Wounded Feelings

The geography books of olden times used to speak of regions of the globe, land or ocean, where monsters dwelt and storms were always raging, where sun and moon, and wind and wet, and day and night, and the four seasons,..kept neither times nor rules, and set at nought the laws of meteorology, and where mysterious magnetic influences reigned, beyond man s understanding or control. They were spots which superstitious mariners might people with attractive horrors, and to others, if they were less interesting than the real wonders of physical geography, they had an air of mysterious horror round them, which is not without its attraction still. The world of wounded feelings is like one of these fabulous worlds of old geography. It follows no rules. The needle ceases to point to the north. It lies apart from all analogies. It is a region of unreasonable things. It is full of contradictions and of confusions. Everything, which happens in ifc, is unexpected from the very fertility of its lawlessness. There is hardly such a thing as humanity in it. It is peopled by individual souls, and each soul is a species by itself. Is there much practical good, then, in penetrating into the centre of that anomalous world? Is there any chance of its vagaries being reduced into a science? Perhaps not. Yet observation will teach us a great deal; and we have hardly a right to say that there is nothing to be said of a region, which most men cross in their way to heaven, and which is precisely the region which those, who are most capable of perfection, cross at its broadest place, and so are longest in crossing.

I suppose there are few men in life "who* have not at times, or once at least, sat down and wondered, whether life were worth the living. If we will not let faith speak, there is a. great deal to be said on both sides. Faith tyrannizes over the question so completely, that it ceases to be a question in her presence. Upon the whole, however, men seem to like life. I infer this, not only from their reluctance to part with it, but from their evident zest in living. The most unhappy man I have ever seen, I see him now in my mind s eye, obviously relished his life exceedingly. The least tolerable thing in life is perhaps its monotony. Some how the life that is fullest of attractions comes to drao at last. Almost all lives have got a lame limb. Nevertheless, if we strike a balance between living and not living, it is in favour of living, with such a surplus that it is not worth while going back to look for errors in our summing. No conceivable errors would put the total the other way. But here is a remarkable thing, that gifted lives are those, about which we may most reasonably doubt whether they are worth living. Gifts bring with them an inheritance of pains, as if they were out of place in a fallen world like this. The extreme delicacy of any one sense brings with it more additional annoyances than extra pleasures. Fineness of perception, delicacy of taste, keenness of appreciation, liveliness of imagination, excessive sensitiveness of feeling, all these things bring exquisite pleasure with them; but in a world, whose constitution, has been deranged by sin, they expose us to continual shocks and jars, which often more than counterbalance the enjoyment. This is only what we should expect. Obtuse people feel less than others. They feel sin less, and the disproportionateness of things, and the hose of mi-nor evils which haunt life from its beginning to its end. Nevertheless all these gifts are great helps to perfection. Some spiritual writers have spoken of some of them as if they were indispensable. Certainly of some of them it is true, that where saints have not had them naturally, grace has infused them. It is of one of these things that I am going to speak to you now, a great help, or a great hindrance in the spiritual life, a source of peculiar pleasure and a cause of peculiar pain in the natural life, easily wounded feelings, the gift or the curse of sensitiveness.

Sensitiveness is neither a virtue nor a vice. But it is not on that account less intimately connected with the spiritual life. As years go by, their varying circum stances gradually disclose to us depths and peculiarities of our own character, which are deeply concerned with holiness, yet are not in themselves either virtues or vices. They are capabilities of both, and can with equal facility lend themselves to either. They are points in our character, at which we begin to go wrong, or at which grace exhibits a predilection to graft itself. Thus they are strengths as well as weaknesses. Sensitiveness is one of the most important of these things. I do not see how sublime virtue can be reached without it, while on the other hand we behold every clay into what depths of incalculable meanness it can plunge great minds, affectionate hearts, and strong characters. It is the secret cause of one half of the disedifying incon sistencies of religious people. It rules us more power fully than any of our passions. It absorbs our character into itself, until it alone almost becomes our character.!t makes everything in life exquisite and exaggerated.

Our pleasures and our pains are both exquisite. It belongs especially to affectionate dispositions; yet it is not the same thing as tenderness. We must be careful not to confound them. Tenderness comes much nearer to being a virtue. But sensitiveness without tenderness is a very terrible thing. When separated from it, sensitiveness is for the most part allied with cruelty, and cruelty is a complete disability to be a saint. Cruel men are more common than we might have supposed; for modern society exhibits great facilities and conveni ences for cruelty. Many men are tyrants in the secret domestic relations of life, who are not only bland and yielding in society, but even charm us by a manifestation of humility, which is not simulated, neither is it altogether unreal. Cruelty and humility often combine very strangely. Nay, what too often is domestic, life, because of this cruelty, but a veil behind which lie interminable regions of unhappiness, trodden wildly or trodden wearily by unsuspected thousands every day?

Sensitive men are also very quick and keen in their sympathies; but these sympathies are very narrow. Generally speaking, such men can only sympathize with sorrows which they themselves have passed through. Their hearts cannot outgrow the circle of their own experience. They are often not largehearted men, neither are they forgiving men. There is indeed much narrowness both of mind and heart about sensitiveness, w r hen it is not found in combination with other things. It is always degenerating into umbrageousness, and so darkening the heart, unless that heart is peculiarly blithe and sunny in itself. A man, who is sensitive without being elastic, is a false character, and will always be found on trial far worse than he seems. Last of all, a sensitive man is generally disinclined to an interior life. Whether it is that all probing is so painful to him that he shrinks from it, or that he has a wider experience than other men of his power of self-delusion, or that he finds outward kindness a charity so difficult to him that he overvalues it, so it is, that we mostly find very sensitive men highly impatient of an interior life, and almost inclined to treat it with contempt. It irritates them so strangely, that we may be sure there is something in it which is deeply uncono-enial to them. At the same time, as we shall see afterwards, sensitiveness confers almost a microscopic power upon the conscience, and so enables us to perceive the finer shades of evil, and to correspond to the more delicate operations of grace. For the present, let this be enough as a general description of sensitiveness, and its affinities.

It is a common gift in its ordinary degrees, but very uncommon in its highest degrees. But in almost all hearts the amount of liability to wounded feelings is hardly credible beforehand. It is sufficient completely to obscure our judgment, to deceive our affections, and to make us forgot proprieties in our outward demeanour. Men are constantly placing themselves in false and foolish positions under its influence. They can only avoid this, either supernaturally through great grace, or naturally through a keen sense of the ridiculous, which is one of our greatest safeguards through life. Sensitiveness is therefore, on the whole, a common phenomenon in the spiritual life, so common as to justify our making it the subject of a separate investigation. All hearts quiver when they are touched. If some do not, there are only exceptions enough to prove the rule. Piety, if anything, keenly quickens this natural sensitiveness. Indeed in its earlier stages it quickens it almost to a morbid extent. This is one of the unlovelinesses, which cling about recently converted people. It makes their devotion only a new capability of censoriousness. Thus the mortification of it becomes one of the primary duties of the spiritual life; and the intense suffering which this causes is the ladder by which we climb higher.

I wish to call your attention to this matter, not only because it is a very practical one, but also because I think we hardly do justice to sensitiveness. We speak of wounded feelings, as if they were far more wrong than they are. We confound them with the conse quences which follow from them when they are not under the dominion of grace. Our own attainments are perhaps too low to enable us to estimate the magnificent fruits of wounded feelings, when they are consecrated by grace. Our tone about wounded feel ings is given to be exaggerated, exaggerated condemnation. This leads to many evils; but two especially, scrupulousness and discouragement. Theology tells us that our Blessed Lord s Body was especially formed for suffering. In like manner we should suppose that His Sacred Heart was sensitive above all other hearts. It is this which carries the sufferings of His Passion deeper down than we can follow them. Our sensitiveness, as well as our other characteristics, must be exalted into a conformity with His. Let us look at it, therefore, with fairness and moderation. If wounded feelings are a fountain of venial sins, they are also a capability of great holiness. They do not want killing; they want supernaturalizing. Perhaps it is not possible for us to make ourselves obtuse; but it is an enormous mischief even to try to do so. If we succeed, then we have stereotyped our present lowness in grace, and have gained nothing but a worthless diminution of some of the noblest pains of life. Thus the mortification of sensitiveness is a peculiar process. It is not a blunting, or stunning, or putting to death of sensitiveness, as it is with vices. But it is a brave making;

o use of the torture of our wounded feelings to get nearer God and to be kinder to men. What we have to avoid is the common error of blaming the feelings, instead of blaming consequences which would never come of them, if we corresponded to our grace. We must bear in mind at all times this peculiarity of mortifying our wounded feelings, as distinguished from other mortifi cations. This is not a mere subtlety, or a piece of metaphysical straw-splitting. I grant that there is a legitimate prejudice against refined distinctions: but we cannot do without them in the spiritual life. Coarseness and roughness spoil everything there. Simplicity is the highest grace, and the last reached; and what is simplicity but an almost incredible supernatural refinement?

Sensitiveness affects us in various ways. It makes us fanciful. We imagine offence has been intended where it was never dreamed of. It constructs entire imaginary histories upon what is often no foundation at all. Even where there is a basis of truth, it builds upon it more than it will bear. It magnifies and ex aggerates things. It puts the wildest constructions upon innocent actions. It mistakes indifference for intensity. It imagines subtlety where there has only been carelessness. It throws a monstrous significance into a chance phrase, and then broods on it for years, literally for years. From being fanciful we pass to being suspicious. Where we do not see phantoms, we are sure they are lying in ambush. We start at shadows. We make all life like riding a mettlesome horse by moonlight, when there are shadows at every turn; and there are few things more irksome or more irritating. Our mind is crowded with suspicions. We forget God. We become distracted in prayer. We are hardly able to distinguish between what is shadow and what is substance. We give shadows the power to harm us, as if they were substances. It is difficult to say whether we grow more intolerable to ourselves, or to those around us. From being suspicious we pass to being umbrageous. We grow moody, and bitter. We add sulkiness to our suspicions. There is no dealing with us. If an offender begs our pardon, we do not forgive him. We discover some new offence in the very act. Pie had no right to beg our pardon. He put himself into a position of superiority by doing so. We are angry with him for it. It is just like him. It is a piece of conceit and forwardness. He should have waited till we made the advances. We will not believe he is sincere. On whichever side men take us, they will find us equally unmanageable. They will meet with nothing but rebuffs. Now what grace, what conceivable Christ-like thing, can grow in such an atmosphere as this?

But shadows distort the bulk of things. So, when we are umbrageous, all our feelings connected with the subject-matter which annoys us, are disproportionate. This leads us into all manner of mistakes. We attach the wrong things to the wrong persons. We do not know where to take our aim, the outline of the shadows is so swollen and uncertain. We make people; think we are much worse than we really are. When we come forward of our own accord, we do so in an ungraceful way. When on the contrary men come upon us, our manner is startled and menacing. Hence comes excitement, excitement which by morosely brooding over itself becomes a sort of subordinate madness. Then it is that we become almost incurable. For then it is that we become as sure that we are in the right, as if it had been revealed to us. The proofs of the unkindness of others are overwhelming. We put our evidence together,, and get up our case against our best friend, it may be, or at least against an unhap pily offending friend, as a barrister gets up a case against a murderer. The excitement burns our judgment into us, as the fire anneals the porcelain and fixes the pattern and the colours. We shall never change our minds now. Then come the sins, outstreaming like a mountain -torrent, thoughts, words, actions, manifold displays of outward irritability. Every one of these is most likely irrevocable. We have dropped a mere word of bitterness, and it clings like a stain to the poor offender for life. It maims his power of doing good. It throws a shadow over his sunshine. We stand between God and him. Yet perhaps the offence was imaginary, or perhaps it was nothing like so great, and after all, what was it when weighed against past kindnesses? We have now got very far. We have come in sight of hatred. It is possible now for us to hate. Possible, yet is not the mere possibility terrific? O who can set bounds to the unmercifulness of a sensitive man?

This is the bad side of things. Here is plenty of occupation for a holy self-revenge. There is abundance to mortify in all this. We must be very unsparing of ourselves. A touch will not cure the matter. We must hold the caustic firmly, and press it hard,, and keep it long on the place, even while we tremble, and are on the brink of fainting. We must remember we have come in sight of hatred in our own souls, and no panic is out of proportion to such a terror. We may plead our health, as being in a great measure to blame for these ugly developements of our sensitiveness. Very likely this is true. It often seems as if men had only a given quantity of grace, a given quantity of patience for example; and the endurance of pain draws upon the bank till it breaks, and we have no patience left to pay others with, in the little rubs and affronts of daily life. Indigestion will make even a bright-minded, limpid-hearted man umbrageous. But the truth of ail this is no defence, and only a poor extenuation. But at any rate it is no exemption from the obligation of mortifying these wounded feelings. We must be swift also, as well as unsparing. We must work day and night, as men do on the railway when a bridge has broken down. All traffic between heaven and ourselves is interrupted, till we have got the ruin out of the way. Those grim labourers by torchlight in the thick darkness of night, they are our models in this desperate task of mortifying our wounded feelings.

I do not think that sensitiveness is an evidence of our fallen state, but only that certain developements of it are so. On the contrary I believe that in itself it is a grand gift: and that he is most fortunate who is most sensitive. Yet it runs into what is wrong so swiftly that it always seems wrong, and therefore causes us more unhappiness than it need do. The quickness to feel an unkindness, the tenderness which makes us shrink before we are touched, the subtlety which causes us to fancy unkind intentions when there were none, the delicacy which is almost crushed by little rough nesses, these are evidently without a shadow of sin.

2SG "WOUNDED FEELINGS.

They are not moral actions. They are both Involuntary and incleliberate. They are our character and constitution. Grace may change and elevate them, may fortify them with a gift of the Holy Ghost, and counterbalance them by making us love God more fervently and care for His interests more exclusively. But meanwhile they are not Avrong in themselves. More over the first moments of our sensitiveness, the first ideas, the first imaginations, the first impulses, are wholly free from sin; and many persons would be much happier if they could always bear this in mind. We are cast down if we feel a thing with exceeding keenness, which is in reality a feeling we cannot help, a feeling, which if it is to be overcome, can only be overcome gradually and in the long run, as the result of continuous processes of grace. Our self- annoyance ought not to begin till we proceed to act upon our sensitiveness, whether inwardly by deliberate thoughts, and that brooding which is a proximate occasion of sins against charity, or outwardly, by word, manner, or action. Neither is the undiminished keenness of feeling to be regarded as any proof of immortification; yet how often are people overwhelmed with sadness, be cause they have mistaken it for one!

In order to understand in what the mortification of our sensitiveness consists, let us take a case. Some shadow has come between us and one whom we love, and whom we continue to love in spite of the shadow. The shadow broadens, lengthens, thickens, we hardly know how. Words of his are reported to us. They have a dubious, if not an unkind sound, about them. We are stung, and the pain is so great that we wince under it. We know very well that words taken out of their context are very different from what they are in it. Experience has taught us that reported words are hardly ever exact; and even when exact, they put-on a new character by being separated from manner, tone, look, and circumstances. The unkindness of reported words is more often from the mind of the reporter, than from the mind of the original speaker. A man given to report things is never a kind man. He is no better than a bird of prey, given to feed on the garbage of the baser parts of our poor nature. We know all this. Nevertheless we are stunoj with the words, They rankle. There was poison on the arrows. Then come some actions, or looks of our friend, which admit of an unkindly interpretation. Our first impulse is to interpret them by our own pain at the former words. Like the roots of trees, it is the nature of a misunderstanding to entangle itself as it grows. It is its instinct to outgrow the possibility of ever being explained. It is easier to cut out a cancer than to disengage from the heart a misunderstanding which has once had time to harden there. The shadow then still continues. We do not speak. But our friend is, unconsciously perhaps, causing us the most exquisite torture by nearly every thing he says or does, or is reported to have said or done, with regard to us. Now let us also suppose that, while we have been thus wincing, we have been forcing ourselves intellectually to believe that no unkindness was intended, that we have checked ourselves sharply whenever we have caught ourselves brooding on the matter, that we have pun ished in ourselves any imaginary speeches, indictments, or defences, which our imagination has indulged in, that we have accused ourselves sedulously in confession of everything which had the slightest aspect of uncharitableness, that we have not allowed ourselves to express our sensitiveness in complaints or in actions, that we have prayed more than ever for him who is the cause of our suffering, and that, when we could do so- without giving him pain or discomfort, we have humbled ourselves by telling him of those inward feelings which must seem to him exaggerated and absurd, even if not petty, base, and mean, let us suppose all this, and then, though our sensitiveness is as lively as ever and our pain as sharp, we have been by God s grace mortifying it to good purpose. It is truly miserable work. For the very struggle defiles us. Our inward life is all thrown into disarray, and kept so perhaps for months or years. There are many cases in which we cannot speak, cases in which speaking would make matters worse. There are many misunderstandings, which we shall only lay down, where so many other burdens are laid down, just on this side of the judgment-seat. Hearts are often sundered in this life, whose love of each other is growing secretly beneath the shadow of a misunderstanding; and the unexpected growth will be one of the sweet surprises of eternity. Meanwhile, if we have done what has been described above, we are not only without sin, but we have earned merits, and have gone heavenwards by strides rather than by steps. We have acted nobly, as our infirmity and littleness may lawfully count nobility. Yet years of this inward strain may not, perhaps, allay our sensitiveness one iota. "When we lie down to die, we may have the same feeling of being flayed alive, which we have now. It is not always so, but it is often so. Some men grace makes blessedly insensible; other men it makes more tender and susceptible. I would rather have this last gift than that other blessing.

In the process of mortifying our sensitiveness we must also bear in mind, that the sensitiveness of each one of us is peculiar. We share it with no one else. It is individual. It is part of our idiosyncrasy. We may resemble this man rather than another. But a resemblance is all. ]Sfo man s sensitiveness is quite the same as another man s. It depends on combina tions of character, which nature does not appear ever to repeat exactly. We must therefore learn our own. This is of importance in two ways. Things may be wronor in others which are not wrong- in us; and the c? O 7 knowledge of this w r ill sometimes save us from discouragement. Again, things may be excusable in others which are inexcusable in us; and the know ledge of this will hinder our defending and dispensing ourselves where we have no ri^ht to do so. We must also remember that the tendency of sensitiveness is always towards selfishness. An unusually affectionate man is generally a man of unusual self-love; and sensitiveness is a department of the affections. It comes from what is good. Indeed it comes from what is too good for the present state of things. Hence it often does a mischief here, while it is in itself a prophecy, or rather an actual germ, of some undeveloped excellence of our eternity.

I have defended sensitiveness, and yet I have been saying a great many strong things against it. So I must not conclude without saying something about its privileges. Even in natural things it is the source of our keenest and most refined enjoyment. It is sensitiveness alone which finds out what lies under the monotony of life, and so gives us spirits to bear it. It glorifies all our joys, and makes sorrows more tolerable by its carrying them deeper down into our hearts. While it widens the sphere of our love, it also inten- 19 sifies its action. It gives a zest to the practice of virtue, which is in natural things what divine sweetness is in spiritual things. But its grand privilege is, that it makes us especially capable of the higher graces of sanctity. There is a delicacy, or subtlety, in the more uncommon operations of grace, which appears to require something congenial in the natural character, on which it may graft itself. Thus sensitiveness is the best basis for a great grace of charity, because it is an almost infinite power of sympathy. It reveals to us the finer and more interior perfections of charity. It is also infallible in its instincts for heavenly things, and quickly apprehends God, and is thus an excellent foundation for interior peace. It will thus perhaps increase our joy in heaven, if natural character is allowed any action there, independent of the degree of supernatural love.

Sensitiveness also peculiarly enables us to under stand God, to penetrate the meaning of His ways with us, to feel each touch of His grace, to discover the faintest workings of a divine vocation, and to be uneasy under any scarcely perceptible drifting away from His will. AVe are enabled by it to correspond to the jealousy of G-od, that jealousy which is a characteristic of His sanctity, and enters so deeply into all His dealings with souls that are aiming at perfection. Sensitiveness also makes us unworldly by continually bringing home to us our unfitness for the world. It is a gift whose dower is suffering, and which therefore makes us pine in our exile, even while it is contributing joys which are the best natural consolations of that exile. It is a source of sanctification uniting in itself all the four excellences, according to which we judge of the importance and efficacy of means of grace. It is constant; it is acute; it is unsuspected; it is fatal to self-love. By unsuspected I mean two things; first that it goes on sanctifying us even while we are not adverting to the fact, and secondly that so little delusion adheres to its method of operation that we may trust ourselves to it without suspicion. Last of all, it is a peculiarly Christlike fountain of suffering. Think of the mystery of the Agony in the garden. It was a great part of that mystery, that therein our dearest Lord put Himself in the place of every one of us. He bore our sins; He identified Himself with our shames; He felt our shrinkings. Our finest sensitiveness is coarse and blunt compared with His. We rudely pressed every one of the quivering keys of His Sacred Heart, and made it utter the low and plaintive notes of a sorrow beyond our understanding. He shrank, like a sensitive plant, from the shame with which we covered Him. In the other mysteries of the Passion we have outward pains, external shame, publicity, unkindness, and the desertion of friends: but the suffering of the Agony was in no slight degree, and above the other mysteries, the keenness of wounded feelings. To us, therefore, the model and the consolation in our excess of wounded feelings is that most dear and divine Heart, whose inward wound finds words in the Reproaches of Good Friday,