IV. Father Faber

(Dublin Review, January 1864.)

In this brief notice we do not pretend to write a biography of Father Faber, or to review his works. But we feel that when any one who for fifteen years has filled so large a place in the thoughts and affections of Catholics is called away to his rest, it is a grateful duty to record his name in our pages.

F. Faber died as a pastor ought to die, amidst the tears and prayers of a multitude of souls brought by him to the foot of the Cross; and, we must add, amidst the petty malevolence of those who hate the Church. No one can have been present on the day of his requiem without a desire to die as he did. And no one can have read the comments of the Saturday Review on that spectacle without a new conception of the littleness and implacableness of a certain class of minds. Until the rise of the spirit of petty personal detraction which stains our anonymous literature, we should have thought it impossible, not that any Christian, but that any man, could be found to write in cold blood, over a grave hardly closed, those words of un generous detraction and effeminate spite. They who in that article are held up by the writer as ' a desert

VOL. i.

of unfulfilled promise, blighted powers, and wasted life,' may well thank God that they have been saved from a greater desolation— that of sharing the heart and mind of the reviewer. Better to be all he describes than a Pharisee without a faith, and a man without a heart.

We confess that when we first read the article, the ill-natured gossip and unmanly raking up of early failings, supposing them to be true — or the reckless wickedness of publishing such detraction, supposing them to be false— excited in us no little indignation,— until we remembered that so it must be. If such a mind could appreciate F. Faber, F. Faber would not be what he was. We remembered that some writer of French gossip describes S. Vincent of Paul, the father of the Lazarist missionaries, of the Sisters of Charity, and of modern beneficence, as a man fond of cards, and not over-scrupulous in his play. This somewhat allayed our feelings; but one more thought turned it into thankfulness. A Saturday Reviewer in France has lately written a life of our Divine Lord, describing Him as the ' handsome enthusiast, the fascinating preacher, and the favourite of effeminate minds.' A Kenan in England has described F. Faber almost in the same words. ' The disciple is not above his Master, nor the servant above his Lord.' We know no greater honour than to be calumniated together with our Divine Re deemer. The animosity and injustice of the writer, happily without a name, are signally betrayed in the selection from F. Faber's poetry of two sets of verses, certainly of no high excellence. But will the critic, as a man of honour, pretend that those poems are a sample of F. Faber's poetical writings? In the very volume from which they are taken there are sonnets which would bear comparison with the poems of those who are accepted as the highest poets of our day. But it would not serve the purpose of detraction to quote them. It was more to the mind of the critic to pick out the few things which may be censured among the many things which are to be commended. The poems are criticised also for a tone of servility to friends. Has the critic ever read Shakespeare's Sonnets? But an Anglican of great gifts, who has committed the unpardonable sin of submitting to the Catholic Church, thereby disturbing and shaming many, who had the same lights and responsibilities, but not the same fidelity or force of character, must be run down, de rided, and damaged, lest men should believe in him.

Our first recollection of F. Faber is of a graceful and intelligent boy just launched into a great public school; and next, as a young man who had lately won for himself a high place in honours at Oxford. No one could have known him in those days without being attracted by a grace of person and mind rarely to be met with. But with his early career we have little to do. He is known to us in a character which effaces all antecedents. The only Frederick Faber we can now present to ourselves is the priest, the preacher, the guide of souls, the spiritual writer, and the head of a great community; and in these offices he has in fifteen years fulfilled the works of a long life.

As a priest we may say that few men of our day have given a higher example of the ecclesiastical and

11G FATHER FABER.

sacerdotal spirit, of entire devotion to the priestly life; detached from the world, in which he never set a foot, and immersed in everything which is most in harmony with the priesthood. The accuser of the Saturday Renew industriously collects against him the charges of tuft-hunting and the like. If so, then the change which his faith and piety had made in him was all the more meritorious and supernatural; for undoubtedly, of all our contemporaries few can be found who more entirely and consistently withdrew from the world. ' He lived with himself/ as S. Gregory says of S. Benedict, — habitabat sccum. He was so buried in the four walls of the Oratory that he never even visited his friends. They sought him, not he them; and those who did not come to him, be they who they might, he never saw.

As a preacher he possessed certain gifts beyond any one we remember to have heard. He had a facility and flexibility of mind and voice, a vividness of apprehension and of imagination, a beauty of conception and of expression, — a beauty, that is, to the eye and to the ear, — with a brightness of confidence, as of a man who lived in the light and the peace of God, and a longing desire to make others possess the happiness he enjoyed, which we have hardly seen united in the same degree. We have heard others who have spoken with more power, more mastery of intellect,' more reserve of force, more commanding strength of word and of will, but we have seldom, if ever, heard any preacher who so seemed to speak from a personal consciousness of the beauty and sweetness of a life of union with Jesus, with

His Saints, and with His Church. F. Faber's preaching was not a discourse elaborately worked out and delivered with a sensible or conscious effort, but the overflow of a mind perpetually fed from its own inward sources, and pouring forth with an exuberance of which we have known no example. With most men to preach seems to be an effort; with him it seemed to be a relief, as if his mind were so overburdened by the consciousness of the things of God and of the soul, that to pour them out in a continuous stream was as great a refreshment to himself as to the multitude who hung upon his lips.

As a guide of souls it wrould hardly be in place for us here to speak of him; but there was about F. Faber one quality which we must not omit to note. He had a thorough mistrust and dislike of all low views and compromises in serving God. He aspired, both for himself and for others, to the highest — not out of any rigour or moroseness, nor out of any vainglorious affectation of sanctity, but from a deep and consistent desire after the nearest union with God. No one was more large in permitting all that was innocent or lawful; none more high-minded in encouraging, inviting, urging men up the narrow path. He had a kindly but most caustic raillery for the vanities and singularities of silly pietism, which reminds us of S. Philip's counsels about ruffs and high heels. Certainly no one could hear him speak of the love and service of God without being attracted to it. It has been well said that to make men love their country the rulers must make it lovely; and it may be said of

US FATHER FADER.

religion, that to make men love it, spiritual guides must make it lovely; and this F. Faber did in a sin gular degree.

Of F. Faber as a spiritual writer it would be impossible here to speak. It would require a large ana lysis and appreciation of his many and various works, which we may hereafter attempt. All we can do is to point out one feature by which F. Faber's writings are eminently distinguished. His first work of Catholic piety was entitled All for Jesus, and this may be said to be the key-note of all that followed. They are all one strain, and all as harmonies elaborated out of this octave; the first few simple notes giving forth a flood of sound, rich, intricate, and sweet. Year after year, with a wonderful rapidity, his works came forth. In such an abundance of matter it might be easy to criticise; but it would be hard to find any mind or hand which has bestowed so large a gift on the Catholics of England— and not only of England, but wheresoever the English tongue is spoken— and not only in our tongue, but in German, in French, and in other languages. In France many of his books are now in the fourth, sixth, and tenth editions. The Catholics of other countries have recognised in F. Faber the quality and the flavour of mystical and ascetical piety familiar to them in the tradition of the Church. To them it was a gift, but not the supply of a need, as it was to us. The Church in England has hitherto been as poor in writers as in endowments. The Catholics of other countries had already their doctrinal works: we had hardly any; and it must be said that, excellent as are those, we possessed, there was still a want to be sup plied. Gother, Challoner, and Hay, with all their deep and solid instruction, do not fulfil the mission of S. Francis of Sales, or Lallemant, or Segneri. There was still a strain of the spiritual life to be uttered. To this F. Faber applied himself; first by the translation of the series of the Lives of the Saints, and next by his own writings. The former work was, as it were, a novitiate for the latter. Now it is well known how great an opposition was made by good and excellent men to the series of Lives. The chief opponent afterwards, with a true Christian's humility, withdrew his censures. But this fact is enough to show that there was a need to be supplied. The Lives in question are chiefly those which were prepared for the processes of canonisation, or at least derived from the evidence taken in those processes. We feel sure that both for the series of the Saints' Lives, and for his own writings, we are greatly his debtors. We know of no one man who has done more to make the' men of his day love God and aspire to a higher path of the interior life; and we know no man who so nearly represents to us the mind and the preaching of S. Bernard and of S. Bernardino of Sienna, in the tenderness and beauty with which he has surrounded the names of Jesus and Mary.

And here we cannot omit to mention his devotional hymns, among which are to be found some of the purest simplest strains of high and elevating devotion. They have been a consolation to multitudes, and are daily in the mouths of thousands of our children; and they have entered deeply into the training of many hearts in the love of God, of piety, and of the Church.

It only remains to us to say the fewest words of F. Faber as the head of the London Oratory. No one can have followed the career of the Oratorians, from their entrance upon the miserable room which served for a church in King William-street, Strand, to the day when F. Faber's bier, in their spacious church at Brompton, was surrounded by more than a hundred priests, representing the reverence and affection of the diocese, and a great multitude of mourners, representing the love of his spiritual children, without recognising both the vastness of the work which has been done, and the pre-eminence of the one mind which animated and guided it. This is neither the time nor the place to enter into the reasons which make this work so significantly great. F. Faber has had the happy lot to be called to labour for the Catholic Church in England and in London at a moment pregnant with critical events; and nobly he has done so, — as ' a workman that needeth not to be ashamed;' as a voice that never faltered; as a man that was always found upon the right side — always for the higher truth and for the better choice. It is the property of greater minds to assimilate others to themselves; and this F. Faber did with a remarkable power. His spirit pervaded the community over which he presided, and he lived to see it multiplied to some two-and-twenty priests, and expanding itself with a singular fruitfuluess of spiritual works. It is hardly credible that among us there should be found a man— and lie must Le also an Oxford man, we fear, and perhaps once a friend — who could describe such a man and such a life as one ' who would have made his fortune as a pocket-handkerchief preacher in a fashionable chapel,' and whose proper sphere was amongst choristers and effeminate minds. Perhaps it was necessary that while the aspersory sprinkled upon his bier the tokens of divine absolution, the frivolous and the malicious should sprinkle it with vinegar and gall. Such is the destiny and the dignity of the ser vants of God; and this thought gives us an additional feeling of joy in laying upon his grave our too slight testimony of reverence and love.