Chapter XX. The Right View of our Faults

The sweetest of all the sweet doctrines which St. Francis of Sales was inspired to teach us, was that which regarded, the right view of our own faults. The consideration of it falls very naturally into this place. On the one hand, we have got clear views of temptations and of scruples, and on the other, a perception of the necessity of an abiding sorrow for sin. That sorrow, as we now understand it, can be no source of scruples, but a right view of our own faults must fall in with and be a part of it. Unfortunately our faults form a great portion of ourselves, and it is plain that the management of them can be no slight affair in the spiritual life, and that our management of them depends very much upon the view we take of them.

Indeed, much of life depends upon taking right views of things. Time is saved. Mistakes are hindered. Sometimes we chance upon a short road to heaven. Not that the short roads are always the easiest. Strictly speaking, none are short and none are easy; but they may be comparatively so among themselves, and all are full of pleasantness and peace. What do we most abound in? Certainly, in faults. Perhaps a right view of them may be a short read to heaven. It will at all events, help us to make a road of what looks like a series of barriers.

S68 THE RIGHT VIEW OF OUR FAULTS.

If a good person were asked to give an account of himself, it would probably be somewhat after the following fashion:

I am constantly doing things which are wrong in themselves. It is not that I do them on purpose, or with forethought. I hope I do not commit any venial sin deliberately. It is the great object of my life, next to loving God, to avoid that. Yet neither on the other hand can I say that my falls are altogether surprises. They seem so at the time, but not when I come to look back upon them. The sense of guilt grows upon me in the retrospect, rather than reproaches me at the moment. And, worst of all, I see no visible improvement in myself in this matter. Again, when I do things which are outwardly right, nay, which are generous, and involve some amount of sacrifice, I continually detect some low motive in them. I cannot 6hake off human respect. Self-love seems inseparable even from my very thoughts, my very sacrifices. It is not as if this happened now and then, but it is going on all day. It runs parallel with the stream of life. I believe I have never done a good work in my life. A spoiled good work is my highest point.

But in prayer I am quite a different person. I seem to have entered another world. I am at my ease and at large. The aspirations of the saints appear to be mine. Desires of suffering, an appetite for calumny, tremendous penances, ardent resolutions, heroic deeds, all rush upon me at once, and express precisely what I am feeling most gtrongly in my interior life. Bold words, from which at other times I should have shrunk with reverence, fill my prayers. I plead the right of saints, and urge their petitions, and demean myself as if I was one. And all this before God! I do not mean to be insincere. I feel, or 1 fancy I feel, what I am saying. Yet when 1 3ome back to the level of my daily practice, I feel as if my prayer had been all an hypocrisy from beginning to end. I wish I could think that it were not so. There is no sort of proportion between my prayer and my practice. The first is always running ahead of the last, and so absurdly far ahead!

For when I come to practice, generosity in suffering is just what I cannot realize; and as to mortifications, they are simply to me what punishments are to a child. It would be as surprising to others as it is humiliating to myself, if I were to mention what little things I do for God, and what a laborious effort it takes to do them, and what immense pain it is. How I complain, and tremble, and put it off, and hunt for a justifiable dispensation, and sink back into comfortable spirituality, as soon as the momentary effort is over. The revelations I could make of my own pusillanimity, would be almost incredible. But I was grand at prayer in the morning, grand as a martyr at the block in front of one of my own castles in the air.

The upshot of the whole is, that I seem to myself to be getting worse and going back. My sensible fervors have gone, and I do not see that they have left formed habits behind them. I wish I could name any one imperfection that I could say had been effectually weeded out, or any one venial sin, whose crowded ranks had been thinned, or that I could show anything beyond a scratch here and there on my ruling passion. All that I can see is that I make as much effort as I used to do, perhaps irore, but apparently with less effect.

Now is a person who gives such an account of himself in a good way? Let me think. On the whole, Yes? I found my judgment on two things; the evident desire for perfection with which he began, and the fact of continued effort with which he ended. Starting then with these two things, he may reasonably take a consoling view of the rest. But let us speak of ourselves. Our faults are very numerous and very great: true. But is there anything to surprise us in them? From our own knowledge of ourselves and from what we knew of the measure of our grace, are they not what might have been expected? At times we have thought of our future humbly and prudently, was it very different from what has actually taken place? The fact is that neither in the kind nor in the degree of our faults, is there anything astonishing: and if nothing astonishing, then nothing discouraging. But this is not going far enough. There is something astonishing, and the astonishing thing is that our faults have not been greater. When we weigh ourselves against our temptations, our estimate of things is very different. How unlike ourselves we have happily been in many things! This can be nothing less than the work of grace. Instead of being peevish because we have been so bad, the wonder is that we have been so good, and the fear is lest we should be elated in seeing it.

Common-sense also has a word or two to say on the matter. The faults are committed. They have done their harm, and gone to God. There is no good in being cast down. There is much good in not being so. There is no good in being cast down; for the faults cannot be recalled. We may fidget about the circumstances, and worry oursdves by thinking how easily the evil might have been avoided. But the fault itself lost us some of our peace; why should we now lose more in self-vexation? Discouragement moreover is no part of penance. It atones for nothing, satisfies for nothing, merits nothing, impetrates nothing. It does not make us more careful next time. On the contrary oy dejecting us it makes us at once more open to temptation and less masculine in resisting it. But on the contrary there is much good in not being cast down. We shall be less teased with the imperfection in ourselves, and more occupied with the infidelity to God. To fall and not be out of spirits with it is not only to keep the courage we had, but to gain more. It is the humblest course, and on that account the most acceptable to God. It is the most reasonable, and therefore has the greater blessing.

Sometimes a saint gives us a new thought, which for what we can see is not to be found in any of the spiritual writers before him. It is his contribution to the tradition. When he has said it, it sounds so common-place that we wonder we never thought of it for ourselves, like the sayings of all great minds. Such a thought is that of St. Francis of Sales, the man of many new thoughts, when he taught us that if in the spiritual life we often fall without perceiving it, so it must be true that we as often get up again without perceiving it. It sounds like a pleasantry j but if a man who has the infelicitous habit of disquieting himself about his faults, would once in a way take it for the subject of his hour's meditation, ho would suck from it the very marrow of spiritual wisdom I should spoil it, if I enlarged upon it.

We may imagine that we take a sufficiently low view of ourselves, and estimate our attainments, as humility would approve. But any disquietude about our faults, which is more than transient, or a temptation, is a proof to us that we have secretly been putting a far higher price i>pon ourselves than we were warranted in doing. And this turning king's evidence against us is the only good such disquietude ever does, and that is as it were in spite of itself. But does not God occasionally show us fearful things in the depths of our own souls? Sometimes a family with the sunshine of domestic peace and virtue all around it has tenanted an ancient house for years, when lo! the necessity of some repairs leads to the discovery of secret dungeons and horrible places under ground, with traces of misery suffered there, and of guilt perpetrated. So it is in our own souls. The access of some unusual temptation, the accidental waking up of some long-dormant passion, or a flash of supernatural light from God, illuminate for a moment unexplored cavities and unexpected materials for evil. It may be that the reading or hearing of great crimes may have brought it home to us. But by whatever means we make the discovery, there can be no doubt that we carry about with us immense capabilities of uncommitted sin. Nothing but the merciful turns of a considerate Providence, and the constraining empire of grace, prevent these from being realized in acts. 0 how we crouch under God's mantle, and hold to His feet, when we first get sight of these things! What an amazing, what a blessed disproportion between the evil we do and the evil we are capable of doing, and seem sometimes on the very verge of doing! If my soul has grown tares, when it was full of the seeds of nightshade, how happy ought I to be! And that the tares have not wholly strangled the wheat, what a wonder it is, an operation of grace, the work of the sacraments 1 If the heathen emperor thanked God daily for the temptations which He did not allow to approach him, how ought not we to thank Him for the sins we have not committed 1

Then, again, have we not times in which, I must express myself so, grace seems to. stir up the very dregs of our nature, and throw them into a state of fiery effervescence, by some combination of supernatural chemistry? What devils, what beasts, we look to ourselves! For a moment we feel as if we were polluted by the sins which we might have committed, and though a dream, it is all so life-like that the horrid impression haunts us for days. We are as heavy as if we had very blood upon our souls. At these moments, and without one atom of vanity or the least fear of complacency, the grateful thought of what we are, the thought which another while vexes and disheartens us, is the pillow of rest to which we turn, to forget in the sense of God's mercies the thought of what we might have been, and yet may be. Strange that our little faults should ever be the chosen place of our repose!

Here is another consoling vision. Compare the drossj mixture which we are of God's grace and the human spirit, with what we should be if, without any touch, or taste, or odor of the devil, God left your human spirit simply to itself. M. Olier could not realize this, but God made him see it by subtracting His succors from him. He showed him what we should be if He were merely to leave us to ourselves. The intense interest of the passages must excuse the length of the quotation.

"This subtraction takes place," says M. Olier, "with regard to sensible grace; for the divine goodness does 32 not cease even then to succor us with insensible graces, of a still more efficacious kind. The default of Hia sensible graces causes strange effects and often prodigious humiliations in the soul. Under the influence of those succors the will and the heart are drawn to God with delight, aud something may be observed even in our exterior, the way in which we carry ourselves and the works we do, of an unparalleled sweetness, modesty, and equability. When God withdraws these sensible gifts He leaves the soul in its nakedness, and as great lights came from them before, there is nothing left in the soul now but trouble and confusion. Touched with compassion for my state, God mercifully took these gifts away from me, to show me what I really was, and thus tenderly disabuse me of my error. It is really an effect of huge mercy thus to leave us to ourselves, else we should go on esteeming self, and appropriating to ourselves what belongs to God only, until perhaps we might fall into a blindness like that of Lucifer. God thus shows visibly to the soul the depths of its own abjection, and so convinces it of its misery. For this sensible grace, which reined in the corrupt man and held him in check, having now retired, everything is changed both in the interio and exterior. The Holy Spirit then leaves him to fee* the amount of his natural unruliness and the corruption of his desires. The bridle is thrown upon the neck of ihe passions. We feel nothing but anger on the slightest occasions, envy, aversions, sentiments of self-love, until our pride breaks out externally in the fierce and haughty expression of our countenance. Yet very often the soul does not at all contribute to this by any thought or voluntary emotion. It is the natural effect of a rising inuudation of pride, now that He is gone who OCu*d repress it, and bid it hide itself.

" Thus when the Holy Spirit, who had raised He soul to God for a time, retires, the soul, no longer sustained by the fortitude of this powerful principle, falls In upon itself, and seems by the fall to relapse into an abyss of obscurity, darkness, corruption, and confusion, an abyss of passions which, like wild beasts, gnaw and tear themselves. In a word the soul feels as if it had fallen from heaven to hell, so appalling is our own reality to ourselves. How much more then to the eye of God, who is purity and sanctity itself. Thus God leaves in the midst of us that fiery furnace, the concupiscence, which, no less than the ashes of Sodom and Gomorrha, advertises us of the judgments of God pronounced against Adam and his posterity. It is a mouth of hell which we bear about inside ourselves, vomiting a thousand stenches insupportable to God, and which draw down upon our sinful flesh the chastisements of His avenging arm. I am not speaking of the sins which we have committed by our own malice, but only of the humiliation common to all the world. I do not wonder at the saints arming themselves with holy fury against themselves, and furnished with instruments of penance, cutting their flesh to pieces and making their blood to flow, in the justest of martyrdoms. It was to show men what they ought to suffer in their criminal flesh, that the Son of God vouchsafed to be scourged, and to have His blood flow, and His bones be dislocated. So when the sensible succors of grace retire, and this subtraction lays our malice bare, we feel it an ease and a relief to be the butt of injuries and outrages, and the object of treatment the most rigorous and the most undeserved.

lt See how these subtractions of grace work! First o\ all they give us a plain and visible knowledge that of ourselves we are nothing but sin. Then comes humility, which makes us love to be treated both by God and men as our sin deserves. God only subtracts these sensible graces to put more excellent ones in their place, like a gardener who roots up one tree to plant a better. But. as it is not His will always to accomplish the same operations in all men, He does not prepare them all in the same way. As it is not His intention to take an equally intimate possession of all, He does not so utterly and radically detach some from themselves as He does others. He makes us feel these subtractions and derelictions in proportion to the gifts He intends to confer upon us; and because it is more common to be proud of the gifts of grace than of those of nature, and yet that the former pride is more odious to Him than the latter, this kind Master, careful of our good, makes the gifts of grace rather than those of nature the theatre of these subtractions."¹

So far M. Olier. Oh! a thousand faults that were not mortal sins, were better far than this nature, emancipated from the devil, yet without grace, and enjoying its own wretched prerogatives, would be! See what we are at bottom. Why we are saints compared to our real untempted selves, selves uncompounded with grace and God's compassion!

From all these considerations I infer that we ought to be, I do not say thoroughly contented, but fairly happy, if as time goes on we do not add to the kinds of venial sin of which we have to accuse ourselves, nor increase the numbers of those which beset us, nor fall into those with more advertence than before, nor give way more resistingly to surprises of temptation, and still continue to entertain even in our worst times an habitual preference for God. These are five sources of moderate cheerfulness, which, like Cowper's cups of tea, while they cheer, will not inebriate.

But is it safe and wise to give ourselves up to these considerations? Do we run no risk in thus taking our faults quietly? Let us then now consider the propriety and spiritual wisdom of so doing. What is humble is safe, provided it be true humility. Now, to be indifferent to faults, and to make no endeavor to improve, would not be humility, but lukewarmness or irreligion. But it is a very different thing to take our faults quietly, and all the while be doing our very best to mend, and wishing intensely to be better. Neither is there any danger of laxity in it, because we are looking to God j and laxity implies a downward, not an upward eye. It leads us sway from self. Even self-love makes us hate self. So that ill this taking of our faults quietly is in reality based 32* upon a supernatural principle, which both implies and ftugmjnts interior mortification.

Moreover, quietness is absolutely necessary for spiritual growth under ordinary circumstances. There are sometimes brief tempests in the interior when we grow, like children in an illness. But these are eccentric phenomena. It is plain that quietness must be the prevailing atmosphere of an ascetic. We must be quiet in order to pray. Mortification must be quiet, or else it will be merely vehement nature, growing in fury as it grows in pain. Confidence in God must be quiet. The very word itself is full of the sound of rest. The receiving of the sacraments must be quiet. Noise and hurry would be simple irreverence. Our love of others must be quiet, else it will degenerate into earthly tenderness. In a word, there is hardly a function of the spiritual life which does not require quietness for its exercise and fulfilment. Yet faults are universal, daily, in all subject-matters, thought, word, deed, look, omission. They cover the whole surface of life incessantly; so that if we do not take them quietly, we shall never be quiet at all. This is so absurd a result, that it is as good as a demonstration that we must take our faults quietly.

The desire of perfection is, as we have already seen, a gift from God, and a great gift; and a generous and earnest pursuit of virtue is necessary to perfection. Yet we must not be inordinately attached, either to the desire or the pursuit. If it is God's will to hold us back, we must be content to be held back. The goodness of a thing is no justification of an unruly eagerness in acquiring it. Thi eagerness of the pursuit will more than counterbalance the blessing of the acquisition. Our falls are permitted. Our share in them must be wiped away by cheerful, hopeful sorrow. The rest God will look to, and we must be at peace.

There is also this other disadvantage in the opposite line of conduct. Discouragement necessarily brings with it a greediness for consolation. The more we are disquieted, the more we fly to what will solace and soothe. And this is bringing back self Again into everything, besides unnerving us for genuine struggle, and giving us a disrelish for mortification. Consolations from creatures never really help, but very often hinder; *<nd an appetite for them is a bad augury of progress.

But in the spiritual life there is never a permission without a caution, never a relaxation without a saving clause against laxity. So in this case we must be careful to distinguish hopefulness from self-conceit. To be quiet under our faults is not to be free and easy with them; and cheerfulness is a very different thing from vanity. But how to discern between the two? Hope implies a certain amount of doubt, and that again implies fear: so that when we hope in time to advance beyond the circle of particular faults, we have some, but a subordinate, fear, that possibly we may not succeed. That fear is plainly self-distrust, and it is subordinate, else it would be discouragement. Conceit has no fear, because it has no doubt, and no hope, because it does not contemplate its success as being in any way uncertain. So that self-distrust is one test by which we can distinguish hopefulness from conceit. A confidence in God more than equalling (ur distrust of self is another sign Conceit trusts in itself; and in its reckonings calculates as a right what humility sees to be a grace. A third test is to be found in the gradual growth of the supernatural in our feelings, motives, and desires. If we look more to God, if we lean more on sacraments, if we prefer the divine will to our own spiritual advancement, then we may be sure that our quietness with our faults is hopefulness, and not conceit.

The whole question comes to this. There are two views of growth in grace, the self-improvement view and the will-of-God view. In these views, for what is more operative than a view? is the root of all the error and of all the wisdom of the matter. If a man puts self-improvement before him as the end of life, almost every step that he takes will be wrong. If he works away at himself, as a sculptor finishes off a statue, he will get more out of proportion, and bring out more black marks and gray blotches, the longer he chisels. Not a motive will be right, not an aim true. If he takes up his particular examen and his rule of life, and his periodical penances, as merely medicinal appliances, if he shuts himself up in a reformatory school of his own, if he models his whole spiritual life upon the complacent theory of self-improvement, his asceticism will be nothing better than a systematizing and a glorifying of self-will. Under such auspices he can never be a spiritual man, and he will hardly be a moral man. Yet how common is this miserable view, even among men living right in the heart of a system so intensely supernatural as that of the Catholic Church.

The will-of-God view, on the contrary, refers every thing, but diligence and correspondence, to Him. A man follows God's lead, and does not strike out a road for himself. He models himself in his measure and degree on the imitation of Jesus. He seeks to please God, and acts out of love. His inconsistencies neither astonish nor tease him. An imperfection annoys him, not because it mars the symmetry of his character, but because it grieves the Holy Ghost. Sacraments, and scapulars, and beads and medals, relics and rites, all find their places in his system; and the natural and the supernatural form one whole. God is always pleased when a man seeks humbly, and in appointed ways, to please Him. Hence this man is quieted, cheerful and hopeful with his faults. The gaiety of endless success is in his heart. God is his Father. Whereas the self-improvement man either does1 not succeed in improving himself, or he does so too slowly, or he loses on one side what he gains on the other, or people will persist in being scandalized at his edifying deportment, for with such men edification is the crown of virtue, and if they do not edify, they have failed. Hence he is unquiet, sulky, and desponding about his faults. The bitterness of endless piecemeal failure is in his heart.

After death we shall have many revelations. I suspect the hiddenness of our spiritual growth here on earth will give rise to some. How surprised many humble spirits will be at the extraordinary beauty of their souls, when death has disengaged them! So much more is always going on than we in the least suspect I

3M2 THE IRRELIGIOUS AND THE ELEOT.

Footnotes

1. Vie. i. 285. It should be observed that the epithets, which M. Jlier uses, betoken his doctrine on the subject of original sin, which appears in a very startling way in his Catechism of the Interior Life; where, to say the least, he has pushed it to the extremes! limits which orthodoxy will allow. Where I have had to use adjectives qualifying our fallen nature and its propensities elsewhere in the book, I have spoken out of the belief that the state of origlua! sin is like that of pura natura, with the exception that it is a stat< of privation. As a man's views of original sin exercise a great influence on his spiritual life, I have thought it right to take exception to M. Olier's expressions, without intending to say anything disrespectful towards him of whom I have observed elsewhere that of all the uncanonized servants of God whose lives I have read, he mnst resembles a canonized saint. ↩