Chapter V. What Holds us Back

It seems now as if we had got our course clearly laid down, and had received our instructions as to the spirit in which we should serve God. We are fairly out of harbour, but how is it that we are not making way? We Bee others around us in full course, but no breeze is filling our sails. Whether it is that we are still under the influence of the shore, or whether it be that something else is in fault, it is clear that we are not catching the wind. Such is the common complaint ef many souls at this period. Something holds them back j and they do not all at once see what it is. Our business now is to discover these secret obstacles, and see how to deal with them.

Our first step must be to examine the symptoms which betray that all is not right with us. First of all we experience a want of power in resisting temptations, in going through with our penances, and in being faithful to our devotional observances. Then we feel a want of elasticity in surprises which come upon us, in changes, in trials of temper, in the management of exterior duties, and the reconciliation of them with devotion and the interior life. Moreover we are conscious of a certain deficiency of inward light. Our examinations of conscience become hazy and dim. An inclination to scruple an«j littleness grows upon us, and we seem to lose the sight of God which we bad before, and which, imperfect as it was, was a true illumination. There is a vagueness about out spintnal combat, which we feel requires more definiteness as well as more vigour. And added to all this, a sort ot drowsy laziness is creeping over us like the oppression rf a dream.

Something is wrong, it is clear; the question is, what? Here are three wants, power, elasticity, and inward light, o be accounted for. They arise from various causes. Partly they are the result of the attention we have been almost obliged to pay to ourselves and the interior expediences of our souls in these early stages of the spiritual life. Self-inspection is always dangerous even when it is necessary; and consequently it is never to be practised Without its proper accompanying antidote. Self-knowledge its both a grace and a necessity and a blessing; yet none ot these things prevent its being a danger also. The dagger is in its leading us to unreality, sensitiveness, atfeetation, and that which is the most disgusting of vices in the spiritual life, sentimentality. It may be also that we have not exercised faith sufficiently, and this may account for the three wants in question. We have gone by feeling, or by sweetness, or by impulse, rather than by faith; and hence we have mistaken God's gifts for God, and have accustomed our eyes to so strong an artificial light that we cannot see in the soft twilight which belongs to the Christian life. Or we have not been sufficiently solicitous to keep ourselves in harmony with the spirit of the Church, neglecting certain devotions, or lightly esteeming them, such as confraternities, scapulars, indulgences, nud the like. Or we have not looked sufficiently out of ourselves to the objects of faith, but have resed on self-im^ri/vement too exclusively and too anxiously; and devotion never can neglect doctrine without paying dearly for it in the end. There is nothing Satan can clog our wheels with more effectually than an untheological devotion. Or again our lii-take may have arisen from our neglecting external works of mercy and edification, and our not being r.o scrupulously careful aa we should be in our intercourse with others.

From all this we are led to conclude that our secret obstacles consist of three mistakes in our ioterior life, and two in our exterior. The present chapter shall consider the first three, and the next chapters the fourth and fifth of these mistakes.

1. It is not impossible that what is holding us back is defective devotion to our Blessed Lady. Without this devotion an interior life is impossible,' for an interior life is one wholly conformed to the will of God; and our Blessed Laiiy is especially His will. She is the solidity of devotioa. Yet this is not always sufficiently kept in mind. Beginners are often so busy with the metaphysics of the spiritual life that they do not attribute sufficient Importance to this devotion. I will mention some of the jonsi'ierations which they do not seem to lay to heart. Devotion to the Mother of our Lord is not an ornament of the Catholic system, a prettiness, a superfluity, or even a help, out of many, which we may or may not use It is an integral part of Christianity. A religion is not, strictly speaking, Christian without it. It would be a different religion from the one God has revealed. Our luady is a distinct ordinance of God, and a special means of grace, the importance of which is best tested by the intelligent wrath of the evil one against it and the instinctive hatred which heresy bears to it. She is the neck of the mystical body, uniting, therefore, all the members with their Head, and thus being the channel and dispensing instrument of all graces. The devotion to her is the true imitation of Jesus \ for, next to the glory of His Father, it was the devotion nearest and dearest to His Sacred Heart. It is a peculiarly solid devotion, because it is perpetually occupied with the hatred of sin and the acquisition of substantial virtues. To neglect it is to despise God, for she is His ordinance, and to wound Jesus, because she is His Mother. God Himself has placed her in the Church as a distinct power; and hence she is operative, and a fountain of miracles, and a part of our religion which we can in nowise put in abeyance. Spirituality must be orthodox. This is self-evident. Now doctrine could not be orthodox which pretermitted the office and prerogatives of the Mother of God; so neither can spirituality be orthodox, if it be distinct or separable from a just devotion to her, and a devotion generous as well as just. Indeed a mistake in doctrine is doubly dangerous when it is worked up into the spiritual life. It poisons everything, and there is no mischief which may not be predicted of the unfortunate soul which is the subject of it. If then you have the symptoms of something wrong, something retarding you, look first of all if your devotion to our Blessed Lady is all it ought to be, in kind ani degree, in faith and in trust, in love and in loyalty. Perfection is under her peculiar patronage, because it is one of her special prerogatives, as queen of the Saints.

2. It may be that you are wanting in devotion to the Sacred Humanity of Jesus and His mysteries. Even this is possible, and not so uncommon as we could wish to beiieve it. Yet who could doubt that the devotion which may not leave us on the highest heights of con tern plation, is quite indispensable in the states of the spiritual life which we are considering? It must interpenetrate every part of the Christian life; and being a Christian means this, if it means anything. Christ is the Christian's way, the Christian's truth, and the Christian's life. To lead a holy life is to be the Spouse of the Incarnate Word; and therefore the love of the Incarnate Word is the very neart of holiness. The love of the Sacred Humanity is of three kinds; one represents our interior affections towaids our Lord, another the proofs of the sincerity and solidity of those affections, and another the operations which Jesus Himself causes in the souls that are sufficiently well disposed. They are called, respectively, Affective, Effective, and Passive Love.

Affective love of our dear Lord consists in an intense desire of His glory, in a joyous complacency in the success of his interests, and in an affectionate beautiful sorrow at the view of sin. It leads us to pour out our whole souls in confidence before Him, to complain of our coldness and imperfections, to put before Him our pains, wearinesses, disgusts and trials, and to abandon all to Him with a quiet and childlike indifference.

Effective love makes us the living images of Jesus, representing in our own lives His states, His mysteries, and His virtues. We bear His image outwatdly by continual mortification, by diminishing and narrowing our bodily comforts, by regulating our senses, by cutting down the extravagant requisitions of the world and society, by a jealous moderation of innocent affections and pleasures, and a perpetual repression of all vanity and conceit. Our interior life is conformed to Jesus by liberty of spirit, which means detachment from creatures and conformity to His will. Our external actions have His character stamped upon them, when we act as His members, and all our actions are done in dependence upon Him, and according to His movement.

Passive love I speak of, rather that we may learn to thirst for what one day may be ours, than that it is, ordinarily speaking, to be looked for at this stage of the spiritual life. It is cheering to see how close, please God, we may one day be to Jesus even before we die. His first operation in this supernatural state is to wound our souls with love, so that we lose our taste for everything which is not Him or His. It is as if a new nature were given us, so little in harmony with the wretched world around us, that we languish and pine, as out of our proper element. Then He deepens the wound, and makes all our thoughts, affections, words and works to be imbued with His love, until we are unable to do anything but seek after Him, like the Spouse in the Canticles. Every love is renounced but His, every idea effaced from our minds but of Him, and everything which is out of relation to Him drops from our remembrance as though it had never been. So that He possesses our soul altogether, and it is not so much we who live as He who lives in us. Then He sets us all on fire with resistless love, and makes us break out into actions of heroic charity and supernatural union with Him, while all the time He so deepens in us the sense of our own vileness and nothingness that we do nothing but deplore the meanness of our service and the dulness of our hearts. And lastly He throws us into a state of purifying suffering, and fastens on our shoulders the perpetual cross, when we seek for nothing but to suffer more, and shrink fr;.m nothing but to suffer less. So He strips us of ourselves, and makes us wholly His. But all this is a long way on. Look up and strain your eyes. I do not know that you will so much as see the mountain tops where all this will be found. But good cheer! it is something to know that those fair heights are really there.

It is inconceivable what advantages we derive from these exercises of love of the Incarnate Word. The heart detaches itself from creatures; self-love burns down and goes out \ imperfections are corrected; the soul is filled with the spirit of Jesus, and advances with giant strides along the paths of perfection. See then, if you are catching no wind in your sails, whether your love of our Lord's adorable Person and Sacred Humanity is all it ought to be, all He meant and all He asks, or at least whether you are distinctly cultivating it, and doing your best daily to make it grow.

3. The third deficiency, and I am inclined to suppose it by far the most common, may be a want of filial feeling towards God. I wish I could be very cle^r, as well as very strong, about this, because so very much depends upon it. If our view of God is not uniformly and habitually that of a Father, the very fountains of piety will be corrupted within us. We shall incur the woe of which the prophet speaks; our sweet will be bitter, and our bitter sweet.

Our position towards God is that of creatures. See what is involved in this. We belong absolutely to Him. We have no rights but those which He compassionately cnooses to secure to us by covenant. Our life is at the mercy of providence, and providence is not a mere course 7 of external events, but the significant will of Thres DWine Persons, One God. Our condition in the next life is known to Him already; and we on our part know that more grace than He is obliged to give is necessary for us, although we know of an infallible certainty that He will give it us, if we choose to correspond to what we have. Yet this last consideration cannot wholly allay the nervousness which the view of our position naturally causes us. Reflection on the attributes of God, His omniscience, omnipotence, immensity and ineffable holiness, is not calculated to diminish this feeling. Nevertheless the conviction that the spirit of adoration, the temper of worship, the instinct of religiousness, reside simply in our always feeling, speaking, and acting towards trod as creatures, that is, as beings who have no independent existence but have been called out of nothing by Him, is in reality so far from projecting a gloomy shadow over us, or exciting an internal disquietude, that the more seriously these truths are received into the soul, and the more unreservedly the sovereignty of God is acknowledged by us, the more tranquillizing, supernaturally tranquilliaing, will their effect be found.

Yet this does not appear on the surface, nor until the mind has become habituated to, and imbued with, religious thought..We are tempted to look at God in almost any light rather than that of a Father, as well because of our own helplessness, as His overpowering immensity and omnipotence. Yet our spiritual life depends entirely on the view we take of God. If we look at Him as our Master, then His service is our task, and the ideas of reward and punishment will pervade all we do. If wa regard Him as our King, surely we must be crushed by the indubitable rights of His unquestionable despotism, and nothing more tender than an abstraction of dutiful loyalty may we dare to cherish in our hearts. If we look at Him as our Judge, the thunders of His vengeance deafen us, the awful minuteness of His indictment strikes us dumb, and the splendour of His intolerable sanctity blinds us. If we consider Him exclusively, in any one of these lights, or in all of them, it is plain our service of him will take its character from our views. Hardness, dryness, untempered fear, and a consciousness of our being unable to stand upon our rights, will necessarily make us cowardly and mean, cringing and mercenary, querulous, and as disrespectful as we dare to be.

But we may even look at Him as our Creator, and yet be wrong. For it is possible to consider a Creator to be an independent and eternally self-existing Being, who for His own good pleasure, as First Cause, has called creatures out of nothing, and cares as little for them as He is beholden to them. Yet it seems to me as if to be a Creator implies the being a Father too. The very will of creation is surely a stupendous act of paternal tender-B#«9. Thus God is not only our Father and our Creator also, but He is our Father because He is our Creator. A rational creature, to be a creature, must be a son also. W<? bring with us out of our primal nothingness the filial tie Creation ranges itself rather under goodness than under power or wisdom. So that if I knew no more of God than that He was my Creator, I ought to feel that He was my Father also. Qui plasmasti me miserere mei: Thou who formedst me have mercy on me, was the lifelong prayer of the penitent of the desert. There wa* a sort of right, or a sound of right, in the very appellation, which endeared it to her lowliness and timidity.

However this may be, there is no truth more certain than that God is our Father; and that all that is most tender and most gentle in all paternity on earth is but the merest shadow of the boundless sweetness and affectiouateness of His paternity in heaven. The beauty and consolation of this idea surpasses words. It destroys the sense of loneliness in the world, and puts a new colour on chastisement and affliction. It calls consolation out of the very sense of weakness, enables us to trust God for the problems we cannot solve, and binds us by a sense of most dear relationship to all our fellow-men. The idea enters into, and becomes the master thought of even all our spiritual actions. In sin, we remember it; in aiming at perfection we lean upon it; in temptations we feed upon it; in suffering we enjoy it. He is our Father in the ordinary events of life, in protection from a thousand evils which He never lets us feel, in answers to prayer, in blessing those we love, and in forbearance with ourselves, forbearance with a degree of coldness and incorrigibleness which is almost incredible, even to ourselves.

He is our Father not nominally only, but really also. As I said, the tie comes out of creation. The Creator has a marvellous and mysterious sensible love for His creatures, with which no earthly affection can compare for indulgence or for tenderness. Moreover He has been pleased to make our interests identical with His; and He has so created us in His likeness and image as that we should reflect even His Divine Majesty. But he is our Father also by covenant; and as He ever effects what He promises, this new paternity is as real as the other. And beyond all ties of nature, grace and glory, by which He calls us children, He is our Father in a way we can never fully know, in that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Out of this filial feeling towards our heavenly Father comes ease of conscience as to past sin. We can trust Him, in sweet confidence, even with the unutterable decision of our eternal doom. We enjoy liberty of spirit in indifferent actions, mingled with an intense desire to serve Him which our filial love inspires. Out of it come also a sweet forgetfulness of self, enjoyment in prayer, patience in doubts, calmness in difficulties, lightheartedness in trials, and an uncomplaining contentment in desolation. We worship Him for his own blessed {sake, because He is our most dear Father. Happy sunshine of this thought! it falls upon our souls with triple beam, more trust in God, more freedom with God, more generosity with God!

1 have dwelt upon this, because it is of paramount importance that we should be thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of the Gospel) and the missing of it so frequently as men do, is partly owing to their not remembering every hour of the day that our Blessed Lord is God, and partly to their mixing some other idea of God with that of Father, and allowing the harsher element to preponderate. The spirit of the Gospel is tenderness; and these three wants I have been examining, of devotion to our Lady, of devotion to the Sacred Humanity, and of filial feelings towards God, are at once effects of want of <,endernes. and causes of the continued want. This is the great occult hindrance. With your chivalrous desire 7* for perfection, your disgust with the world, and youi appreciation of high things, you expect to be making progress, and are disappointed. I have already asked you to examine yourselves, and see whether you are not wanting in devotion to our Blessed Lady, to our dear Lord's Sacred Humanity, and to the ever-blessed Paternity of God. Now let me put it in another shape. The want of these three things means in reality the want of tenderness, though it means other things as well. But the absence of tenderness in religion is often of itself enough to stay man's growth in holiness. It is worth while, therefore, to say something on this head. A man may be in a certain sense religious: he may fear God, hate sin, be strictly conscientious, and honestly desire to save his soul. All these are most excellent things. But you cannot say that the saints were men of this sort. They had about them a sweetness, a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, an affectionateness, nay, I will dare to say, a poetry, which gave quite a different character to their devotion. They were living images of Jesus. This, in Dur far inferior measure and degree, we also must strive to be, if we would grow in holiness.

By tenderness is not meant a mere impressionableness, soft-heartedness, or a facility of tears. These are as often marks of cowardice, laziness, and a want of resolute will and earnestness. True tenderness begins in various ways. Its progress is marked by a sorrow for sin, without thinking of its punishment, by what I have elsewhere called a touchiness about the interests of Jesus, by childlike docility to our superiors and spiritual directors, by mortifying ourselves and not feeling it a yoke, by never thinking of Btopping short at precej^ts without going on to counsels, i,Dd by a very faint, incipient, and as yet scarcely discernible, appetite for humiliations. According as it is formed in our souls, all the characteristics of sanctity gather to it, and group themselves round it. For love is a greater safeguard against sin than fear, and tenderness renders our conversion to God more entire by making it more easy. It especially attracts Jesus, whose spirit it is, and who will not be outdone in His own peculiar sweetness. Without this tenderness there can be no growth; and while it renders duty more easy, and consequently the performance of duty more perfect, it instils into us the especially Christianlike instincts, such as love of suffering, silence under injustice, a thirst for humiliations, and the like. Moreover, it deepens sorrow for sin into a contrition which is worth more to the penitent soul than any gift that can be named. Look at the phenomena of the Incarnation, what were they? Helplessness, unnecessary and unobliged suffering, sacrifice, abasement, continual defeat, no assertion of rights, carelessness of success, and most pathetic wrongs. And what is our response to all these things, but the temper which is expressed by that one word tenderness?

The Sacred Infancy teaches us tenderness; the Passion tenderness; the Blessed Sacrament tenderness; the Sacred Heart tenderness. But look at the common life of Jesus among men, and you will see more clearly what this tenderness is like. There is first the tenderness of our Lord's outward deportment. The narrative of Palm Sunday is an instance of it. Also His way with His disciples, His way with sinners, and His way with those in affliction or grief who threw themselves in His road. He quenched not the smoking flax nor broke the bruised reed. This was a complete picture of Him. There was tenderness in His very looks, as when He looked on the rich young man and loved him; and St. Peter was converted by a look. His whole conversation was imbued with tenderness. The tone of His parables, the absence of terrors in His sermons, and the abyss of forgiveness which His teaching opens out, all exemplify this. He is no less tender in His answer to questions, as when He was accused of being possessed, and when He was struck on the Face. His very reprimands were steeped in tenderness; witness the woman taken in adultery, James and John, and the Samaritan, and Judas; nor was His zeal less tender, as was evidenced when He rebuked the brothers who would fain have called down fire from heaven upon the Samaritan villagers, and also by the sweet meekness of His divine indignation when He cleared the temple.

Now if our Lord is our model, and if His spirit be ours, it is plain that a Christianlike tenderness must make a deep impression upon our spiritual life; and indeed give it its principal tone and character. Without tenderness we can never have that spirit of generosity in which we saw that we must serve God. It is as necessary to our interior life, or our relation with God, as it is to our exterior life or relation with others; and there is one gift of the Holy Ghost, namely piety, whose special office it is to confer this tenderness.

If then the secret obstacles of which you complain concern your interior life, and arise from defects in your devotional feelings and exercises, cultivate these three Jevotions, to our Blessed Lady, to the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, and to the Paternity of God, and great result will follow. Put yourself right in these three things* ind the sails will no longer idly flap against the mast.