FROM the Catholic life and the Catholic vision, it is something of a shock to come to the Catholic. We are so appallingly commonplace. Illumined by such truths, fed by such food, we yet look so horribly like everyone else. Living within one split second of the judgment seat of God, we are so intent upon other matters. At Mass we are taking part in an action of inconceivable wonder, and our problem is to keep our minds upon it at all. These things, and a score of other manifestations of the same trouble, puzzle the unbeliever. There is no doubt at all that the principal argument against the Church is the Catholic. Not the bad Catholic: any man of intelligence can see that members of the Church who do not listen to her teaching or receive her sacraments or obey her laws constitute no case at all against the Church. It is the Catholics who do in a general way listen to the teachings and receive the sacraments, who stand more than any other single factor between the unbeliever and belief. He hears of the immensities that we believe, and he feels that if he believed such things his life would be utterly revolutionized, he would be made new. But we do not look new, or anything else in particular. He meets us, for instance, after we have received Communion, and he finds the Real Presence of Christ in the communicant rather harder to believe than the Real Presence of Christ in the Host. Before communion the bread does not look as if Christ were really present in it, after communion the Catholic does not look as if Christ were really present in him. The unbeliever feels certain that he could not believe such things and be to all appearance so little affected outwardly or inwardly. He can account for it only by assuming that we do not really believe the things we say we do, and this comforts him in his own aimlessness, or at least helps to keep him in it.
As I say the unbeliever is troubled, and this is tragic. But it is not his puzzlement that I am concerned with now, but our own. We puzzle ourselves, when we stop to contemplate ourselves, and unless we see the key to our own puzzle we may easily get a mis-taken view of the vital realities which seem to vitalize us so little.
The truth about us is, of course, that grace is working in a nature that fell in Adam. Grace is in itself as glorious a treasure as we have described it. But in St. Paul's phrase we carry that treasure in earthen vessels: and the vessels are not something distinct from ourselves: they are ourselves. Gratia supponit naturam, say the theologians. They mean that grace does not supply us with a new nature but works in the nature it finds. Grace is a supernature, but it does not supersede nature. It sets a new principle of life in the very core of the nature we have, which gives it new and greater powers. But it does not directly improve it as a nature. It is rather like electricity which gives a wire the power to light up a whole room. But the electricity does not correct any defects there may be in the wire. The analogy must not be pressed further, because grace does, as we shall see, bring aid to nature. It brings aid not by direct action upon nature's defects, nor, usually, at all quickly or spectacularly. Grace is necessary for the healing of our nature. But it will not itself heal our nature. Our co-operation with grace will do that, and in the measure of our co-operation. We are the trouble. If you want to see the effects of the Fall upon human nature, there is no need to find an unbaptized man: stop the first Christian you meet and study him. We all of us inherit natures tainted and vulnerable from Adam and every ancestor since, and it is only too probable that we have contributed our own share to their worsening.
Grace, then, has to work in a damaged nature. Consider first the clouded intellect in which the theological virtue of Faith, the moral virtue of Prudence, and the Gifts of Understanding, Knowledge, Wisdom, and Counsel have to operate. Vast and luminous realities are spread out before our gaze: why are we not dazzled? Our intellect is defective at three levels.
There are truths it simply does not know; truths it knows but does not advert to; truths it knows and adverts to but does not realize.
Take the first. For a variety of reasons one finds that a great number of Catholics have made almost no study of their religion. They believe it, would probably die rather than deny it, but are not interested enough to find out very much about its meaning. They have grasped that knowledge is not the most important part of religion, and have proceeded from that to a sort of working theory that it is not important for themselves at all. They know that they can be saved with a very minimum of knowledge, and have not grasped that more knowledge might help. Consider, for instance, one piece of truth not grasped even by all practising Catholics. They know that Sanctifying Grace is necessary to salvation; they have been accustomed all their lives to being urged so to live that they will increase in Sanctifying Grace. But for the most part they have only the vaguest notion of what Sanctifying Grace is. From this two practical consequences follow; first, that they think of their destiny after death as rather a matter of whether they are in sin than as a matter of whether they are in the state of Sanctifying Grace; second, that they think of salvation simply as a matter of getting into Heaven and thus avoiding all the unpleasantness of Hell. They have not grasped that there are degrees of glory in Heaven, dependent upon the intensity of the life of grace in the soul at death. The result of this hodge-podge of light and darkness in the mind is that one adopts as a practical rule of life the question: How much can I have of this world without losing Heaven?— very much like the small child speculating how much he can eat without getting sick. The extremely practical question: How little of Heaven am I likely to get by this system? does not arise at all. There is no awareness, as I have said, of degrees of glory in Heaven; nor very much awareness of glory in Heaven at all: the motive of such a life is not desire for Heaven, but desire to avoid Hell.
Still in this category of truths not known, is a widespread failure to grasp the whole truth about sin. At any level of instruction or uninstruction a Catholic can hardly fail to know that the moral law is a command of God; but he may easily fail to realize the other half of the truth, that it is a statement about reality, that it is comparable with the maker's instructions as to the running of an automobile. In the light of that truth sin is folly. But one may easily not know that truth— still less a truth deeper still in the light of which sin is totally ridiculous. Given that God made us all of nothing and continues to hold us in existence, it follows that we depend for our existence entirely upon the will of God. Sin is an effort to gain some happiness for ourselves against the will of God, against the one thing that is holding us in existence at all. What could be more ridiculous? We are being kept from God by our attachment to things which are wholly of God. Which is a reminder of that defect in the intellect which underlies all others, our tendency to take the part for the whole, to treat the part as if it were the whole, to try to get from it that total satisfaction which can only be got from the whole. The trouble is that our minds have not the muscles for totality. But they can grow them.
The second defect in the mind concerns the truths it knows, but does not advert to. Our intellects are always harassed and often dominated by our imagination, the thing seen close has greater power than the greater thing on the horizon. We are obsessed with the immediate. We have already considered this in the matter of our reaction to suffering. Under the impact of some pain especially terrible, we tend to ask impatiently why does not God intervene? If the question meant what it says, it would mean "I would act thus and thus if I were God: why doesn't God?" So stated it is ridiculous. But it would be unfair so to state it. It is the almost automatic reaction of a mind which sees the part and not the whole, is all aquiver with realization of what it does see and naturally not affected by what it does not advert to. One can think of a dozen such instances: there is, for example, the tendency to be unduly affected by the appearance of unworthy conduct in a priest. It means that his personal conduct which is immediately under our gaze holds our attention, while his office as the channel of God's gifts does not.
The third effect concerns things known and adverted to, but not realized. The unbeliever is wrong when he thinks that we do not really believe the immensities we profess. We do quite really believe them, with no admixture of doubt; but we do not always realize them. It is of the plainest historical evidence that Catholics will die for the Mass: they would not die for something they did not really believe. Yet the vast majority of those same Catholics were almost certainly distracted at every Mass they ever attended, and may very well have spent more time thinking of other things. The test of belief is willingness to die for a truth; the test of realization is ability to live by it. It takes time for the mind and an effort of habituation if we are to live at the level of our new know-ledge. Realization requires muscles which the ordinary conduct of life has never called upon us to use. They will not instantly come to full power and functioning. We are not dazzled by the immen-sities we believe simply because the mind can hardly cope with them at all— much as a man does not stagger under a weight that he has not the muscles to lift.
More serious than the damaged intellect is the damaged will. For in the will lies the issue of salvation or damnation. It is the will that loves, and as we have seen it can fix its love anywhere between nothingness and God. Ultimately we are saved or damned by what we love; here and now we are made or unmade by what we love. We were not consulted about our creation, about that act of God which brought us into existence, what we may call the initiation of our creation. But creation will not be fully accom-plished in us without our consent. It is by no act of our will that we are men: but as to what sort of men, our will is decisive.
We have already seen that just as the continuing action of God is necessary if we are to exist, so the continuing action of God is necessary if we are to act. It is not thinkable that beings whose very existence results from God's action upon nothingness should themselves be able to act without God's concurrence in their action. The same God Who lends us the energy to exist with, lends us the energy to act with. Apart from God, there is nothing in ourselves for action to proceed from. But it is part of the con-sequence of the freedom God willed us to have, that God will concur in the actions our will chooses, even if these actions are not the best for us. If the will insists, God will give it the energy which will allow it to damage itself. In other words God treats us as grown-up. He will lend our will the energy to act against His will if that is what our will chooses. This choice is sin.
It is an interesting list that the Church gives of the seven capital sins, the sins from which all other sins flow. They are Pride, Envy, Avarice, Anger, Sloth, Gluttony and Lust. Note that all are in the will. For sin is always a defect of the will. Its act may be in the intellect, or in the body; but the sin itself is in the will. No action whatsoever, merely as action, can damn us, but the will with which we do it. And the will can damn us without any action at all save merely willing. For by the will our deepest relation of harmony or disharmony with reality, that is to say with God, is established.
We see that sin is always assertion of self as against reality. Pride is the worst sin, for it is positive assertion of self, positive choice of self in place of God as the supreme object of our love and our actions. Being the worst sin, it is also the most ridiculous. In order to set oneself up in place of God, one must borrow from God the energy to do it: if we insist upon defying God, God lends us the energy to defy Him with. No sin is its own contradiction more instantly and obviously, no sin therefore means a more total break with reality. The other six sins avoid the crowning folly of Pride. Where Pride is a positive assertion of self as against God, these others choose creatures in place of God, without necessarily making any explicit assertion at all about the nature of God or themselves. But there is always an assertion of one's own desires as against the reality of things. And it is always an assertion that negates. It always involves choosing less than we might have, less than we need. And it never pays full dividends.
Why then do we sin? For the sins of the mind, there is the plain uncomplicated pleasure of egoism. There is an appearance of autonomy in asserting self with the appearance of impunity. Indeed there is a disease in the will which can find some sort of pleasure in the assertion of self, even where the appearance of impunity has vanished away and the wretched inadequacy of self in the face of reality is altogether obvious.
But for sins of the body, the position is different. They are the lesser sins (not that they cannot damn us all the same) because they affect the lesser part of us; because they are rather a yielding of weakness than an assertion of strength; because the temptation is fiercer. Our bodies are so made that there is a clean joy to be got through their senses, and this joy is a splendid thing, meant by God. It turns to total evil in the extreme case when we are able to get joy from nothing else. But short of that extreme, the body can urge its desires upon the will with altogether disproportionate effect. There is an intensity and exquisiteness and immediacy and vibrancy in bodily pleasure which for most of us is not in the pleasure of the mind. Serving God does not give us the same kind of here and now pleasure that sin gives. To eyes as little trained to reality as ours, there is a colour and energy in sin by comparison with which virtues look pallid and half alive. It is in this sense that Swinburne speaks of:
The lilies and languors of virtue And the roses and raptures of vice.
There is something in us all that stirs into life in response to that. But it is illusion all the same. Chesterton has the truth of it when he makes Swinburne's mistress reply:
The notion impels me to anger That vice is all rapture for me And if you think virtue is languor Just try it and see.
Sin is always a following of the line of least resistance, towards the deficiency of life: there is less of a man after sin. It is a going with the stream of one's inclinations. But it takes no vitality to go with the stream: a dead dog can do it.
In any event there is quite enough in ourselves to account for our sinning. And we are not left to ourselves. There are other men to urge us on. And there is the Devil. What the Devil gets out of it it is hard to see. There is a futility in all that he does. His own sins and the sins he leads others to commit serve only to illustrate the unbreakableness of God's law. The Devil is the supreme example of the assertion of self at all costs and with no gain, of the pure rejoicing of self in self, the world well lost for love, self-love. That God allows the Devil to tempt man, we have already seen. But how does the Devil go about it? He has no direct power over our souls: he has not even a power to read our souls. He can form extraordinarily good guesses as to what is in our mind, but they remain guesses. His power relates to the matter of our bodies. All angels have, as a mere consequence of their own superiority in being, a power over matter. They cannot create it or annihilate it, but they can move material things in space, and redistribute the elements within material things themselves. They cannot exercise this power without the permission of God; but God does give permission to the fallen angels to make a certain use of their power as part of the testing of man. The Devil can stir the flesh of man at its most sensitive points; he can move the eye of man to see what otherwise he might not have seen; he can produce certain images in the bodily organism, the brain for example, which man will find at once distracting and soliciting.
One way or another, under the impulse of his own desires and other men's urgings and the Devil's tempting, man is in constant peril of sin; and no one of us can feel that our own performance is particularly impressive. Baptized or unbaptized, we all sin, though some less than others, certain of the Saints probably only venially, and only Our Lady not at all. But leaving out the Saints, the rest of us are a pretty unimpressive lot. And the Church knows it, as indeed she well might after hearing our confessions for the best part of two thousand years. If you want realism about the weaknesses of Christians, read the Missal carefully. The worst things our enemies charge us with, the Church has already men-tioned on Her own account in Her official prayer book. Right at the beginning of Mass, for instance, the priest, the minister of God, alter Christus, beats his breast and says:
I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
What
is there left for anyone else to say against him?
One might embroider that, as the Church's enemies often do,
but one cannot add to it.
It says everything.
This same realism is to be found on almost every page, so that we are tempted
sometimes to wonder if we are as bad as that.
But we are.
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All this is plain fact. But how is it to be reconciled with the presence in our souls of Sanctifying Grace. To bring the problem to a point: how is it that a man with the virtue of charity acts cruelly, a man with the virtue of temperance gets drunk?
To answer the question, we must return to what was said in an earlier chapter about Sanctifying Grace and the theological and moral virtues as habits. A natural habit is acquired by a constant repetition of certain acts, and results in a facility in the performance of these acts. The good habit of speaking English, the bad habit of drinking too much alcohol, the dubious habit of playing the piano, are all illustrations. The supernatural habits are not acquired by the continuous repetition of acts, but are given to us in one act by God. Nor do they give the same facility in action that the natural habit gives. But they are habits all the same, as truly as our natural habits. For they are a real modification of our nature giving us the power to act in a special way.
Along with the Gift of Sanctifying Grace we get supernatural habits, but we do not lose our natural habits. We are in the curious position of having two sets of habits in one person. With Sancti-fying Grace, a naturally cold man gets the virtue of charity, and remains cold; a naturally lustful man gets the virtue of temperance, and remains lustful; a naturally timid man gets the virtue of fortitude, and remains timid.
I have called this curious, and so it is; but there is no contra-diction. That is why the Missal can tell us to pray May the energising of the divine gifts take possession of our minds and bodies, so that its effects and not our own impulses may prevail in us. (Postcom 15th S. after Pentecost).
Grace gives us a power, which without it we should not have, to act supernaturally—for example to be temperate for the love of God or courageous for the love of God. But though it gives us the power to act supernaturally, it does not remove our natural power to act sinfully. It does not even remove our natural desire to act sinfully. What it does is to insert a new desire to act for the love of God, so that there is a new war in our powers.
The result is that a man with the virtue of temperance may find it appallingly hard to act temperately and may often collapse into intemperance. Yet the virtue of temperance is a real power all the same. It is rather like a great pianist with a bad piano. His power to produce music is truly real and objective; but in the state of the piano he finds it all but impossible to produce music at all. This same illustration may help to throw light upon another problem. The Church teaches that when we are in a state of grace, we have all the supernatural virtues at the same level of intensity. There is no such thing as a man having more prudence than fortitude. Yet it seems to be a matter of everyday experience that a given Christian has more of one virtue than another. We can now see why we fall into this error. Suppose a man who could play all the instruments in an orchestra equally well: yet if the piano is good, and the violin less good, and the oboe hopeless, the listener might conclude that he had a greater gift of playing the piano than of playing the violin and that he had no gift at all for the oboe. The illustration will serve, provided we remember that the instruments upon which grace must make its music are our natural faculties of soul and body, not something distinct from ourselves, but part of ourselves: and that grace does aid in their repairing.
All our powers are not equally apt to manifest our supernatural virtues. But our supernatural virtues are equally powerful. For they all go with the Life: it is to that, not to any single effect of it, that God gives increase. God does not give us an increase of faith, for instance, as distinct from hope and charity. He gives us an increase of Life, which means an increase of all the Virtues and Gifts that flow from Life. When we pray, as against a particular temptation, for an increase of faith, our prayer is not for more of the supernatural virtue of faith as distinct from the other virtues, but for an increase of Sanctifying Grace and a strengthening of our nature that it may not be prevented, by its own natural scepticism for instance, from acting in harmony with the super-natural virtue of faith.
Thus our problem is to bring our natural habits into harmony with our supernatural habits. Grace has to operate through our faculties; we have to work for the destruction of habits that make our faculties bad instruments for grace and for the development of habits that make them good instruments— to the point where the supernature has become a sort of second nature, and the supernatural habits give the same facility as natural habits. And there is only one way in which this can be done— by the steady repetition of actions, actions against the bad habit, actions tending to form a good habit. That is the law of our nature for the formation of natural habits, and the supernatural life does not supersede it.
But then, you may wonder, how grace and the virtues fulfil the second part of the definition of habit. A habit is a modification of a being, disposing it to act in a particular way. How can grace and the virtues be said to dispose our nature to act according to them? First there is the truth we have already seen: that by grace we have real powers, even if our nature is too damaged to act in harmony with them. But there is something else. Grace helps us in the effort to acquire good natural habits by setting this new energizing of divine life in the very centre of our being, and by showing us God closer and clearer, as a stimulus to action that will please Him and bring us to Him. It gives us not only a supernatural power to act in relation to God thus seen close and clear, but a stimulus that our nature itself can respond to. It brings not only God all-knowing and all-loving thus close to us, but the rest of reality as well, and especially the truth about ourselves: it analyses sin for us, telling us what the war within ourselves is about; telling us why man is unsatisfied and must go on being unsatisfied with things less than God, because the central fact about man is that he is capax Dei, capable of being filled with God.
In these and a dozen other ways grace helps nature to do nature's own job of remaking itself. But it is, as it cannot help being, a long job. At first all we can say is that there are now two sets of habits at conflict within us, and that now one is victorious, now the other, which is at least an improvement on our earlier stage when the natural habit invariably won because there was no contest. But from that first effect— disturbing our peace, ruining our previous simple joy in our sins, by initiating a conflict which was not there before— to the successful issue of the struggle when we find peace at a new level, there is a long way to go. It is vital that we should understand just what the struggle involves. As we have seen the precise problem is the healing of our nature as nature, which cannot be effected without grace or by grace alone, but by the development of natural habits in harmony with grace. As between different people, one will find less resistance in his nature than another, his passions are less stormy perhaps or his sins bring less delight. But in all men there is some resistance, some sort of warfare, and the general principles on which the war must be fought are the same for all. First, we must use every means of increasing the supernatural life in us. Second, we must work upon our natures with toil and pain that may amount to agony, fighting against bad habits and forming good.
At the risk of wearying it must be repeated that grace alone is not the answer. We often deceive ourselves by trying to make the supernatural do the work of the natural, and falling into despair because it does not. We multiply communions as against a particular temptation, and often enough the only result is to increase the strife within us without producing the virtuous act or preventing the sin. The charity of God troubles us, but does not seem to aid us. Once we have grasped the real nature of the struggle, we shall be in no danger of being led by this to despair, least of all to despair of the supernatural, because the supernatural was never promised for this. God could of course root out the bad habit or tendency by one act of His power, but He has not promised to do so, and it would be something in the nature of miracle if He did. By all means pray for a miracle, but do not be discouraged if you do not get it.
The direct work upon our nature has to be done, as we have seen, with labour and pain. In our damaged state, in the wrongness of our relation to reality, we are not healable or rightly treatable without pain caused. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—It is sweet and right to die for our country. So says Horace, and the first word surprises. That it is right one does not doubt. But sweet? There is a sweetness in it, but for most of us that would hardly be the specifying element. It is true that all right action can be sweet, but only if we are in complete harmony with reality. To get ourselves to the state where virtue is sweet, the road is by no means sweet. Immediate enjoyment is almost invariably incom-patible with healing, and without healing there is no permanent enjoyment.
Part of healing is the bringing back of our powers into their proper relation to one another. The body must be made subject to the mind. This will mean that where the body wants something which the instructed mind knows it should not have, the body's claims must be denied. The mere keeping of the commandments will tend to bring upon the body a good deal of very unpleasant pressure, which may amount to real pain. Over and above that, all who have had any success in bringing their body into proper subjection to the mind testify that there must be definite un-pleasantness caused to the body or pleasure refused to the body, not simply in the avoidance of sin, but as a direct training of the body for its proper part in the human compound, not only for the soul's good, but ultimately for the body's, too.
But if the body must be brought into right relation with the mind, the mind must be brought into right relation with God. And for this the obvious method is prayer. Prayer does of itself, even more directly than suffering, tend to correct the disharmony between ourselves and reality. For of itself it asserts every element in the relation that ought to exist between the creature and God, and it brings the soul into that sort of contact with God in which He is closest and clearest. And if this is true of prayer in general, it is most true of prayer at its highest point, the Mass. The harmonizing of the two wills, man's will and God's will, must be brought about by shared life: that is not simply by effort on the will's part, but by a loving co-operation with God's action. In the Mass there is precisely this co-action of man with God, with no sense of effort or strain, and the richness of that experience falls back upon those other areas of life where the co-operation is most difficult.
But even here, the co-operation is not simply a matter of our acting as God wills, but of God acting with us. When St. Paul said I live, yet now not I, but Christ lives in me he was speaking a precise truth, not simply giving us a stimulating figure of speech. In his epistle to the Colossians (i.29) he tells us the same thing even more clearly: In Christ Jesus I labour, striving according to His working which He worketh in me in power.
The same truth that our struggle to live the life of grace is not ours only but God's, too, he tells the Romans: Only, as before, the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; when we do not know what prayer to offer, to pray as we ought, the Spirit himself intercedes for us, with groans beyond all utterance. (viii.26.)
St.
Paul sees our prayer and the Holy Ghost's part in our prayer as so interwoven
that he hardly bothers to distinguish them.
We are praying, but it is really the Spirit praying in us and with us;
and to the Spirit St. Paul attributes the unspeakable groanings which are ours,
because it is He that has given us the power to utter them.
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In the ordinary Christian life, the struggle is life-long. The victories go sometimes one way and sometimes the other; but the oscillation grows definitely less. With all sorts of defects, the Christian's nature does come into something like harmony with grace, his natural habits into some sort of correspondence with his supernatural. Temptations may remain, but his power over them grows. If he falls into sin, his repentance comes more quickly and certainly. Again not always, though this tends to be the story for the Christian who makes a real effort to grasp the Church's teaching, use the Church's sacraments, obey the Church's laws. If the oscillation does not cease, it does, as I have said, grow less violent.
In the Saint it ceases. His nature has been brought fully into harmony with his supernature. If temptation remains, it can only solicit him and not conquer him. Because the Saint is the man who has made a total success of man's prime job of being a man, we may look at him for a moment a little more closely. What makes him a Saint is the union of vast supernatural love of God, and a nature through which the supernatural love can manifest itself without flaw or discord. This correspondence of nature with grace— which he has attained and we are still toiling towards— may or may not have been for him a matter of hard striving. There is a romantic notion abroad that the greatest sinners make the greatest saints. It is an error, but it contains certain truths. The men who begin life with an equipment of strong passions may actually be aided on their way to sanctity by that very fact. Men of strong passions, in the first place, are more likely to be driven to actions which will shock themselves into the realization of their own sinfulness and their need of aid from God. There is a certain danger in weak passions: a danger that one may mistake the absence of any very spectacular sin for virtue; the danger that one may seem to oneself to be a good enough sort of man, because one happens to be temperamentally incapable of doing anything bad enough to force one to realize one's own badness. And there is a second way in which this original natural equipment may help. Sanctity does not mean the absence of sins, though it will result in that, but the right direction of energy. There is no particular virtue in not committing sins for which one has not the taste or the temperament. It is in this sense that St. Teresa of Avila said that chastity is no bad preparation for purity. Chastity as such is merely a fact of one's autobiography. It means that one has not had a particular bodily experience. If this is for the love of God it is a virtue; but not if it is only because one is afraid of women, or has no natural inclination to women, or prefers one's stamp collection. But purity means the direction of energy to God with no admixture of self. Given that sanctity is the right direction of energy, then great natural energy, which if it take the wrong direction runs into sins of passion, will if it turn to the right direction produce the heroic virtue of the Saint.
The Saint, we may say, is the successful man. He is this even by natural standards. For he has found peace, and peace is what all men are seeking at all times. They would say that they are seeking for happiness, but peace is happiness and nothing else is. Peace, of course, is not the absence of activity, but the absence of discordancy. It is not the beginning of our life in the Church. Anyone who joins the Church, as the common misunderstanding has it, to find tranquillity will soon begin to wonder what he has found: not tranquillity certainly, but struggle. Peace is not given along with faith, as the Missal shows when it begs God on those to whom Thou hast given faith, lavish also peace. (Prayer for Monday in Whit Week).
We shall find peace at the end, if we persevere to the end. The danger is that in seeking peace we may be led away from the road to peace: the struggle to harmonize our will with God's and our body with our will seems to bring so much discord into our very being, and we want happiness so urgently. if thou couldst understand the ways that can bring thee peace;
so
cries Our Lord, and it is the heart of our tragedy.
But the Saint's tragedy is resolved.
This book is not about sanctity, only about sanity.
But sanity points straight towards sanctity.
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