I will ask you, dear reader, to go with me for a few moments to that sunny land, the home of saints, the centre of Catholicity, and witness in fancy a strange spectacle in these days of unfaith and injustice. Between the Apennines, that lift their cold crests high into the ever blue air, and the sunny plains far beneath them that know no winter, there is many a delicious valley where Nature, exhausted neither by excessive cold nor heat, but invigorated by tempered breezes, brings forth all its wealth of fruit and its pomp of flower, and where one would imagine, men would never think of Heaven at all, so perfect is the paradise around them. By far the most beautiful of these rich valleys is that which is called the Umbrian; and cresting the Umbrian valley, looking down upon and crowning all its beauty, is the city of Assisi. And, this warm summer day, is it a jubilee pageant that stirs the ancient city? Is it some worldly feast of king or emperor, or some political triumph, that brings from every part of Italy those sun-browned, dust-stained, travel-wearied pilgrims, who throng every square and street of the city, and who linger
It would be a good and profitable thing to bring before our minds the life and example of this wonderful saint. I am sure they are familiar to you, dear reader; I am sure that the figure of this "wonderful man of God," worn with fasting and penances, his face so withered and pale, but resplendent with the light of Heaven that is always present, and those dark signs in his hands and feet, the stigmata which were burned into his flesh by the Spirit of God. I am sure that often and often you have studied this picture, gazed upon it, wondered at it, prayed God that some day you might have the happiness of seeing this dear St. Francis face to face, and hear him call you, as he called his brethren here below, little child little lamb in the sheepfold of his
It is his native town. Francis, the son of Pica and Bernardone, has been known as the gayest and handsomest youth amongst his equals in social standing. He has the pleasantest face, and the sweetest voice, and the moist agreeable manners of all the young men of the place. He dresses sumptuously; and at their revels he holds the place of master, and all obey him. Suddenly he retires from Assisi, gone no one knows whither, and then as suddenly reappears in his native streets. But how changed! That bright, handsome face is grave, and worn and disfigured; that exquisite raiment is replaced with rags; tattered and wayworn as one who has come from a long journey, Francis moves slowly along the pavement of the streets. And he has come from a long journey! He has passed from Egypt into Israel, he has gone out from the world of men into the company of Jesus Christ; he has stepped from riches into the deepest poverty, and commenced his lifelong journey in the painful steps of his Divine Master. His eyes have been illumined by the Spirit of God, and his heart has been touched by the grace of his Saviour, and he has seen the world and its supreme follies by the light that falls from Heaven above, by the lurid light that shines from Hell below; and he has abandoned all things to find his God, and he has embraced as his spouse and Queen that holy Poverty which Christ, our good Master, came down from Heaven to embrace, and which He raised up, sanctified and ennobled by His Life and Passion and Death.
But what do the people of Assisi think of him? Well, the people of Assisi were like the people of to-day, and every day; and they came to their doors, and hooted him through their streets, and called him by that name it is so painful to men to hear they called him Thou fool!
Francis a fool! Yes, but the days are coming when God will prove that his folly is the wisdom of the Cross. Francis a fool! Yes, but a little while, and he will appear to the Pontiff in his dreams as a pillar of the Church. Francis a fool! But there will spring from his inspirations and his prayers generations of
What a lesson for us is here! In this noisy, turbulent life of ours, with our passionate straining after pleasure, and power, and gaiety, how reproachful is this example of St. Francis, cheerfully giving up all these things, and embracing the rough, hard way of the Cross, determined to carry it through step by step, after his Divine Master, to the end! And in this hard, money-seeking, ambitious life of ours, when Mammon once more has been set up in the market-place as the idol of men, when the heaping-up of money has become the business, and the only business of the world, and when even the just who strive to be perfect are carried away in the current of fashion, and strain every fibre of the heart for gold, and are miserable and disquieted at the slightest reverse, what a divine
The next scene, dear reader, I have to show you is one that has been familiar to you from childhood. Francis, the gay, the worldly young man, has become transformed into the meek and lowly child of God; and, having once given himself to God, he is determined to go on with swift strides into perfect communication with his Master. He goes out, then, from the society of men altogether, he wants to be alone with God. He needs silence and solitude to strengthen him, and the immediate presence of the Divinity to sanctify him still more. It cannot be had down here amongst the busy haunts of men; but there are the blue mountains rising above him and afar off; and in their recesses the voice of man has never been heard, only the screams of the eagles, and the music of the waterfalls; and sometimes God's majesty descends upon them veiled in clouds, as it descended on the Lawgiver on Sinai; and Francis thinks he will go up there, and, alone with God in prayer, he will try to come nearer and nearer to his Maker, and, perhaps, see behind that awful veil that has dropped down before the eyes of us poor mortals, lest we should be blinded with the effulgence that streams from the great white throne, or appalled at the awful mysteries that lie concealed behind it. And so, as our Blessed Saviour took with Him Peter and James and John when going up the mountain for his Transfiguration, our Saint takes with him three disciples, and, after a weary journey of many days, he ascends his Calvary the holy mountain, the scene of so much austerity and pain, of so much miracle and mystery. The landscape is one that is very unlike what he has been accustomed to from his childhood. Instead of rich valleys and fertile plains, he sees a black and gloomy mountain, a picture of desolation, and the solitude of it is brightful. There are dangerous precipices by the way, and caverns where the wild
For many days the sacred intercourse between God and His servant went on, Francis praying and crucifying himself, and God lifting him higher and higher on those celestial steps that reach to the foot of His throne. Several times he had seen Him whom kings and prophets desired to see and could not; he has spoken to Him suspended in mid-air, as on Thabor; he has spoken to our Divine Redeemer, as He sat side by side with him on a rough rock in the darkest and gloomiest grotto on the mountain. And that something wonderful will come from all this Francis knows by a secret inspiration, which tells him that it is God's holy Will that His servant should come nearer to Himself, and be, as it were, changed into His very likeness. And so he consults the oracles of God; and brother Leo opens the holy Gospels thrice, and thrice does the holy book open at the history of the Passion of Christ. Here, then, was the way in which God's designs were to be accomplished. And so, for the thousandth time, Francis began to meditate on the Sacred Mysteries connected with the Passion and Death of our Divine Saviour. And as they began to unfold themselves before him, and as he began to see in the wounds of the Lord Jesus the meaning of sin and Divine justice and Divine love, he trembled with fear and humility before God, and his prayer ever was: Who am I, Lord, and who art Thou? And at last, as the time came near the feast of St. Michael, the holy servant of God was vouchsafed a vision like unto those that Ezechiel saw.
It is a saint, and one of his children, Bonaventure, who tells the story, and it is confirmed by the authentic decrees of the Church authorities of the time. Francis, the servant and the truly faithful minister of Jesus Christ, being in prayer on Mount Alvernia, and being raised up towards God by the seraphic fervour of his desires, and being transformed by the most tender and
O wonderful Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ! O Book of all the saints! O mystery of all mysteries! There we can read the love of God that is incomprehensible. There we can read the malice of sin which is indefinite. There we can read the meaning of those things which puzzle us so much God's justice and man's iniquity. There, above all, can we read the nature and the malice, the shame and the crime, of those sins which we ourselves have committed in our childhood, in our manhood, in our old age sins countless in their hideous sum, sins that mocked God by the coolness with which they were committed, sins that lay lightly upon us as the down upon a feather, and we went on our way heedless and thoughtless, not caring that every sinful thought was a thorn in the brow of Jesus, and every sinful desire a lash on the tender flesh of Jesus, and every sinful word was a pain to the heart of
Oh, if God would only open our eyes to see the things that Francis saw in his vision; if God would only touch our stony hearts to understand the anguish and the desolation and the pain of Christ in His agony; if God would only teach us the unutterable love of His dying Son for every soul that was purchased by the Precious Blood which fell upon the green grass of Gethsemani and Calvary, we would not indeed feel the sacred stigmata as Francis felt them, but we would pray God to give us back those years that we sent into eternity laden with our sins; or rather, as those years cannot be recalled, we would beg of God grace and strength to make the time that remains a time of reparation, devoted to the faithful service of our crucified Master. May such a vision come to us before we die, and with it the grace to understand its full meaning!
Yes, the past is irrevocable. Each golden day rose from eternity, and passed into eternity again, laden with our good or evil deeds, and is not to be summoned back by any reward. Each golden day was a leaf in the Book of Life, written in black and white, which our good angel turned over and sealed down, not to be opened again till the day of final judgment. But the future is our possession, to make or mar, for better, for worse, and the pressing question is, how shall we use it for God's glory and our own salvation. Well, the life of every saint is a track of light, which, if we follow, we shall come to the dawning of eternal day. The life of the humblest servant of God is a Gospel, containing many and many a lesson of wisdom unto perfect sanctity and holiness. And the life of such a saint as St. Francis is so holy, so wise, so sublime, that we may ponder over it every day of our lives, and yet find new marvels of sanctity, new mysteries of God's omnipotent love.
Yet here I can fancy some one saying: But St. Francis lived seven centuries ago, and the world has advanced in many ways since then. Don't you think that the age of evangelical virtues,
And, strange to say, in this age of progress and education, in this age of mammon and ungodliness, in this age of infidelity, when God is ignored and religion despised, there is a fascination about the life of St. Francis, which even freethinkers cannot resist. It is a romance of simplicity, of humility, of charity, that will be read with pleasure centuries after we, I hope, shall have seen the Saint in Heaven. His love of Nature and of this wonderful world, his love of everything that God had made, because the hand of God had touched it, is inexpressibly beautiful. He was a child in the picture gallery of God, and every day opened to him fresh revelations of his Father's mercy, and his Father's power. The firmament flecked with clouds, or blazing with stars, was the open Book of Omnipotence. The earth, so varied and beautiful, was his home which his Father had made and decorated for His child. The winds were to him a sweet psalmody; and the hoarse roar of the ocean was a voice from eternity. The flowers were beautiful in his eyes, for God had painted them. No wonder they bowed their lovely heads to him as he passed. And the dumb beasts, whom he called his brothers and sisters, came to him, as they came to the martyrs in the Roman amphitheatre, and fawned upon him, and the birds sang with him the praises of their Maker. I know nothing half so beautiful in all the legends of the saints as that story of St. Francis, who, after the evening vespers in the choir,
And so, with that singular simplicity and gentleness, and love of all things that come from the hand of God, and live beneath His smile, he succeeded in undertakings where learned men would have utterly failed. He preached from the depth of his own great heart, and his words went direct to the great heart of humanity, and pride bowed down before his majestic humility, and wealth abased itself before his sublime poverty, and he stood before kings and princes with the same sublime composure that he maintained amongst his brethren, and he walked through palaces and lordly places with the same indifference as the air would wander through them or the bird would fly. And the people looked on him as a being not of this world at all as a spirit clothed in the frailty of flesh for a moment to teach the world that after all the soul is man, and not the body or its raiment. Nor can we find fault with the popular faith, which, to quote the words of a Protestant lady, Mrs. Oliphant, tells us: He lies under the great altar, but no one knows the precise spot of his grave, and a mysterious legend has crept about, whispered in the twilight for ages, that far underneath, lower even than the subterranean church, the great Saint, erect and pale, with sacred drops of blood upon his five wounds, and an awful silence around him, waits, rapt in
For us, however, his life has a deeper lesson. It is a perfect following of Christ. Take the holy gospels; and mind, the holy gospels are not obsolete or antiquated. The gospel teachings are as true to-day as when Christ spoke his words of wisdom by the sea of Galilee, or on the mountain. By the gospels we shall be judged. Take the holy gospels, and place side by side with them the life of our Saint, and you will find that every thought, and word, and deed, of his life correspond with their high teaching. Contempt for everything that does not lead to God there is the one great maxim of his life. Sacrifice of everything that kept him from God there was his one great practice. Hatred of the world that hates God here was one great passion. The complete crushing of every sinful inclination here was his perpetual study. To spread in every soul love for his Divine Master here was his daily task. To save sinners here was his one ambition. To be crucified with Christ here was his glory, as with St. Paul. Oh! how that blessed figure rises up before us, perpetually rebuking our coldness, our sensuality, our pride. Oh! may God grant that, as Christ put the marks of His own dear wounds in the body of our Saint, so our holy Father would print upon our souls some faint image of His own great sanctity. If we cannot embrace his absolute poverty, let us love it at least in spirit, for blessed are the poor in spirit. Let us practise it by honouring, loving and venerating the poor, who are the special friends of God. We cannot practise his awful austerities; but here are passions to be daily kept under, here are mortifications to be daily endured, here are crosses to be daily borne. Every soul has its own cross; let it bear it meekly for the love of God and St. Francis. We are not called to bear the stigmata as our Saint; but if we are faithful to Christ, we have a daily martyrdom to endure in the struggle with the world and ourselves, and that martyrdom will leave its scars and wounds upon us that will be to us a glory hereafter, as the wounds of the martyrs shine brilliantly in Heaven. Visions will not be sent to us angels will not visit us Christ will not appear to us what do I say? I am wrong quite wrong.
For soon, very soon, for man's life is but a vapour that appeareth for a little time,1 that strange revelation will be made to us which is made to every child of Adam. Soon, very soon,