfect life in less need? See what difficult work they have to do, and such utter inexperience in the doing of it. No man can learn a trade without an apprenticeship. And this is such a trade! Discouragement would be the ruin of them, and yet none are so liable to it, and none also have so much which might rea. sonably discourage them. There they are, among the ruins of themselves. All around them are strewn broken 29 w resolutions, vows grown cold, distracted prayers, eccentric scruples, weak-minded enthusiasms, slovenly sacraments, plans that have suffocated each other for want of room, and all the inexpressible variety of tarnished tawdry thoughts and things and aspirations, scattered about like the finery of a burnt playJiouse in the muddy street. And here is the devil marching down upon them, and they must have all in order in a trice, and fight for their lives; for it is no other kind of fight with them just now.

The need of the advanced is hardly less. They are just entering on more supernatural ways. They are crossing the frontiers into a jealous empire. Are their passports in order? Have they nothing contraband in their luggage? They should be advised to travel only with light baggage. How the difficulties multiply! They cannot speak the language, nor catch the manners of the people. They are always in scrapes, and do not know what is wholesome to eat. They give offence, and they take offence, where none was intended on either side. They may get used to it all in time. Meanwhile, their delusions become at once more numerous, more secret, more contradictory, and more intricate. The devil displays greater ability than before, and the human spirit has arisen, crowned himself king, and commenced an usurpation which, all things considered, bids fair to last. The exercise of humility becomes more needful at every step, and it seems as if nothing but a director could supply a healthy, continuous, and refreshing exercise of that invigorating grace.

As to the perfect, I know nothing about them. But 1 see men as trees walking, and they seem to reel to and 6ro, as if divine love had intoxicated their human frailty.

They seem always at cross purposes with others, and often m plump contradiction to themselves. Occasionally, they appear not quite to know which road to take, or what to do. At other times they look stolid and unmeaning, and lifeless as the glistening caverns in the moon. Then again I see the air filled with balloons, and men in them taking every kind of indiscreet liberty. They get out and walk upon the clouds, or put on a pair of wings, and fly through sunset, or shoot up like a rocket, and dissolve iD spangles, or balance themselves on a star, or hide themselves in the Milky Way, or sail in opposite directions, as if each soul had a wind at its will. Not unfrequently I see them come down to the earth, in the poorest parachutes, or without them, with appalling velocity; and though I have no notion what their other movements up in the siderial space may mean, I feel satisfied that this parachute work is extremely dangerous, and unexceptionably wrong. How their director is to reach such people, I cannot tell, but I am sure they need one; and it is not every one who, like Catherine of Genoa, and Claudia of the Angels, has the Holy Ghost for sole director. I suspect some of the parachute souls dreamed He was directing them, and were fatally mistaken.

May I not from these six considerations legitimately infer the necessity of a spiritual director?

Now for the choice of him: this is my fourth point. There are various kinds of directors. One writer divides them into human, spiritual, and divine. He calls a human director one who goes according to the spirit of the world, and the maxims of human prudence. A soul is very unfortunate when it falls into such keeping aa that. A spiritual director he defines to be a man who leads us into mortification and prayer, but has not clear or consistent views of spirituality; so that he sometimes makes mistakes, though God for the most part blesses his purity of intention, and does not allow our souls to suffer loss. A divine director is a wholly supernatural man, who lives always in a flood of light, and guides us as if he read our hearts, and prophesied our future. Then directors have very various gifts. Some have a benediction for beginners, others for the more advanced, others for the perfect. Some are quite wonderful in their management of newly-converted persons. Some have a peculiar aptitude for educated and refined people, who make sad blunders with the poor. Some revel in cases of vocation, while others are not at all at home in them. Some have the magnificent grace of making the laboring poor interior, and supernaturalizing poverty and sufferings. Some are expert at scruples, others with interior trials. Some seem inevitably, with the holiest intentions and purest science, to involve their penitents in fancies and delusions, making them sentimental and unreal; while others have the gift of disenchanting the deluded, and of making their penitents at once spiritual, and yet natural common-sense persons. Hardly any one is a good director for all, and not often for one person all his life long. This must be borne in mind, because it has so much to do both with the choice and change of directors.

As to the choice of a director, what has been just said shows that we must be by no means precipitate. It is one of the most serious questions of our life, and the evil of delay is nothing to the mischief of precipitation. It must be the subject of long and fervent prayer, not with the foolish expectation of any miraculous token of God's will at the last, but to get the grace to choose with discernment, in faith, and without human respect. We must ask the special intercession of St. Joseph, the patron of interior souls. Whenever a real attraction to a devout life becomes manifest in our souls, and is more than a transient caprice of fervor, then is the time when God ia calling us to choose a director, if we have not already got one. We must look around us, see if we have the inward signs I mentioned earlier on, and then carefully separate all natural feelings from the choice. We must let it be either the deliberate selection of a prayerful and satisfied mind; which I like best, or the result of supernatural attractions, which I like least, because it is less under the control of cool resolve and sober calculation.

It seems singular to couple the change of a director with the choice; yet this must be my fifth point. On the whole, and speaking quite generally, the change of director is an evil. Yet we may err in four ways; either by changing too soon, or by changing at all, or by changing too late, or by never changing. There is nothing more perplexing than the distinguishing the right times from the wrong in this matter. The only thing to be said is that the change of our director is so grave a step and fraught with so many consequences, that God hardly ever brings the difficulty to our doors without giving us a more than common light along with it. If we have chosen without deliberation, we may have the less scruple in changing. When we find we do not advance, and are not conscious to ourselves of any abatement in our earnest desire to advance, and we think we perceive some special hindrance in the method of our direction, then we may at least take other advice, and entertain the question of 29* a change. Perhaps it will come to nothing. But whik he would be a very indiscreet adviser who should tell U9 to make light of such a change, I do not know that I am not more afraid of some who represent it as the hugest evil of the spiritual life, the mother of delusions, and tantamount to final perdition. I suspect that so far is it from being desirable that we should stick so scrupulously to our director (I speak diffidently), that when we have lost our liberty and ease with him, he has lost his grace for us; and that without fault on either side. Spiritual direction must be free as air, and fresh as the morning sun. Neither temptation nor scruple, neither mortification nor obedience, must be able to infuse into it one element of bondage. The moment they do, let us break the direction, and take the consequence. For the end of spiritual direction in all stages of the interior and mystical life is one and single and invariable, and it is liberty of spirit. The opposite doctrine does not belong to the wisdom of direction, but to the superstition of direction.

This thought brings me to my sixth point, which is the true catholic idea of our intercourse with our director. The first characteristic of this intercourse must obviously be openness. Our sins and imperfections, the working of our passions, our inward disorderly inclinations, our temptations and the secret suggestions of evil which haunt us, the style of architecture of our castles in the air, our good works, penances, devotions, lights, and inspirations, must all be open to him, not with superstitious minuteness, which degenerates into frivolity, but to such a degree as will enable him to be a fair judge of our interior condition We must also be obedient as well as open. We have chosen him for his spiritual doctrine, whereby he knows the ways of God, the tempter, and the human spirit; for his holiness, whereby he is zealous to advance those whom he directs; for his experience, whereby he gains a readiness in applying principles to practice; and for his aptitude at direction, natural, supernatural, or both combined. Hence we must see God in him: for this is the meaning of obedience. We must submit our judgment to him; for his science is his primary qualification, St. Theresa says our director should be learned and devout; but that if we cannot find both in one man, it is better to have the learning without the devotion, than the devotion without the learning. And of all the Saint's wise words, and they are innumerable, she nevei uttered one that was more like herself than that.

Unhappily this obedience to our director is a stumbling-block to many of us. I cannot think it would be so, if we had a clear idea of it, or which is the same thing, an unexaggerated idea of it. What shall I say to clear your thoughts without lowering them? In the first place a spiritual director is not a monastic superior. Our obedience to the last must be minute, to the first general. The superior's jurisdiction is universal, the director's only where we invite it, or he asks it and we accord it. The superior commands us unconsulted, the director's commands arise out of our own questions. Nigronius said he never augured well of a man who made his director take the initiative in spiritual direction. The superior turns into precept matters of supererogation, a director must have forgotten himself if he attempts anything of the kind. If we disobey a superior, we sin; it would require very peculiar and unusual circumstances to maka disobedience to our director any sin at all.

Now, the wrong use of a right thing is always bad. But the confounding of a spiritual director with a religious superior is fraught with specially pernicious consequences to our souls. If we are living in the world, and aiming at perfection amid the freedom of its distractions and pursuits, our undue subordination to our director is out of keeping with the rest of our life. It is a discord. It is a foreign element, which will cause either corruption or explosion, according to our temperament. It unmans us; and what a host of evils there are in that one word! Moreover, it plays the game of some one or other of the many forms of spiritual idleness, and secretly nourishes our self-love. We like to think we are obedient, and to feel that we are being governed. It is agreeable to us to live in the bustle of a perpetual spiritual administration. We hold endless cabinet councils, and grow pompous and absurd, uneasy, mysterious, and conceited. We fancy ourselves great people. We magnify our tiny experiences. At last we grow soft, effeminate, sentimental, feverish, and languid. In a great measure it does away with the seriousness of our relations with God, and leads us unawares into a kind of irreverence. We throw things upon our director which we have no power to throw upon any one but God. We lose the sense of God's immediateness, which is the secret of false spirituality, and ends in moral helplessness.

It is a monstrous thing to say; but it is unhappily no uncommon sight to see a soul made for high things and now gone all astray, simply because a false notion of the kind of obedience due to its director led it to surrender itself indolently to an idea of safety, as if it had transferred its conscience. We cannot get rid of our responsibility. In point of fact, it is physically as well as morally impossible to put our director into the position of a monastic superior, so as to make the famous words of the saints about blind obedience as true of the one office as the other. Let us ponder the words of St. Theresa. u My directors told me that what was a venial sin was no sin at all, and that what was mortal was only venial. This did me so much mischief that I do not think it superfluous to mention it here as a caution to others. For before God, as I plainly see, I was not excused by this. It is enough that a thing is not good, that we should abstain from it; and I believe that God on account of my sins permitted my directors to be deluded and then to delude me, and then that I should delude many others, by telling them what my directors told me. I was in this blindness for seventeen years." Schram, the Benedictine, quotes the passage, and adds, " Tremenda, theologia de ignorantiis sepe vincilibus." Yet it is, as all truth is, theology as salutary as it is tremendous.¹

Furthermore, as it must be the care of our director to watch and be slow, and thus not to interfere with the work of God in our souls, so also must it be our care not to interfere with that work by exaggerating our relations with our director, and putting upon him what does not belong to the austere simplicity of his office. We must not go to him too often, which is impatience and loss of time. Neither must we seek any extraordinary interview with him without thought and prayer. We must be sure of what we are going to ask, and that it is worth asking, and real, and not an impulse, or a first thought, or a wild idea, or a conclusion we have jumped to in a hurry and a heat. We must really be serious about these things; for they touch God. We must not prolong our interviews, nor say more than is necessary. Indeed our conversations with him, at least in brevity, pertinence, and forethought, should ever have some analogy with prayer. The penitents who talk most are the least obedient. "Believe me," said M. Lantages, superior of the Seminary of Puy, "it is not the long confessions that are the good ones." Neither should we go to our director merely for consolation) this is greedy, and unmanly. Spiritual direction is meant to elevate people: yet how often it debases them! This comes of our not remembering that it, like all things else in the direct service of God, must be thoroughly reascnable.

It only remains for me to speak of my seventh point, the sufferings which our director causes us. Our obedience to him, to be reasonable, must allow itself to be modified by time/ place, person, circumstances, country, proficiency, character, both his and our own, and companions. Yet even thus it will be a source to us of many Bufferings. I need say the less about them here, because I have enumerated them when speaking of patience. The mortification of our judgment is always painful, but it in pre-eminently painful when it concerns devotional tastes The discomfort of faucying ourselves misunderstood is not slight. His scanty words are intolerable to self-love. When he sees we lean too much upon him, he will draw his arm away, and we shall falter. He will leave us sometimes to ourselves to teach us to walk, though it may be at the risk of a sinless fall. He knows we shall never be brave for God, if we have not a certain amount of independence of character, even in spiritual matters. He will know how to combine this with humility. One of his greatest and most precious secrets is, how to keep intact all the rights of lowliness, without letting it swerve into poor-spiritedness and a craven spirituality.

We should beware of driving our director into much speaking, either by acting on his human respect or his natural kindness, or wearying him by importunity. There is after all little to be said where growth is so slow as it is in the spiritual life. A conversation between an oak and the woodman would surely soon come to an end, if growth and development, blight, birds, bees, and ivy, were the only subjects of conversation, and it was not allowed to pass into idle and irrelevant matters. For an oak does not make an inch a month, either of trunk or twig, and it could hardly expect to have its bark brushed and varnished, and picked out with gold. So the soul is not revolutionized every day. To-day is yesterday's brother, and to-morrow's also. What is there to be said? All this talking leads to our making new starts in new directions after each palaver. It is taking up devotions and throwing them down again, like a child restless amid his toys. It is heaping practices upon practices, and getting the fruit out of none of them. It is applying remedies, and then applying others before the first have had time to take effect. It is driving God. It is playing rashly with the proverbial delusions of spiritual communications. It is clouding God, and forcing Him up to the surface of the soul, when He is pleased to bury Himself in the depths of it.

It is better to go through the little vexations of our director's slowness and silence, than to run the risk of all these mischiefs. And none of these sufferings bring any real feeling of bondage along with them. Bondage is the only thing to dread. All else surely may be borne in so grave a cause. Why ask more of our spiritual than of our bodily physician? The office is analogous, though the subject-matter is so different. And then see what blessing we have: safety, victory, inward peace, the merit of obedience, and a good man's prayers.

I have seen a geranium brought up from the cellar when the spring-time came. It had been a mild winter, and in the warm darkness, it had grown an unwholesome growth! It hung down like a creeper, with lanky whitish-yellow shoots, and miserable jaundiced leaves. The growth had been abundant; and it would not be true to say that the abundance was the only good point about it; for it was the worst point of it all. There was but one course. It was cut down, planted out, and flowered the latest of its brethren that year, and very poorly after all. Such is the soul that has been over-directed; and the spring-time is eternity. Alas! in that matter there comes the cuttiug-down, but there cannot come the planting out. I never knew or read of any one who had a director, and then who suffered because he was too little directed. The souls damaged by over-direction would fill a hospital in any decently large town.

I have written with a host of authorities before me: and this I believe to be in the main, the mind of the most approved writers in the Church on this most difficult question. I have sought only one thing, not to swert* from their even-handed moderation.

Footnotes

1. The saint's words axe worthy of notice. "I thought," she says, " that I was not obliged to more than to believe them," (her directors.) Yo pensava che no era obligada a mas de creerlos. Vida cap. 5. This remarkable passage has, as might be expected, attracted considerable notice. It has not only been commented upon by Schram in his Theologia Mystica-j but also by Arbiol, the Franciscan, in his Desenganos Misticos, lib. iii. cap. 9, where he is treating of the delusions of those souls who appear to be far advanced in prayer, and rery little advanced in the practice of solid virtues. ↩