The Monotony of Piety
To ourselves it is always good to make the best of a bad case; but in persuading others it is good to admit the worst in that which is the subject of their com plaints. Now most men in most stages of the spiritual life complain that piety is monotonous. An interior life is dull, tame, uninteresting, uniform, wearisome, and sickly. It would be easy to answer, as many do answer, that to meditate on the magnificences of God can hardly be dull; to fight for our lives with the superior intellect and huge power of a fallen seraph can hardly be tame, whatever else it may be; to be all day receiving new actual graces, realizing new increments of sanctifying grace, listening to numerous and wonderfully diversified inspirations of the Holy Spirit, can hardly be uninteresting; to be changing in grace, and love, and knowledge, nearly every hour cannot strictly be called uniform; and to be fighting God s battle even with the most importunate and dishonouring temptations cannot truly be a sickly thing, even though it may be fatiguing. Indeed from an intellectual point of view it would not be easy to find anything in the world so thoroughly refreshing, so actively full of changeful vitality, or so briskly interesting, as a spiritual life. It is the healthiest, manliest, completest, divinest thing on earth. Resolve it into its elements of prayer, of light, of love, of heavenly communications, and of the highest operations of a human will, and what more noble, more free, more wide, more magnificent? Look at its darker side, failures, temptations, fallings short, inward trials, diabolical intrusions, and what more interesting? At the least interesting, at the least not monotonous., if it be nothing else. This is an answer, common enough, o f o * and true in its way, yet eminently unsatisfactory, because it is not genuine. It wants the persuading charm of truthfulness, although it is true: and for this reason, that it is only true to us when we do not feel piety monotonous, while it is untrue to us when the monotony is sensible. It remains speeulatively true, while it is practically false. In ascetics, as well as in theology, we need something more than logic in order to discover truth, something indeed above losdc. Unless we can embrace in our minds, and feel not to be con tradictions, opposite truths which are not only seeming contradictions, but to us effectually irreconcileable, we can never hold the truth. We must sacrifice it to the rigour of an unfruitful consistency. Whoever read and compared half a dozen theologians on Grace, and did not see this? Yet when these theologians came to preach sermons or write spiritual books for the people, they all taught alike; they were all at their ease: they all turned their faces one way, to make people acknowledge that salvation was wholly of grace; then they all calmly turned their faces the other way, and reproached and insisted as if free-will could do it all; and they found the teaching of incompatibles as easy as it was comfortable, when it concerned divine things. So is it in conflicting questions in the spiritual life. The experience of kindly direction will do for our ascetical theories, what the patient and observant confessional does for our theology.
So then I give up this answer about the monotony of piety. I am not going to administer to you a dignified reproof for calling the service of God and the salvation of your souls a tame and uninteresting work. I admit it. I admit it to be my own experience. Indeed I believe the admission will help us to the better sight of some truths, which, although, they will not make piety less monotonous, will teach us what to do with our mono tony, and how to make the most of it. I will freely confess that I know nothing in the world, to which I can compare for monotony the occasional drag of a pious life, except either the being detained at a country inn during a hopelessly wet day, or driving a tired horse in a gig for a long stage which is on the collar the whole o o o o way. ISTot very dignified comparisons! K"o but where shall we find any dignity about the monotonous? "We are out of the atmosphere of dignity, when we are in the region of monotony.
Let us get a clear idea of monotony. It is something more than the being uninteresting, something more than the being uniform, something more than honesty downright weariness. We may get tired of looking at lightning. It is about the last sight in the world to get tired of. Still we may tire of ft. Yet no one could call lightning monotonous. Rahel Varnhagen used tc* say, " Heavenly men love lightning." An interesting thing may become monotonous by our becoming callous to its excitement. Yet it need not thereby cease to be interesting. Even a change may become monotonous to us, from its following uniform laws in a lifeless and pedantic way. Novelties may be monotonies even while they are still novelties, from being forcedly new, or obviously new as treats to us and distractions to us, having the old expressions of countenance under their masks, and the old odour about their flowers. This is especially true of novelties in devotion. They are simply old friends come back on the stage with their jackets turned inside out, and their hats cocked on the other side. Our spiritual nurses coax us to receive them as novelties, and pretend to go into extasies with their newness. Alas! we are too old for those dear deceits, yet not old enough to know that life is too short to let it be worth our while to be indignant with impostures.
In fact monotony is a very unmonotonous thing. Yet this is true of all the varieties of monotony, that they keep down among the littlenesses of our nature, and betray us into all manner of protean unworthiness. There are monotonies which irritate, like the monotony of a man who is always joking and punning. All forms of stupidity are irritating, but this perhaps most of all. Some monotonies are placid, and minister to our indolence, like the plashing of a fountain. Most men have one monotony or other which never tires them. To me the sound of the wind blowing and wailing is always new music and almost articulate speech. The fluent conversation of a lighthearted grammatical man is a delightful monotony, quite apart from the sense which there may or may not be in his talk. Sense is not requisite, only fluency and grammar. Some monoto nies are almost universally depressing, as the monotony of a solemn manner, which to the male sex is almost without exception intolerable, yet is attractive and influential with many women, perhaps as indicating something foreign to their nature; for a solemn woman is surely not common, and, if anybody has seen one, he has most probably found that she was not a favourite. Then there are monotonies which rest us, as, in certain moods at least, the sight of the wilderness or the sea. But I have said enough about monotonies. I want to force a picture of it into your mind, rather than to furnish you with a definition, else I might have dis missed the whole matter by giving you the old one, " Want of variety in cadence;" for it is just this which annoys us in life, when our life is for ever repeating the same cadences, like a preacher who preaches as if he were doing a lection in choir. Alas! and is not this true of almost all lives in these smooth days, that they are all on one note?
We will start then with the admission that piety is almost unpardonably monotonous, and that we may the more pardonably complain of this, first of all, because at the outset it distinctly promised to be otherwise, and secondly because really monotony is not a quiet suffering, like a degree too much of heat on a summer day, but it is a positive strain upon us. It is an active annoyance, not a merely passive one. Now then, without the slightest hope of changing matters, indeed without the least effort to do so, and without any pur pose, let alone expectation, of finding a remedy, we plunge into the matter in order to investigate it, believing that something practical will come of the investigation, without exactly knowing or caring how much or what. AVe shall at least pass through some country, and see something; and a man is not worth much who is not a trifle the better, deeper, and truer man for everything he sees. I have a presentiment, that with a little adroitness we can make capital of our monotony.
Why is piety so monotonous? " Beally," some of you may say, " now that you force me to think of it steadily, I do not perceive that it is so monotonous." Fortunate soul! then read no further. You will perhaps find suitable matter for you in other Conferences, if rather you are not happily above the need of any Con-t ferences. The rest of us -will work out this problem of our monotony, and try to forget it for a while by the very working of it. Why is piety so monotonous? Because it lies in so small a compass, because there are only Ten Commandments, because it is all fear, because it is all love. These are reasons, brief enough, and with nothing in them to be complained of. Nevertheless piety would not be less monotonous, if we had more than Ten Commandments to keep, or if the Counsels were innumerable. We have little need to complain of piety lying in such a small compass; for that narrow compass is wider than we can conveniently stretch ourselves to fill. But the answers are too summarv, altogether too narrow for the question. We must answer more at length, more in detail.
The spiritual life is the progress of the finite creature towards union with the Infinite. In all its stages the process of being conformed to God is going on in the soul. Nothing is indifferent. Every moment of time may be made to bear the burden of something which is eternal. Each separate action, no matter how trivial, is capable of holding a supernatural immensity. The grace, which enables us to do supernatural things, is coming to us constantly in ways which are imperceptible except to the greatest vigilance, and operating in us with such fineness and delicacy as require a heavenly discernment, in order that we may perceive them, and cooperate with them. On the other hand, the unworthiness of our nature is almost unbounded, and its manifold unfitness for such a divine union is disabling us at every turn. So that we have to live down among our own motives, and consort with all the creeping and crawling things of self-love, in order to be provided against a surprise. Moreover nature to the last draws one way, and grace from the first draws another. Thus the three leading characteristics of the spiritual life must always be effort, detail, and slowness, all three things monotonous, and the sustained combination of the three almost an insufferable monotony.
When we advance in self-knowledge, and by grace have obtained a tolerable command over those greater passions, whose tyranny has in it something of a seeming dignity, and even the shame of which is felt not to be degrading, we come to the meanness of our nature and character* Here the work becomes slower, at the very moment that it has grown less endurable. The details also multiply, and fresh vigour has to be infused into efforts which have no sort of external stimulus to cheer them on, and very often hardly a place on which to rest their lever. The drag of the spiritual life is not so much felt by a man When he is getting out of his sins, and quelling the revolts of his greater passions, as it is when he comes to his ungenerosities, his little un truthfulnesses, his ingrained hypocrisies, his mean jealousies, his degrading spites, his incredible conceits, his causeless dislikes, the undignified vagaries of his wounded feelings, his secret slavery of human respect, and all the crookednesses of his self-love, It is here that the monotony begins. All the phases of the work only deepen its monotony.
Dirty work, such as digging and delving in a swamp, is well known to be more Wearisome than other work, even when it is not more tiring in itself. It is wearisome because it is dirty; and the discomfort of it is a not inapt representation of the work of the spiritual life. It is a work also at which we must always labour stooping, and the posture adds to the moDotony. It is an extremely solitary toil. "VYe cannot work at our soul in gangs. "VVe must labour in secret. Even the intelligence and sympathy of our directors cannot reach into the innermost secrets of our secrecy. Thus there is nothing to beguile the time. It is sheer work, unparticipated, uncommunicated, un relieved. Furthermore, our efforts are attended with extremely little success, and most even of that little is imperceptible to ourselves, or imperceptible at the time. It is not a work which can be put in detail under any external obedience. It can only be generally under obedience. The minutest regulations of a director, o which, because of their very minuteness, are as often a snare to souls as a help to them, are only a general obedience, compared with the minute intricacy of the ever-shifting operations within. Then, again, a work soon becomes wearisome when it is not under obedience, wearisome with a weariness quite different from that produced by the uniform pressure of obedience, and harder far to bear. Moreover, the perpetual shifting of the operations of the interior life is itself a fountain of monotony; for there is no monotony so flat as the monotony of endlessly fluctuating change.
To be always beginning is an irritating as well as an uninteresting thing. Yet this also is an invariable characteristic of the spiritual life. It is a work which almost any change of outward position, so morally feeble are we, actually interrupts. Then there is a beginning again at the same place with the same tools and under the old difficulties. It is like the perpetual falling in of a tunnel in unmanageable loose soil. Moreover it is a work which we only very imperfectly understand; and understanding is light, and light is cheerfulness. To say Office without knowing Latin must obviously be much more irksome than saying it as.
a scholar says it. Neither recitation is irksome if we have sensible sweetness; but who has that always? Still, in most things, we are always working towards the light, always approaching an understanding of what we are about. But the teasing thing about the spiritual life is, that what we beinn to understand immediately u changes into something else, as soon as we come to understand it. Grace is always drawing us over the border, into a darkness beyond. Even while we our- t selves are in the light, our attractions are far outward in the dimness ahead of us. It is also to be considered that anything like a satisfactory spiritual life implies a great deal of steady self-punishment. A certain quiet unmercifulness towards self is the indispensable condition of all inward peace. We have also to strengthen our hand to a firmer and more vigorous chastisement of self, especially at those times when we are most dis couraged by recent and unexpected defeats. Yet all the while, so little are we rooted in our Work, that any breath is enough to blow us away, when we are engaged in it.
There are many varieties of inward lives. But the features, enumerated above, belong to all of them* They are in the nature of the case. The one thing, which is equally the result of all those numerous causes is monotony. Of course there is a great deal to be said on the other side. Upon what question is there not? It is true also, that a man may be justly reproved for complaining too much of this monotony of piety. A man of great graces may perhaps be reproved for com plaining at all. But we must deal gently with the great multitude of those who are honestly trying to keep closer to God than a mere avoiding of sin implies. There are some who treat with dignified contempt, not only the complaint, but the very feeling of this mono tony. They deny that there can be any solid virtue where such a feeling exists, except as the merest transitory temptation. Kather may we say, that where contempt exists, no solid virtue can exist. Indeed it is shrewdly to be suspected that those, who have not felt this burden of monotony, have only escaped the feeling, because the burden they have tried to carry was so exceedingly little, or because they have carried it only a little way. A man, who has always found it plain sailing, and has never failed to have sun and stars visible when he wanted them for observations, may be sure he is sailing over a pacific ocean of his own, very different from the wild, uncertain, clouded seas, where saints and saint-like men so often find themselves at the mercy of wind and weather.
But let us look at the matter from an opposite point of view. Most of most men s success in life comes from the vigorous play of their natural activity. The abbot Esaias says, that of the three things necessary to the pursuit of perfection natural activity is one.1 Even good works owe no little of their success to this. It has been observed that men, who go about the country giving missions and retreats with all the excitement of fresh air, new faces, new places, new work, and the energetic reactions after physical weariness, find it difficult to cultivate a really, or at least a profoundly, interior spirit. The chronicles of religious orders are full of examples of this, and the arrangements of saintly foun-dars exhibit a presentiment of it. The admiration men have for the exceptions is a conclusive demonstration of the rule. The truth is, natural activity is most eager to save grace the trouble of working; and it may safely be confessed that this same natural activity does no little of the outside work of the Church, and does it well. It has not often happened, though there are notable exceptions,2 that successful mission -preachers or converters have been eminent directors. They want the inward peace, the leisurely concentration, and the habit of not looking for results, which for the most part build up a safe and intelligent director.
Xow what is it which gives our lives the swing, which men see and admire, and by which we accomplish our successes?
It is the intrinsic joyousness of natural activity. We are inspirited by our own effervescence. Our life seems to accumulate by mere speed. We mesmerize ourselves, and so double our powers, and multiply our senses. We are always throwing our innermost selves outside of ourselves, and so producing the most astonishing results. We widen ourselves by this sort of self-externation, and so make ourselves capable of doing more than one man s work. Our self-love riots in the stimulus of enthusiasm, and becomes downright power in the excitement of success. We live in the midst of inward shouts and cheers and huzzaing, until we seem all fortitude, and learn to disbelieve in the impossible. We do various work, and variety always multiplies the amount of work at least by ten. Our results are visible, and the vision of them is a grand attraction. There is nothing dry about results. They fatten self-love, and a wellfed self-love, what should ever tire it, what may it not hope to do, what expectations can ever be reason ably considered unreasonable to such a thing as it is?
Results also make a noise, and noise is an endless battle-cry to an active spirit. Silence is the rearing thing, thin and unsatisfactory and void where the soul is not full of God. Among many results some must be great ones, and their greatness is an intoxication. Then an external life, when it is at full swing, is replete with changes and contrasts, which make it as interesting to us as a romance. We have no time to get tired of any thing The scenes in the drama are too short rather than too long. All this increases our speed, and with our speed our momentum, and with our momentum our facility. Our arms lengthen, and we embrace the world. Then comes the delighted complaint of the multiplicity and the manifoldness of what we have to do, and our speed never lets us see how unsatisfactorily we are doing it all. Quantity is what the world admires, and so we are hounded on by praise. Nobody finds fault. They are too busy staring. You cannot both stare and speak at once. Staring requires the whole face. We throw details overboard, and look only at generals. Now we can be busy without being fatigued. Those details they were the drag, the vexation, secret nests of responsibility every one of them, and greediest devourers of time. We are positively out of breath ourselves with the speed of our lives, and the downright awfulness of our success. Yet there is a seeming dignity about having too many things to do which to the eye of the world envelopes us in an appearance of repose. We seem to be marching through life, marching to music, while we are in reality tearing through it, like a planet got loose in space.
This is the kind of life for swing, for natural activity, for visibility of results. This is the kind of life in which a little grace grows furthest, or seems to do so.
What is the opposite of all this? The spiritual life! What a change! Burrowing in the dark, hidden from all men; for all comfortable purposes hidden even from ourselves. Silence and deep night, solitude and a strange place, an element in which we move sluggishly like tortoises, a land overshadowed by dread presences, haunted by phantoms of evil, terrified by possibilities, which are more often likelihoods^ of sin, a sort of peevish concentration of distraction about details, an altogether microscopic life! What a change! It is as if we had become deaf all at once, and blind a few minutes afterwards. This is the picture of the self-hindered man praying his way into the neighbourhood of the supernatural; for that is not a place into which he can either think his way, or speak his way, or push his way. The prospect is one of boundless monotony, when the horrified eye of natural activity gazes over it; and alas! there are few of us that are worth more, than the worth which our natural activity confers upon us.
But is it then really and definitely decided, that a thing on which so much depends, and which is made up of such component parts, as the spiritual life, is uninteresting? It is hard not to suspect some fallacy in such a conclusion. In reply to this we may say, that the feeling of monotony does not arise so much from the nature of the spiritual life itself, as from the imperfect and wounded state of our own nature. It is one of the phases of our fallen state, and its consequent unworthiness. Eternal interests do not excite our sluggishness. It is not they that are uninteresting, but we that are uninterested. Neither again is it a feeling always felt, but only at times, and least at those times when the spiritual life has most its own way. But there is some thing more than this to be said. We must distinguish somewhat between monotonous and uninteresting. A thing may be interesting and yet monotonous; nay, it is possible that the very interest of a thing may increase its monotony. No wit happens that this is actually the case with the spiritual life. It is made more monotonous by the very things which make it most interesting.
When an intense seriousness accompanies every step in a long line of actions, and those actions remain the same in the same place, to be accomplished in the same way, through a repetition of the same obstacles, and "with only the same results, the seriousness will increase the burden of the monotony. Sunny natures are so light, and gloomy natures so peevish, that they can neither of them bear the yoke of seriousness long; for seriousness is as little congenial to gloom as it is to lightness. Yet this same seriousness must run alongside the spiritual life in its longest length. We never part company with it except through a fall. We cease to be spiritual when we cease to be serious. Moreover we have to do with Ofod always, and to do with Him in the most intimate way; and in divine things that which is most intimate is also most frightening. Reverence is a constraint, yet to lose reverence is to lose everything. But constraint is enough of itself to create monotony; or rather, when long continued, and with a pressure which does not vary much, it of itself becomes monotony. Sin, either in its past, present, or future tense, runs right through the composition of the spiritual life, and above all things keeps us on the alert. Yet the perpetually fretting shadow, and the perpetual starting at shadows, makes the journey extremely monotonous, while these shadows are also themselves its most painful interests. Neither does our poor nature like to be kept always in the same posture. It wishes to yawn; it would fain fold its arms; at least it must be allowed to stretch its legs. Always to sit, always to stand, always to lie down, all are equally insupportable \ but to be always kneeling, the thought of it is terrible. Yet the spiritual life is not a work at which we can take liberties, The very gravity of its interests forbids that. But a change of posture is a liberty; frequent change of posture an unsafe liberty, indeed incompatible with true spirituality. The interest of piety also disallo ws its indulging in any recreation. We cannot give our consciences a holiday, or give over prayer for a while, as we give over lessons. The tension must be always on us, not an unvarying tension certainly, yet a tension. The bow is always bent, and will take a year to recover its having been an hour unstrung. The height of the prize at which we aim augments our strain. The attitude fittest for star gazing does not comport itself comfortably with our anatomy. The risk is tremendous; and a tremendous jeopardy, while it is terribly interesting, is insufferably monotonous. Then after all, we have come to think so little trustfully or gallantly of our poor degenerate nature, that final perseverance, as a grace God keeps in His own hands to the last, looks only like a chance in a supernatural lottery. Indeed it js not so; for it is a grace which an earnest life can secure, though the holiest life cannot merit it. Yet it looks like a lottery, and this adds to the interest by increasing the nervousness. Yet what monotony is worse than a continuity of fear? Thus it is, that the interests of the spiritual life are, from their peculiar character, the feeders of its monotony,
We have then made out a case against piety, namely, that it is monotonous. Now what is the good of all this enquiry? What profit is there in the charge, and in the laborious substantiation of it? We shall succeed in discouraging people more than they are discouraged already. f Is that -what we wish? Surely the very opposite. Illogical as it may seem, there are few things more consoling to men than the mere finding that other men have felt as they feel. Neither is it in reality illogical. Special evils are the most frightening; and that evil cannot be special, which is confessed to be part of the experience of others. We feel piety to be monotonous. As was said at first, the service of God is often a sensible drag upon us. It becomes- flat and dull, failing to excite us, and degenerating into a wearisome constraint. There is always something more than this in it, but that something lies deep down. What is on the surface is monotony, and dulness, and a struggle just on the point, for ever on the point, of ceasing to be a struggle at alL There are times when the sense of all this well nigh overweights us. They are moods certainly, but moods so long, so seldom interrupted, and interrupted for so short a time at once, that, in some stages of the spiritual life, they seem almost to amount to a normal state. It is miserable to find the service of God so wearisome. The more earnestly we love Him, the more profoundly we fear Him, then so much the greater is the misery. When we compare the briskness and agility, the unsleeping interest and the beguiling attractions, of our worldly occu pations, with the dead, flat, sluggish feeling which comes over us in regard to our prayers and mortifications, there is something extremely depressing in this feeling of monotony. Surely, then, it is no little consolation to find, that it is not merely an evil symptom of emr own spiritual condition, a sign against our own individual predestination, but that it is part of our great human disease, belonging to our common misfortune, and all but universal among those who are honestly striving to serve God in the intimacies of an interior life.
In our strife to be supernatural, it is natural then that we should be haunted by this heavy shadow of monotony. It is no cause for discouragement, because every body else suffers from it more or less at times, unless, when it begins to gall them, they give up struggling; and to give up struggling is to give up God. Xowhere does it furnish us with any legitimate reason for being disheartened. For it does not imply any actual sin, or any past incompleteness in our con fessions, or any secret corroding fault. As I have hinted, even its long continuance is often a cheering sign, because it is also a sign that we have continued to struggle. Surely there is manifold comfort here.
Comfort! Yes but what we want are cures. This is what you would say. True: but let me take this opportunity of saying something to you, which I regard of the utmost importance. Indeed I know few things more important. What I am always complaining of in you spiritual people is your unreality. I suffer, like poor Cassandra, from always making distasteful prophe cies to you about this. Now I will go further, and find the same fault of unreality with a very great number of spiritual books. It is taken for granted that every spiritual disease has a cure, not a partial alleviation, not a counterbalancing comfort, not a check which shall hinder its becoming fatal, but an absolute cure, a specific which shall end in a complete restoration to health. I get quite angry with books and sermons for the thoughtless things they say about this. Surely it is a simple untruth, In the matter of bodily health, there are diseases which cannot be cured, wounds which will leave us maimed or lamed to the end of life, constitutional maladies which can be controlled and limited, yet never cured. "With such evils, we have to content ourselves with medical Superintendence, ceaseless physic, a dietary yoke, and the like. Why should we be surprised at finding similar maladies in the spiritual life? Look at the absurdity of the opposite supposition. You do not surely believe in the perfectibility of human nature on this side the grave. You do not expect that you can reach a state of sinlessness before you die, or that your corrupt nature shall become incorruptible, while it is still mortal. Yet your vexation when you cannot have a regular cure, cut and dried, for every spiritual disease, implies that you indulge in these monstrous expectations. Some spiritual maladies are incurable in themselves, because of our nature. This is true of self-deceit, and of several other forms of self-love. Others are incurable in the individual case; and this may arise from past sin, or from natural character, or from unchangeable outward circumstances. In some cases the knowledge of the evil is all we can attain to. In many cases the management of the mischief is our highest attainment. In others the diminution of it is the utmost we can hope. Surely this is common sense. The other doctrine, besides being nonsense, is a grand source of discouragement, while it also foments unreality, and fosters delu sions. Spiritual books are, in a great measure, to blame for it. It is so tempting to be systematic, to set off salves against wounds, antidotes against poisons, to look complete, to encourage, to be popular, to exaggerate our inventions, to puff our nostrums. We call this quackery when it is applied to the body.
Why does it deserve a kindlier name, when it is applied to the soul? The saints tell us we are to be patient with ourselves to the last. Now to be patient means to endure; it means that some things, if not many things, will remain in self, with which self will have to be patient to the end, that is, some things which can not be cured. "We are not told by the saints to be patient with our sins, but with our sicknesses, those sicknesses of the soul, under which sanetincation con sists, not in the cure, but in the combat, The practical man is the man who does the best he can under the circumstances. You must distinguish between incurable and irreparable. I have often told you that no mischief in the spiritual life is irreparable; but I never meant you to understand by that, that there are no evils in the spiritual life which are incurable. I hope you will not forget this distinction. If you do, you. will misunderstand many things, which it may greatly concern you to understand. A spiritual director is a physician. Do you ever expect to do without a director? If not, then you contemplate the necessity of being in an ailing state to the end. This is all I want you to admit: -in the spiritual life nothing is irremediable, but several things are most certainly incurable. The normal state of spirituality is at best that of a vigorous, cheerful, hearty invalid, who is obliged, in order to keep up to his work, not only to take great care of himself, but to be upon his guard against a great many things, and, in spite of his vigilance, to have a good deal to endure.
But, to return from this digression, what are we to do with our monotony? Are we to be simply passive under it? Certainly not. But what will help us out of it? Making haste will not, and this is the first thing to take note of. This negative piece of advice is worth more than anything positive which I cm say: at least I judge so, from the entanglement and low spirits into which I see people fret themselves by trying to get out of it through making haste. Properly speaking, all difficulties in the spiritual life partake of the nature of entanglements; and this also is a thing very much to be observed; for it is another argument, and they never can be needlessly multiplied, for slowness in the way of holiness, that prompt slowness, of which I have spoken so repeatedly, that I see you smile when I reiterate it, as if it were the burden of all my songs. Haste, then, is not the road out of this entanglement of monotony. Mortification, especially bodily mortification, is the shortest way out of it, as indeed it is always the shortest way to cheerfulness and supernatural joy. Everything that tends to fervour tends also to make this burden of monotony less sensible, like wine and food which cure weariness as well as satisfy hunger, curing the weariness by curino- the weakness. This need not be dwelt upon;
*> O but there is one thing more which should be said. To look at that dull, odious, repulsive, grey monotony, who could suspect it was the raw material of the very highest of all high graces? Yet so it is. That haunting monotony is, in a brave, striving, quiet soul, always tending to become simplicity, the peculiar simplicity of the spiritual life, which is a glorious shadow of the Unity of God, and wherein God becomes all in all. This is what the monotony merges in, and then the trial becomes a grace, the pusillanimity a heroism. Strangest of transformations! Yet there are strange things in an inward life, and most of them have the character of transformations. Its phenomena are given to be t transfigurations. It is true that the degree of simplicity, in which the pusillanimity becomes a heroism, belongs to a high and advanced state of things. But the trial becomes a grace in much lower states. But why should you think of anything less than the highest? This feeling of monotony makes me think you should aim high; for it is the proof of something genuine and real in your present attainments. You hare but one thing to do, Sink deeper down in prayer.
Footnotes
Chapter 22 of 24