Chapter III. How to Make the Most of our Signs of Progress

I must now suppose the soul of my pilgrim to have some or all of the signs of progress enumerated in the first chapter. It cannot be content with merely contemplating them; it must set to work to cultivate them: and how is this to be done? This is the question to which the present chapter must furnish an answer. But a word of general advice at the outset. At this early stage of the devout life we must be careful not to take too much upon ourselves, not to fly too high, not to promise God great austerities, nor burden ourselves with numerous practices. We must not be cowardly and fainthearted; but we must be moderate and discreet. To be gentle with ourselves is not necessarily to be indulgent to ourselves. The punishment that is not too much for a man would kill or maim a child.

In the spiritual life there are generally particular aids of grace or means of grace appropriated to particular epochs; and just as this epoch has its own dangers, presumption and discouragement, so it has its two aids or means, recollection and fidelity; and its great work at present is to get used to these two things. In our beginnings, while our first fervours were burning in our hearts, we hardly felt the need or realized the importance of these things. They came of themselves. Impulses of grace did it all; and the generosity of young love 4* supplied for a great deal of painful and dry self-discipline. Thus we were recollected without feeling it,. and faithful without knowing it. But those days are passed away.

Many books have been written upon recollection, of more paragraphs than I must use words. To put it quite shortly, recollection is a double attention which we pay first to God and secondly to ourselves; and without vehemence or straining, yet not without some painful effort, it must be as unintermitting as possible. The necessity of it is so great that nothing in the whole of the spiritual life, love excepted, is more necessary. We cannot otherwise acquire the habit of walking constantly m the presence of God; nor can we without it steer safely through the multitude of occasions of venial sin which surround us all day long. The whispered inspirations of the Holy Ghost pass away unheard and unheeded. Temptations surprise us and overthrew us; and prayer itself is nothing but a time of more nian usual distractions because the time out of prayer is not spent in recollection. The very act by which we apply our attention to prayer does little more than empty our minds of our duties, so as to give more room for distractions than we had while hand and head and heart were in the occupations of daily life.

This habit of recollection is only to be acquired by degrees. There is no royal road to it. We must make the occasional practice of silence one of our mortifications, if we can do so without singularity or ostentation; and seeing that for the most part we all talk more in conversation than others would wish us to do, it would not be hard to mortify ourselves in this way. We should also watch jealously any eagerness to hear news, and to know what is going on in the great world around us. Until we feel the presence of God habitually and can revert to Him easily, it is astonishing with what readiness other subjects can pre-occupy and engross us; and it is just this which we cannot afford to let them do. Newspapers keep not a few back from perfection. Visiting the Blessed Sacrament daily is another means of acquiring recollection. We feel the visit long after it is over. It makes a silence in our hearts and wraps an atmosphere around us, which rebuke the busy spirit of the world. The practice of retaining some spiritual flower, maxim or resolution, from our morning's meditation, in order to supply us with matter for ejaculatory prayer during the day, is a great help to the same end. Bodily mortification is a still greater, especially the custody of the senses, when we can practise it unnoticed. But the greatest help of all is to act slowly. Eagerness, anxiety, Melioration, precipitancy, these are all fatal to recollection. _jet us do everything leisurely, measuredly and slowly, and we shall soon become recollected, and mortified as well. Nature likes to have much to do, and to run from one thing to another; and grace is just the opposite of this.

I do not know a better picture of recollection than Fenelon's description of grace, which he sent to a person who was just going into a convent. "God would have you wise, not with your own wisdom, but with His. He will make you wise, not by causing you to make many reflections, b'lt on the contrary by" destroying all the unquiet reflections of your false wisdom. When you shall no longer act from natural vivacity, you will be wise without your own wisdom. The movements of grace are simply ingenuous, infantine. Impetuous nature thinks much and speaks much. Grace thinks little and says little, because it is simple, peaceable, and inwardly recollected. It accommodates itself to different characters. It makes itself all to all. It has no form nor consistence of its own; for it is wedded to nothing; but takes all the shapes of the people it desires to edify. It measures itself, humbles itself, and is pliable. It does not speak to others according to its own fulness, but according to their present needs. It lets itself be rebuked and corrected. Above all things, it holds its tongue, and never says anything to its neighbour which he is not able to bear: whereas nature lets itself evaporate in the heat of inconsiderate zeal." *

The peculiar rewards which recollection brings with U bIiow how appropriate a grace it is to this particular epocli of the spiritual life. The difficulties of prayer are more easily surmounted, and some of its more dangerous delusions avoided. It seems also to prevail more with God when it is offered from a recollected heart, and the answers come quicker and more abundantly. Sweetness and sensible devotion once more revisit the soul along with the peace in which recollection plunges it; and liberty of spirit, arising from the detachment from all earthly things, which is gradually the consequence of recollection, enables us to fly, rather than to walk, along the path of perfection.

Without recollection, this liberty of spirit becomes mere license and dissipation, and our spiritual life nothing but * presumptuous imitation of the freedoms which the saints have purchased by years of heroic self-restraint and disinterested love. How many fall into this pitfall, whence * Lettres, tome v., p. 398 they are drawn out only to go down into Egypt as bonds-men! For recollection is itself a holy captivity, to which we are unwilling to submit; but from which we only free ourselves to meet a worse and harder slavery. Vanity and cowardice are equally the sworn foes of recollection; for to vanity it is always unfolding pictures of self which are anything but flattering, and cowardice is perpetually annoyed by its loud calls to reform and mortification, which grow more irksome the longer they are delayed.

In a word, at this season of our pilgrimage, external things, though a necessary probation, are a trial almost above our grace to bear. They begin by engaging, possessing, pre-occupying us; and no sooner are our minds completely filled by them, than they beguile our hearts, and entice us into a thousand human attachments, which, however spiritual their pretexts may be, are nothing more than a veritable slavery. The mind and heart thus •ubdued, nothing is wanting but the third and last process of corrupting us, which is accomplished by dissipation, sensuality, and the maxims of the world. We may be sure then that without recollection we shall make no progress.

Fidelity is the other great aid of this epoch of the spiritual life. What is meant by it is this. Even although we may not be living under a rule of life, still as a matter of fact the duties and devotions of one day very much resemble those of another. It is practically as if we promised God certain things, and a particular round of religious observances: so much so that conscience reproaches us whenever we causelessly intermit any of them. Thus these daily observances come to be a kind of condition of our perseverance. They acquire a sort of sanctity, and become the ordinary channels by which God pourc His grace into our souls. The tempter sees all this, and estimates this daily perseverance at its just value. He puts forth all his strength to throw us out of it, and makes us fretful and irregular. He makes it feel heavy to us as a weight of lead. Or he represents it to us as a dangerous formality. Or he reminds us that we are not bound to it either by obedience or by vow. Or he contrives that we should read something that was meant for scrupulous persons, and mistakenly apply it to ourselves. Or he makes us fancy that such regularity is not good for our health. Any pretext will do, so long as he can allure us into unfaithfulness, either to the movements of grace, or to our routine of spiritual exercises. His anxiety to make us unfaithful is the token to us of the paramoun importance of fidelity.

The legitimate decay of our first fervours, when their time was accomplished, has naturally thrown us more upon ourselves. This is an anxious thing, though it was always intended, and must have come sooner or later. But one consequence of it is that it has become more necessary than ever for us to wear a yoke of some kind, ind to learn what ascetical writers call the spirit of captivity. This is of great value to us, as it makes all our conquests and acquisitions real, and preserves them for us. Moreover, we stand in need of cheerfulness to face the long outstretching desert that lies before us; and nothing keeps alive in us a holy joy more effectually than fidelity to grace and our appointed observances. The sense of wretchedness which follows frequent or habitual laxity, drives us tc seek consolation from creatures, and to re-enter the world that we may have the pleasure of forgetting ourselves thew awhile, and hiding ourselves from the merciful persecution of exciting grace. Besides which, the formation of virtuous habits is interrupted by our unfaithfulness, and this weakens our whole position, and makes our future harder, while actual ground also it lost by the intermission. In a word, fidelity is the ra* material of perseverance; and to perceive this, is to sec that its importance cannot be exaggerated.

These then are for the present our two guardian angels, recollection or a constant peaceful attention to God ana the issues of our own hearts, and fidelity, as well to the inspirations of grace as to the daily practices which counsel, obedience or our own choice have caused us gradually to bind upon ourselves. Bearing this in mind, I come to a direct answer to my question, what are we to do in order to cultivate the signs of progress which we perceive in ourselves? I will make five recommendations.

1. Let us at once do something more for God than we are doing at present. Let us examine what we actually do, and see what it amounts to, and how far it exacts any effort from us. Let us think whether we could not bear more, and yet not faint beneath the burden. Can we add anything, without much hardship? I put this last question, because I am sure that just now it is the safe course to pursue. We shall be all the more heroic for it in the end. There is no heroism like discretion. Watch the Church canonizing a saint, and you will see how this idea haunts her and pursues her. But whatever we add, however trifling it may be, should be something to be seriously persevered in. It must not be a novena, or s, month's prayer, but something solid. And do not l*t -as be hasty in deciding that we cannot afford to do more at present. Be cautious; but be generous as well.

2. There is however something which we can infallibly do) and that is, put a more interior spirit into what we ctually do. Some men are so shocked by the sight of any wanton waste in housekeeping, that quite apart from all mercenary considerations, it makes them downright melancholy. We may well be sorrowful in the spiritual world to see the waste of good words and works for the mere want of an interior spirit and a supernatural intention. Men are sowing good seed on rocks all the day long. Alas that it should be so! For, with a little pains, how easy it seems to aim each of our actions to the greater glory of God, and inwardly to unite our will to His in all we plan or do or suffer. The difference between an action with this interior intention and without it may almost be called infinite; and the results of the practice to our souls in the way of holiness are immense. The results of prayer and mortification are not to be compared with those of an interior spirit. Of course time is required to mature them. They do not manifest themselves in a day. Nothing is less revolutionary than the spiritual life. Its changes are constitutional, imperceptible and slow. We must not imagine we shall find ourselves saints when we have practised this interior spirit for a month. But we may be quite sure that if we persevere, something great will come of it.

3. Another way of cultivating the signs of progress which we perceive in ourselves is to pray for a greater desire of perfection. I repeat what I said before, that we do not value this mere desire at its proper price. If we did, we should make more use of it; for we always

Use what we esteem. It is in reality praying against worldliness, accustoming ourselves to unworldly standards and ideas, and destroying the old influence which the corrupt maxims of the world are still hiddenly exercising over our hearts. It conveys to us a much truer and more reverential appreciation of the majesty of God, of the lovingness of grace, and of the incomparable pre-eminence of all spiritual things. It is true that we seldom fulfil what we desire; for it is as of old, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Nevertheless what we do accomplish beam some proportion to what we desire, and espe* cially to tLe vehemence of our desire. These are great reasons for fostering this supernatural desire the most we can. Rodriguez' treatise on the value to be set on spiritual things is in my judgment the most excellent part of his most precious book.

4. It is of importance also not to allow ourselves to rest J any pursuit except the service of God. By resting I Jiean feeling at home, reposing on what we do, forgetting it is a mere means even when we do not err so far as to mistake it for an end, being contented with what we are, not pushing on, nor being conscious that we are fighting a battle and climbing a hill. Nothing can excuse the neglect of the duties of the position in life which God has conferred upon us. All is delusive where these are not attended to and made much of. They are as it were private sacraments to each one of us. They are our chief, often our sole, way of becoming saints. But while we perform them with all the peaceful diligence which the presence of God inspires, we must jealously realize that they are means, not ends, subordinate and subservient to tiie great work of our souls. No amount of externa] 5 » work, not the unsleeping universal heroism of a Sfc Vincent of Paul, can make up for the want of attention to our own souls, such as resting in our external work would imply. Hence we should be jealous of any great pleasure in our pursuits, even when they are works of Christian mercy and love. It is always a pleasure to do good; yet it must be watched, moderated, and kept in check, or it will do us a mischief before we are aware. The thought of eternity is a good help to this. It brings down the pride of external work, and takes the brightness and colour out of our successes; and this is well, for such brightness and colour are nothing more than the reflection of ourselves and our own activity.

5. There are also practices of humility peculiar to this stage of the devout life, which we must not omit to notice. We must not wish to forget our sins and give ourselves up to the exclusive consideration of the immensity of (rod's love. It is too soon for that yet. Indeed, in the sense in which we are often inclined to take it, the time for it will never come at all on this side the grave. We should be filled continually with wondering thankfulness that we, of all men, should have been so visited by God, and so deluged with his choicest grace. It must almost try our faith that being what we are, God should have been to us what He has been. 0 blessed incredulity! 0 happy soul, that has to fight against this modest unbelief! We must not be anxious about the heights we are likely to reach in the spiritual life. It is a subject on which we ought never to exercise our thoughts at all. Whatever grace God may intend to give us, He has already given us far more than we have corresponded to. Let us live in inis thought, and make a hermitage of it for ourselves

We nwy desire as much as we please, so Jong as we do not calculate or contemplate. Humility must give a character to our very pursuit of virtue. It must not be disquieting or inordinate. Virtue itself is a means, not an end; for virtue is not God, nor union with God. Do not think this admonition strange. It is one that was constantly in the mouth of St. Francis of Sales. We are so bad that we can make even our pursuit of virtue a hindrance to our love of God. To sit quietly among our own faults and meannesses, and to feel that there is our place, is no slight thing. When Job sat down upon the dunghill, he was to the eye of God a pleasant picture, because he was expressing the feelings and the humility of a creature in the presence and under the hand of his Creator. Pursue virtue earnestly, but not eagerly. Do not waste time by continually going back to measure the ground you have travelled over. Do not be exacting to yourself; for that will infallibly lead first to hurry, and then to ill temper, and then to a forgetfulness of your own badness, and then to a doubt of God's goodness. Be slow. I shall have to say this a hundred times; because there is not a difficulty or a danger of the spiritual life in which it is not necessary advice. Last of all it belongs to our present humility on no account to desire any supernatural things to happen to us, such as voices at prayer, visions, and the like. A person who desires such things may become a prey to dreadful delusions at any moment; and even if God really vouchsafed such gifts, they wouiu be accompanied with great danger to our unpractijad and not yet thoroughly mortified souls. We should probably wrest them to our own destruction. Yet it is not an nu<?o^amon temptation at this crisis. If St Therus& thought it well to pray that God would lead her by the common way, how necessary must such common guidance be to us! Still, I would hardly advise that we should pray for it; lest the very prayer should fill our heads with perilous conceits. There is no weakness or folly, which need even surprise us in self-love.

In these five ways we may correspond to the graces which God has already given us, and cultivate those fair fresh promises of growth in holiness which He has allowed us to exhibit in our souls. But I will not leave the subject of progress, without putting before you an extract which Orlandini gives us from the papers of the Jesuit, Peter Faber, the- companion of St. Ignatius. It is a common mistake, says Orlandini, for men aiming at perfection to pay more attention to their daily falls than to the further pursuit of virtue and progress in spirituality. Of this Faber used often to complain, saying that it seemed as if people took a greater pleasure in studying the art of mistaking and falling, than that of acquiring the beauty of virtue. He called this a fraud in the spiritual life. For although it is a virtue to avoid vice, yet to be always contemplating and deploring our sins, keeps the soul down from higher and better things, and retards its holy impetuosity whereby it attempts great works and rapidly climbs heights of virtue, which are of themselves fatal to the vices we less wisely try to diminish by this perpetual inspection and review of self.

THE SPIRIT _N WHICH WE SERVE GOD