Chapter XXVI. Fervor

Fervor is the state of the saints on earth, and in one Bense of the blessed in heaven; and in its degree, it ought to be the normal state of all who are aiming at perfection. It is at once the growth of holiness, and the strength by which holiness grows. Every chapter hitherto has tended to this, and to avoid recapitulation, I shall confine myself now to conveying a clear idea of genuine fervor. This seems what is most wanted. How few could define fervor if they were asked!

Fervor, considered as a state, is a similitude to God. It is equable like God. It is moderate like God. It is hidden like God, only escaping to view by its own irrepressible excellence. It is silent like God. Praise is in no way its food, neither is it desirable for it. It thinks long before acting, as God condescends to seem as if He also did. It is unanxious about results, which is one of the marvels of God. And it is fiery like God, consuming obstacles, and its very power causing it to make no noise. We must meditate separately on each of these clauses, if we would gain a clear notion of fervor.

Fervor acts in the practical spiritual life as might be expected from the above description. It has no fits and starts. It is never run away with by a new idea. It never boils over, and puts the fire out, that is, it never quenches the Holy Spirit by indiscretion. It is not eager for heroic opportunities, though it expatiates magnificently on them when it has them. It is a stable vital force in the soul, thrusting its way with uniform power and noiseless pressure. Common trivial things persevered in and animated by an unremitting attention, these are its delight, and the infallible proofs both of its presence and its power. As a graceful person walks or stoops or stands gracefully, and whatever he does is done with a grace, so pure charity is the gracefulness of fervor. It is punctual as it were spontaneously and by nature. It omits nothing, anticipates nothing, defers nothing. When time is lost, it can make it up without precipitation, and without compressing, or elbowing, or dislodging other duties. Its conduct is a sort of mirror, upon whose faultless crystal, eternity and heaven and the likeness of God are forever unbrokenly imaged, beautiful to see, commonplace as the commonest daily life, and yet enchanting as a fairy tale, and heroic as the old apostolic days. Its smile is sweet and serene, like an angel's. It can be angry, but beautifully, divinely, attractively. But it cannot frown; it is bo flooded with inward peace it has lost the power. It cannot brood sadly or gloomily; for its nature is as that of the undulations of light. It is sweet to the taste as well as bright to the eye, and it makes music as it undulates, and it smells of the flowers of Eden. It is as if the savor of the Fall had never passed upon it, as the odor of fire passed not on the garments of the Three Children. It is the only thing in the world that is in perfect keeping and proportion; for it bears a proportion in its conduct to the claims of God upon the soul. This is what makes its beauty austere. It is one of the an- 41 2F fciques, an antique of the Christian deserts, of the old monasteries, of the palaces whose kings wore sackcloth beneath their ermine. We could adore it, it is so beautiful and godlike; were it not that it says to us with the angel in the Apocalypse, See thou do it not j for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren who have the tes» timony of Jesus.¹

What are the fruits of this fervor? Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart of man conceived. The variegated splendors of heaven, the riches of the treasures at God's Right Hand, those are the golden fruits of its eternal autumn. It does no more than bloom here; but its blossoms are more healing than the fruits of other things. An infusion of their leaves is the wine, the medicine, and the nutriment of the soul. First of all they give us courage, a courage to go even beyond nature, and to keep up the fight when by the laws of our being we should have yielded. So that we may resemble our dearest Lord, who supported Himself supernaturally to suffer, and made Himself live by miracle in order to love and suffer more, and drank many a cup of various bitterness to the dregs, when those that had gone before would naturally have brought about His death. Fervor gives us a self-distrust because of the deep Irnowledge it conveys to us of the nature of divine grace, and of ourselves. Mortification, which is a mountain of toil to the cold and lukewarm, is to fervor a relief and a necessity. It is the ordinary safety-valve, by which it allows its fires to escape, which otherwise would shrivel what they ought only to mature. When St. Francis of Sales came to die, his last lesson, the crowning part of his long, deep, fiery, ffEfcvoft. 483 beautiful wisdom, was Ask nothing and refuse nothing This is a short, perhaps inspired, definition of fervor. It is the " holy iniifference" of St. Ignatius become domesticated as a permanent majestic habit of the soul. It has no choice; it takes things as God sends them. This is the most enviable part of its loveliness. Yet strange to say, by a secret of its own, it knows how to combine with this almost passive tranquillity the two apparently contradictory excellencies of being immediate and unintermitting. It is swift as lightning. It darts on its duties, like the rapid noiseless hawk, and is down, and up again poised in air, so that our eyes doubt if in truth we saw its descent and its rising again. And it holds on its course like the smooth earth turning day and night on its unseen axle Thus immediately and untiredly it works at present duties; and thus immediately and untiredly it loses no time between duties. I believe it sees God, and is always copying, within its sublime possibilities, the gracious mysteries of the Divine Nature.

Are there any rocks upon which fervor can make shipwreck? No! it would cease to be fervor before it could run on a rock; for it would see visible rocks, and it would divine sunken rocks, and would never neglect its chart. But there is a false fervor which is always running on rocks, and we may know it by the- rocks it runs upon. It is a history of ship-wrecks from first to last. There is a fervor, which looks fine, and seemingly sails well, but when it has caught the wind full in its sails, it begins judging others both in thought and word, imputing motives, and criticizing the navigation of its neighbors. In a moment you hear the dull sound of the strike. With what a monf en turn she went upon the rocks! And now the harmless summer sea, whose fault the disaster eauU in no wise be accounted, is covered with the shivered timbers of a broken and lost spiritual life. There is another fervor, like that of the Pharisee's prayer, which consists more in the contempt of others, than in a loving hatred of ourselves. This contempt is a very commor habit of mind in these days, and nothing can be mora incompatible with spirituality. There is a third fervor, which is the intoxication of a weak head and a vain will with one or more spiritual ideas, and the result of which is a little crude practice of mortification with a very abundant spirit of reforming things, persons, places, domestio circles and institutes. A fourth fervor is the singularity of a very active but one-sided and self-sufficient mind. And a fifth is the mere life of changeableness, with its prolific plans, superficial rapidity, and loudness of brief and brittle purposes. These are sometimes called the rocks on which fervor strikes and makes shipwreck of itself. But it is surely more true to say that they are counterfeit fervors, which have nothing in common with the austere and beautiful thing which we are considering. Yet genuine fervor has most unjustly to bear the burden of their misdoings. Hence the scandal which these indiscreet fervors give, which would be no scandals if they were known to be what they really are. They assume principles which do not belong to them. They wear oorrowed clothes and call themselves by other persons' lames; and then by their vagaries fatigue all good people <n their neighborhood. It is these false fervors which briDg piety into disesteem, as well by their obtrusiveness, as by their inconsistencies and inequalities. With them everything is exaggerated, doctrine, practice, ritual, and mortification. They are ruled by the spirit of publicity. They deal in broad principles and round assertions. They like to differ from all around them, while agreeing is tame and uninteresting. They present to people an image of God without His beauty; and what can be more terrible than this, which is the opposite of all He has ever been pleased to do Himself? Counterfeit fervors, unlike most other counterfeits, copy nothing in their original but its fires. In all other things they are in even verbal contradiction to it. And yet how sad to think that true fervor, all in celestial armor clad, grave, tranquil, majestic, serene, establishing everywhere the royalties of God in the human soul, should have to bear the burden of the wild and puerile furies of half-converted, half-cleansed, and not so good as half-humbled souls!

I said I would confine myself to conveying a clear idea of genuine fervor. If I have also given a picture of these caricatures of fervor, it is to make the true idea clearer. I have now three observations to make, to which some importance is to be attached.

First, it is a common idea that fervor is part of our training, part of our noviciate, something by the help of which we get out of certain difficulties; and when wo have done with it, it passes in its turn. Every one has it, or ought to have it, as children should have the measles, and it goes from one to another doing its work, with more or less success. This I think is a not uncommon idea of fervor. We must take this then as our first fixed point about the doctrine of fervor, that it is, not a transient thing which does a work and passes off; but that it is a permanent state; nay, that its whole essence is in its 41* permanence, and that it has the fewest alternations of any state which is known to human fragility and inconstancy.

Secondly, fervor is a tried state; and therefore not to be confounded with the effervescence of conversion. This last is essentially transient. It comes with a commission, and goes when it is executed. Nevertheless, we must not think lightly of this effervescence, or, as it is sometimes called, our first fervors. They came to us from God, and were freighted with a hundred benedictions. They were young, perhaps, and their zeal was indiscreet, and their taste questionable, and their conceit unquestionable. But amid it all there was a sweet power of God, which neither reverence nor gratitude will permit us now to despise. What God has once touched is sanctified. Never let us speak lightly, or think lightly, of what God once made a channel of grace, even if it were in our darkest days. 0 how many of us may have cause to look wistfully back even to the rawness of those begin, nings, and to pine for a purity of intention and a simplicity of affectionate good-will which now perhaps is far from us, and nothing better come in its stead! Those first fervors do not come twice. If we have not used them, we have abused them. If they have gone and left their work undone, nothing will do it now. We must be the worse for the want of their work to the last day of life. It is as if an angel had come to us, and had gone, and left no blessing because we were not humble enough to ask one. But we may come to have genuine fervor without having had them. It is like the sweetness which the maturity of sorrow gives to the Christian soul compared with the sweetness of sunny generous youth It h 4 come out of trial. It has learned secrets. It has washed its robes in the Blood of the Lamb.

Thirdly, by some perversity of mind men will always picture fervor to themselves as something which is about tc cool down. It were truer to deem of it as ever on the increase. For it is the characteristic of fervor to be always augmenting, and to increase with very visible yet still tranquil rapidity towards death, just as a stone seeking its centre grows rapid and impetuous as it nears it. We may prophesy death sometimes by the way fervor sucks us in and overwhelms us with divine love. 0 that we may feel it so, as body weakens, as ailments multiply, as sorrows bend our backs, and pains increase; so that we may pass out of the world, not cold, not lukewarm, not seeming to hang on to God by threads of grace or a timely sacrament, but all in a glow of spiritual health and love, a sweet purgatory which will carry us clear over that painful one which lies beyond the grave, and is so tedi<raa Mid so siow in its sacred operation* 1

Footnotes

1. Apoc. xix. 10. ↩