Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Any argument, therefore, addressed to prejudgments of this class must merge in the general argument, which shows that, whether the Catholic religion be true or false, it is beyond the limits of credibility that its ruling principle can be one of intentional deception. I insist, then, that it would not merely be a miracle,--if is an _impossibility_ that such an imposture should remain undetected to this day, and that men and women of all ranks, ages, and countries, the ablest and the most simple, including uncounted fathers and mothers of families, should persist in submitting to and upholding the authority of a few thousand priests, who are really no better than incarnate devils. Whether the Catholic system be an error or not, it must have fallen to pieces a hundred times over, if its chief ruler and his subordinates were mere tricksters, playing upon the credulity of a fanatical and besotted world. By this same test, then, its miraculous histories must be judged, like the general characters of its supporters. They who propagate these stories believe them to be true. They do not, of course, assert that _every_ supernatural story is what it professes to be. They may even admit that many are the mere creations of well-meaning but ill-informed report. Nor is every Catholic priest, monk, or layman to be accounted a sincere and honest man. There are betrayers of their Lord, from Judas Iscariot to the last wretched apostates, who remain for years in the Church, deceiving others without deceiving themselves. But on the whole, and viewed as a body, the Catholic Church is as honest and truthful, when she asserts that many wonderful miracles are incessantly taking place within her, as the most scrupulous of moralists can desire.

"But she is herself deceived," exclaims the more candid separatist or sceptic, taking up the argument declined by his scoffing brother. Catholics, it is supposed, are under the dominion of so abject a superstition, that the moment the subject of their religion is introduced, they cease to exert their ordinary common sense and powers of criticism, and believe any thing and every thing that seems to be marvellous. Granting them to be sincere, the charitable Protestant is of opinion that they are intellectually incapable of testing the pretensions of these wonders to be real and true miracles. If, in plain words, Catholics are not knaves, they _must be_ fools. Now, let me ask any candid person who thus accounts for our belief in modern miracles, to furnish me with an intelligible answer on two points. First, let him explain how it comes to pass that an innumerable multitude of persons, many of them distinguished for the highest intellectual powers, and proving by their lives and their deaths that they are ready to make every sacrifice for the sake of religion, should suffer themselves to be imposed upon in so momentous a subject, should willingly accept as true a series of absurd fabrications, whose falsehood they might detect by the exercise of any ordinary acuteness, and should risk their reputation with the world by professing to believe these fictions. If we _are_ sincere in our faith, it is impossible to suppose us so willing to be imposed upon. The hollowness of these supernatural pretensions must have betrayed itself to _some_ amongst us. The bubble must have burst _somewhere_. If not at Rome, where Protestants imagine Catholic intellect to be at its lowest ebb, at least in England, or France, or Belgium, or Germany, _some_ of our great Catholic philosophers, historians, politicians, and men of science, must have unveiled the truth. [Footnote: It is a remarkable fact, that the most celebrated work on the supernatural gifts accorded by God to Christians, is the production of one of the greatest intellects, and by far the most influential political writer, that modern Europe has seen. Görres, the author of the _Christliche Mystik_, was the Wellington of literature during the last European war. The influence which he exercised over the whole German mind by his _Rhenish Mercury_ is altogether without parallel in the history of journalism. It was, indeed, regarded as so formidable by Napoleon himself, that he styled Görres a _fourth continental power_. Yet this first of publicists devoted his whole life to the investigation of the wonders of Catholic mysticism, and believed with undoubting conviction in their reality.]

And, secondly, I desire to be told _who_ are the deceivers. If our numerous miracles are all errors, there must be gross deception in a host of instances _somewhere_. _Where_ is it, then? I ask; which are the dupes, and which the rogues? Do the clergy cheat the laity? Or do the laity (who have quite as much to do with these miracles) cheat the clergy? Do the Jesuits entrap the Pope? Or does the Pope mystify the Jesuits? When missionaries shed their blood in hundreds in heathen lands, are we to believe that _they_ are the fabricators of the wonderful tales which they have been in the habit of sending home to Christendom? Or did they leave Europe with the intention of becoming martyrs, without troubling themselves to ascertain whether they were not the dupes of delusions already surrounding them in a Christian land? Again I say, if Catholic miracles are all false, there must be boundless trickery _somewhere_, and I demand to know _where_ it is. In an English court of justice a charge of conspiracy cannot be entertained unless the accuser can point out certain parties on whom to fasten his charge. Judge and jury would laugh at a plaintiff who came into court crying out that he was victimised by some invisible, indescribable, and unknown, but yet very numerous band of foes. So it is with this popular theory about Catholic miracles. We are told that we are deceived. We are all cheated together. The bishops are victims; the priests are victims; monks and nuns are victims; the laity are victims; the old Catholics in England are victims; the converts are victims; the best of us all are victims; the most learned, the most pious, the most able, the most self-denying,--all _these_ are dupes. If there are deceivers, they are the few, the ignorant, the cunning, and the vile. The Roman Church, as a Church, is supposed to be under the dominion of a band of conspirators, who have blinded her eyes without her having found it out, and who are now using her for their own godless purposes. Does not such a supposition confute itself? Is it worth admitting, even as an hypothesis? Would such a statement be endured for a moment by a judge and twelve men in a jury-box? I say, therefore, before moving a step to overthrow the Protestant accusation, "Make a distinct and intelligible charge of certain definite crimes against certain definite individuals. When that is done, the proof still remains with you. Show us both who are the deceivers, and how they deceive us; or admit that there is no credulity so open-mouthed as that of Protestants when they attack Catholics; no superstition so base as that which worships this visible order of nature as an eternal rule which not even God Himself can ever interrupt."

The fact is, however, that no Protestant ever attempts any thing like a profound investigation of the Catholic miracles. A calm, critical, and judicial inquiry into the worth of the Roman process of canonisation has never been risked. Here is an enormous catalogue of incidents, whose supernatural character is vouched for by the decrees of a long series of Popes, professedly based upon the most prolonged and anxious legal examination. For centuries a tribunal has been declaring that one series of miracles after another has come before it; that it has weighed them all with the utmost care; that it has heard every thing that could be urged against them; that it has rejected, as not proved, a very large number; and that, after the most searching inquiry, it _has_ found such and such supernatural incidents to be established by every law of human evidence. [Footnote: For the steps followed in the processes of canonisation, see Faber's _Essay on Beatification, Canonisation, and the Processes of the Congregation of Rites_.] No man can look at the processes of the canonisation of Catholic Saints without admitting that very few of those secular events which we unhesitatingly believe are supported by so overwhelming a weight of proof. Men's fortunes and lives are incessantly taken away by law at our very doors on lower degrees of evidence, and no one exclaims. And yet the decisions of this Catholic tribunal are set aside without hesitation. People think them not even worthy of listening to. The whole affair they count a childish trifling; and with a shrug or a sneer they pass it by.

And it is the same with those miracles which have not been brought before any such high tribunal, but which rest on undeniable private evidence. Those who are not Catholics put them aside simply as incredible. They assume that they cannot be true, and therefore that they are not true. Press them in argument, and they will shirk your most stringent proofs. You can make no impression upon their _wills_. They will believe any thing but that God has interrupted the course of nature in favour of any one but themselves. In short, if we wish to see human reason in its most irrational mood, we have but to enter into conversation with a Protestant who asserts and thinks that he believes the Bible miracles to be true, and urge upon him the proofs of such modern miracles as are recorded of St. Frances of Rome. You will perceive first, that though he has made up his mind on the subject with unhesitating dogmatism, he has never investigated its bearings or facts, even in outline. Nevertheless, to your surprise, you will find him perfectly ready to start some random theory, at a moment's notice, unconscious of the momentous, the awful nature of the matter he is handling. You see, perhaps, that his mind is powerfully influenced by the singular character of many Catholic miracles. He thinks them strange, unnecessary, unaccountable, absurd, disgusting, degrading. His nervous sensibilities are shocked by an account of the fearful pangs accompanying the _stigmata_. In the phenomena of ecstasy he can see nothing more than the ravings of delirium, or (if he believes in mesmerism) than the tales of a clairvoyante, and the rigidity of catalepsy. His physical frame, accustomed to its routine of breakfast, luncheon, and dinner, its sofas and easy-chairs, and its luxurious bed, shudders at the thought of the self-inflicted penances of the Saints, and at the idea of God's bestowing a miraculous power of enduring such horrors. He would be as much surprised to be told that Smithfield was literally the abode of incarnate demons, as to hear that demons have often assumed the shapes of beasts and monsters in their conflicts with the elect. The notion that an angel might visibly appear to a pious traveller on the Great Western or Birmingham railroad, and protect him from death in a frightful collision of trains, makes him open his eyes and contemplate you as scarcely sane to hint at such a thing. That "the Virgin," as he calls her, should come down from heaven and enter a church or a room, and hold a conversation with living men, women, or children in the nineteenth century, and give them a trumpery medal, or tell them to wear a piece of cloth round their neck, or cure them of some disease, he regards about as likely and rational as that the stories in the _Arabian Nights_ and the _Fairy Tales_ should turn out to be true histories. Be as serious as you please, he simply laughs in his sleeve, thinking to himself, "Well, who would have believed that the intellect of an educated Englishman should submit itself to such drivelling as this?"

Perceiving that this is the state of his mind, you open the Bible, which lies, handsomely bound, upon his table, and running rapidly through the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, point out to him a long series of supernatural events there recorded; and show him that in their nature they are precisely the same as those modern miracles which provoke his disgust or contempt. You remind him, first of all, that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church, and that all His people are made _like Him_, in His life and His sufferings, as well as in His glory; and then proceed to your summary. He accounts the penances of Saints needless and impossible; you remind him of our blessed Lord's fast of forty days and forty nights. He is horror-struck at the details of the sufferings of those in whom the Passion of Christ has been visibly renewed; you beg him to attempt to realise the bloody sweat in the Garden of Olives. He speaks of mesmerism and clairvoyance, and derides the thought of a Saint's being illuminated with radiant light, or exhaling a fragrant odour; you ask him how he explains away the transfiguration of Jesus. He says that it is physically impossible that a man's body can be (as he expresses it) in two places at once; you desire him to say by what law of nature our Lord entered the room where the disciples were when the doors were shut; how St. Peter was delivered from chains and imprisonment by the angel; how St. Paul was rapt into the third heaven, _whether in the body or out of the body, he could not tell_. He says that when a Saint has thought himself attacked by devils in hideous shapes, his brain has been diseased; you entreat him to beware of throwing a doubt on the temptation of Jesus Christ by Satan in the wilderness. He pities you for believing that the Mother of God has appeared for such needless purposes to excited devotees; you ask him why the Son of God appeared long after His death and ascension to St. Paul, and told him what he might have learnt in a natural way from the other Apostles. He calls your miraculous relics childish trumpery; you ask whether the handkerchiefs and aprons which cured the sick, after having touched St. Paul's body, were trumpery also; and whether St. Luke is countenancing superstition when he relates how the people crowded near St. Peter to be healed by his very shadow passing over them. Then, as he feels the overwhelming force of your rebukes, he insinuates that there is something divine, something evidently touching, pure, and strict in morality in the Bible narratives, which is wanting in these lives of Catholic Saints; and you refer him to such biographies as that of St. Frances of Rome, and compelling him to read the narratives of her revelations, ask him if all that she says when in a state of ecstasy does not wear, even in his judgment, the impress of a Divine origin, and seem to be dictated by the God of all purity, humility, and love.

At length your opponent, after brief pondering, changes his ground, and asserts that you are yourself deceived; that the real defect in Catholic miraculous stories is the want of evidence. He tells you that he would believe, if he could; but that you have not proved your point. You next call his attention to the distinct promise made by our blessed Lord to the Church, that miracles should always continue with her; and ask him how, on his theory, he accounts for the non-fulfilment of this promise. You desire him to lay his finger on the epoch when its fulfilment ceased; and not only to assert that it then ceased, but to prove his assertion. He says nothing, for he has nothing to say which he can even attempt to prove; and you proceed to furnish a few examples of miracles, from patristic, mediæval, or modern times, or perhaps of the present day, which are supported by at least as cogent an amount of evidence as the historical proof of the Scripture miracles. You insist upon his _disproving_ these. He cannot. He resorts to some new hypothesis. He says that there is deception _somewhere_, though he cannot tell where; and probably by this time is showing symptoms of a wish to end the discussion. You urge him again, and press him to give an intelligible reason for supposing that there _must_ be deception any where. He thinks a while; and when at length you are looking for a rational conclusion, he starts backwards to his old assumption that the Catholic miracles _cannot_ be true. He begs the whole question, and says that they are in favour of Catholicism, and that Catholicism is false. You too recur to your old reference to the Bible, and so on. And thus you run again the same round; and you may run it a thousand times over, till you perceive that there is but one reason why your opponent is not convinced; which is, that he _will not_ be convinced. And thus it was in the days when those very miracles were wrought which Protestants profess to believe. The Jews _would not_ believe our Lord's words and doctrines. He then bade them believe Him because of His miracles; and they instantly imputed them to the power of the devil. He showed them that this theory was impossible; but, so far from being convinced and converted, they went their ways, and plotted His death. Now, our controversialists cannot, or do not wish, to take away our lives; but when not a word is left them in the way of argument, they go their ways, and protest to their fellows, that we are obstinate, unfair, superstitious, and insolent; and too often encourage one another in the bitterest persecution of those who are convinced by our reasonings, and submit to the Church.

I now turn to the objections which are at times felt by Catholics themselves to the publication of Saints' Lives, abounding in supernatural incidents. Such persons are, indeed, not numerous; and their number is rapidly diminishing. Still it can scarcely be doubted that conscientious Catholics _are_ to be found who take the view I am speaking of, from ideas which, though erroneous (as I believe), are yet so truly founded in sincerity, as to demand respect and explanation from those who differ from them.

The objections they raise are twofold. First, they allege that such books scandalise Protestants and drive them from the Church; and secondly, they do not see _how_ incidents, wholly unlike our ordinary daily experience, _can_ practically serve us in our private Christian lives.

To the idea that non-Catholics are thus needlessly prejudiced against the faith, I reply, that this assertion is wholly unproved. That they do, as a matter of fact, laugh and attack such biographies, I fully admit; but they laugh at them on grounds which we cannot admit without giving up the Christian revelation itself. They scoff at them, not because they think them not supported by credible testimony, but because they are not what they call dignified, refined, and just such as they should have supposed all things to be that come from God. That such a temper of mind is indicative of pure Deism, it needs no words to prove. A man who derides a miraculous event merely as _trifling_, thereby asserts that he himself is the judge of what is great and what is little in the sight of God. He lays down laws for the guidance of the Almighty. He is adopting the identical reasoning of professed infidels, who on this very ground reject Christianity itself. And it is obvious that nothing can be more perilous than the encouragement of so fatal a principle of judgment. Once let the acute and logical Protestant perceive that you move one step backwards in deference to this objection, and he will press you with fresh consequences of the very same admission until he lands you in undisguised scepticism, if not in the blackest Atheism.

Can any single instance, in fact, be named in which a mind that was apparently determined to seek salvation at all costs, has been actually deterred from entering the Catholic Church by meeting with these extraordinary histories? Are they not a butt for determined and obstinate Protestants, and for such Protestants only? Ask any convert whether, on looking back, he can say that the knowledge of these peculiarities in Catholic hagiology ever practically held him back for four-and-twenty hours in his journey towards the Church. That the world is angry, and that the world vents its spleen and its contempt in bitter jests, is true enough; but _pious souls are not made to sin, or kept away from their Saviour_, by any thing of the kind. And that the rage and mocking of man afford not the slightest reason for inducing the Church to turn out of her natural path, I shall not dishonour my readers by attempting to prove to them.

That it _is_ her natural course to make these histories public, for the practical edification of her children, is clear from one fact alone,--they are precisely parallel to the life of our blessed Lord, as narrated in the four Gospels. The whole question resolves itself into this: If such lives as that of St. Frances, and many others, recently published in England, are not edifying to the ordinary Christian, then the life of Jesus Christ is not edifying. The Gospels, as well as the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, must be rigorously expurgated and cut down to the type of the common domestic life of the present day. Nothing can be further removed from the circumstances of most men than the records of our Lord's miracles and supernatural acts in general. What has the temptation, the transfiguration, the driving the devils into the swine, the turning the water into wine at what we should now call a "wedding-breakfast," and, in fact, almost every _act_ in our blessed Lord's life, in common with our amusement, our business, our society, our whole experience? Yet, to say that a devout soul can meditate on these transcendently mysterious events, and not derive from them practical instruction to enable her to fulfil her little trivial earthly duties with Christian perfection, is nothing short of blasphemy. The Son of God incarnate, all glorious, all awful, all unfathomable as He was even in the days of His sojourning on earth, was yet our example, our model, our embodied series of precepts. The eye of the simplest regenerate child cannot be turned for an instant upon His Divine glories and ineffable sufferings without drawing light therefrom to guide it even in its play with its fellows, or in the most trivial of the duties towards its parents and teachers.

And such, I am convinced, is the experience of Catholics of all ranks, of every age and every degree of intellectual cultivation, who study religiously the miraculous lives of the Saints, believing them to be, on the whole, correct histories. It is not needful that they should regard them to be literally true in all their details, as the Bible is true. We have but to regard them as we regard other authentic human narratives, with the addition of that veneration and confidence which is due to such portions of them as have been formally sanctioned by the Church, to derive from them unceasing spiritual comfort and instruction. Doubtless, if we are so ignorant as to fancy that all Saints' histories are to be alike in details, and that therefore we ought to wish that the circumstances of our lives were the same as theirs, we shall be doing ourselves great mischief. But let us study them with a true knowledge of the mere elements of the Christian faith, and they will be to us what St. Paul desires his disciples to seek for in _his_ life, namely, a continuation, as it were, of the life of Jesus Christ, carried on through all the successive ages of His Church on earth. They will impress upon our minds with an intensity peculiarly their own, the reality of the invisible world and the ensnaring tendencies of every thing that we possess. Weak and ignorant as is the imaginative and sensitive portion of our nature, it needs every possible help that it can find to counteract the paralysing effects of the worldliness of the world, of the lukewarmness of Christians, and of the enthralling nature of the universe of sight and sense. Our courage is wonderfully strengthened, and our love for things invisible is inflamed, by every thing that forces us, as it were, to _see_ that this visible creation _is not_ the only thing that is real, mighty, and present. The general precepts and the dogmatic statements of religion acquire a singular and living force when we perceive them carried out and realised in the actual affairs of life in a degree to which our personal experience is a stranger. Influenced as human nature is by example, these unpretending narratives, whose whole strength lies in the facts which they record, and not in the art of the biographer, undeniably _strike_ the mind with an almost supernatural force. They enchain the attention; they compel us to say, Are these things true? Are these things possible? Is religion, after all, so terribly near to us? Are this life and this world so literally vain and worthless, so absolutely nothing worth? Are suffering and awful bodily anguish blessings to be _really_ coveted? Are the maxims which I daily hear around me so hopelessly bad and accursed? Are angels and devils so near, so very near, to us all? Is purgatory so terrible and so inevitable to all but the perfect, that these fearful visions of its pains are in substance what I myself shall endure? And if I fall from grace and die in sin before one of the innumerable temptations that hourly beset me, is it true that nothing less than an eternity of such torments, the very reading of which even thus represented makes me shudder with horror, will be my _inevitable_ lot? And is the bliss of the Saints and the joy of loving God so inexpressibly sweet to any souls here on earth? Is it possible that any one should escape from a state of coldness, deadness, worldliness, and unwilling performance of his religious duties, and positively come to lose all taste for bodily and mere intellectual pleasures through the absorbing of his whole being into the love of Jesus and of Mary, and through a burning thirst for the beatific vision of the Eternal Trinity?

And who will venture to say that it is not good _for us all_ to have such thoughts frequently pressed upon our attention? If there is any meaning in the command that we are to aim at being perfect, whatever be the state of life _in which_ we are called to seek perfection, surely it is no ordinary advantage thus to have the essentially supernatural character of our religious life forced again and again upon our attention. For, be it never forgotten, this very _supernaturalness_ is one of its essential features. There are innumerable varieties in our vocations. The earthly circumstances in which we are to serve God are almost innumerable in their variety; but the supernatural element appertains to them all alike. Our actual relationship to the awful and glorious realities of the unseen world is precisely the same in kind as that of the most miraculously endowed Saints. The only difference is this, that in their case that relationship was perceived and visibly manifested in a peculiar mode, to which we are strangers. Heaven, purgatory, and hell are as near to us as if we beheld the visions of St. Frances. The cross is as literally our portion, in its essential nature, as if the five sacred wounds were renewed physically in our agonising frame. Our angel-guardian is as incessantly by our side, as if our eyes were opened to behold his effulgent radiance. Satan strikes the same blows at our souls, whether he shows himself to our sight or not. The relics of Saints, which we carefully look at or criticise, _may be_ at any moment the vehicles of the same miraculous powers as the handkerchiefs from the body of St. Paul. Who would say to a blind man, "Forget the tangible realities of this life, because you cannot see them"? Who would not rather say, "Bear constantly in mind what is the experience of those who _can_ see, that you may practically remember their ceaseless nearness to you"? And just such is the experience of the Saints, in whose histories faith has partly merged into sight, and the veil which blinds our eyes has been partially and at certain seasons withdrawn. It tells us, as few things else can tell, of the _reality_ of the objects of our faith.

I add a word or two on the question, how far the actual conduct of the extraordinary persons whose lives are here related is to serve as a model for practical imitation by ordinary Christians. To the well-instructed Catholic, it would be an impertinence in me to suggest that they are not in every detail thus to be followed. It is the duty of a Christian to follow the rules for daily life which it has pleased Almighty God to lay down in the Gospel, and not to imagine that those exceptional cases of conduct to which He has supernaturally prompted certain individuals are to be imitated by those who have only the ordinary graces of the Holy Spirit.

The general reader, however, may be reminded that Catholics believe, that as the Creator of the universe occasionally interrupts the order of the laws of nature, so He at times interrupts the relative order of the laws of duty; not, of course, the essential laws of morality, but those positive laws which are obligatory simply because they are enacted by competent authority. No person, indeed, can be justified in acting on such an idea in his own case, unless guided by supernatural light, beyond the usual spiritual illumination given to all Christians. This supernatural light is rarely vouchsafed, and it is accordingly in the highest degree presumptuous in any person to overstep the ordinary routine of distinctly ordered duty, under the idea that he is called by God to break the rules given for the guidance of mankind in general. In all such supposed cases, the Catholic Church has the proper tests to apply, by which the soul can learn whether she is led by a Divine afflatus, or betrayed by her own disordered imagination, or the deceits of an invisible tempter.

J.M.C.

CONTENTS.

I.

ST. FRANCES OF ROME.

CHAPTER I.

General character of the Saint's life--Her childhood and early piety

CHAPTER II.

Francesca's early inclination for the cloister--By her father's desire she marries Lorenzo Ponziano--Her married life--Her illness and miraculous cure

CHAPTER III.

Francesca proceeds in her mortifications and works of charity --Her supernatural temptations and consolations

CHAPTER IV.

The birth of Franceseca's first child--Her care in his education--She undertakes the management of her father-in-law's household--A famine and pestilence in Rome--Francesca's labours for the sick and poor--The miracles wrought in her behalf

CHAPTER V.

The birth of Francesca's second son--His supernatural gifts --The birth of her daughter--Satanic attacks upon Francesca --Troubles of Rome--Francesca's husband is severely wounded--Her eldest son, when given up as a hostage to the Neapolitans, is miraculously restored to her

CHAPTER VI.

Sufferings of Rome from the troops of Ladislas--Death of Francesca's son Evangelista--The famine and plague in Rome--Francesca's labours for the starving and sick--Her miracles