Holiness

Irish Jesuit Province

HolinessAuthor(s): William SuttonSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 15, No. 171 (Sep., 1887), pp. 530-533Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20497611 .

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( &3o )

HOLINESS.

BY THE REV. WILLIANM SUTTON7 S.J.

T O the world's reason Saints are an insoluble problem. Their modes of action seem to it in great part mere fantastic

fanaticism. It " esteems their lives madness, and their end

without honour." Even many Catholics often have, and some times at least yield to, feelings of loathing and contempt for

many manifestations of high sanctity. It would be useless to try to reason unbelievers out of their fierce aversion to the Catholic type of holiness; but for all who believe, it requires only some unprejudiced ,consideration to see that every act and manifestation of genuine holiness are normal developments of principles which they themselves hold. Not only non-Catholics, but also many imperfectly instructed Catholics, have absurd notions of what holiness is, or what it is in people which makes them be called saints. I was once showing a Protestant officer through a college

library. He asked me what kind of books were contained in the section marked " Ascetical." I replied that a great number were

lives of saints. "0, I know," he said, "{live in a cave and all

that kind of thing." Notions quite as grotesque and as far

from the truth are common enough. Living, in a cave or any

thing else extraordinary in outward seeming is not in the least

necessary to form a saint. There have been and always will be

people in every sphere of life, fulfilling all the duties and taking part in all the functions of their state, who lead holy lives by the

practice of great and solid virtues. Holiness is essentially the same, wherever it is met with. It is living for God alone, loving

Him without reserve for Himself and all others for His sake,

making His will and law the guide of our lives in all things great

and small. There is an illimitable craving in the human heart for happi

ness. All the restlessness of life is the effect of it. There is

only one object can satisfy and give peace to the complex, conflict

ing, and boundless longings of man. God alone can fill the human

heart. Reason and experience superabundantly show nothing else can. Faith, reason, and experience prove that God can. For

God is all that is good every way and infinitely, and the love

that brings peace is the heart's rest in goodness. But there is aL



o lt.n1ess. 531

horrible chasm between us and God, which, madly as we may yearn to cross, we never could. Sin has done this. Sin has deprived us of the state, and the right, and the power of being united to God. It has brought upon us spiritual death, the beginning ancd the

cause of eternal death. The death of the soul in this life consists

in its privation of sanctifying grace, which is the principle of supernatural life. The state of grace makes us "1 partakers of the

divine nature" (2 Pet. 1-4). It is a state of being quite of

another kind from any merely natural state. The highest celes tial spirit naturally has no more claim to it, or no more power to

merit it than the rudest inhabitant of earth. What makes a creature like man so incomprehensibly precious and dignified in the eyes of God, is the capacity of being raised to this state.

It is the seed of eternal life and glory. Sanctifying grace is a

quality or modification of substance infused into the essence of the soul by the immediate action of God. This physically or really existing quality elevates the spiritual substance in a certain infinite way, according to the words of Saint Peter quoted above. It en

lightens and strengthens the spiritual faculties of intellect and will with gifts and powers analogous to those already possessed in the order of nature, but making them capable of acts relating to objects

infinitely beyond the greatest natural powers. The right of being restored to this state, lost to the whole

human race through the mystery of original sin, was merited for us by Our Lord. Included in that is the right to supernatural

help to preserve and increase by our own free co-operation the

participation of the divine nature bestowed upon us, whether in baptism, or afterwards, if we sin mortally, on being sincerely sorry, through penance. The infinite wisdom and goodness of

God has repaired the ruin caused by the mysterious malignancy of

sin in a way most honourable to us, and which throws light upon

what Holy Scripture says of God's acting with great reverence

towards men (Wisdom, xiii. 18). For the sake of each one of us,

no matter who or what we are, God became a little child, lived a

poor, hard life, and died a death of shame and torture. Hle was

one of us in everything except sin (Heb. iv. 15), but He took our

sins upon Him, as if they were His own (for they were the sins of

that beloved human nature, of which He Himself was now the human representative), and fully satisfied for them, and made over to us as our own, what He had merited by doing the will of His

Eternal Father. By God becoming man, human nature united to

a Divine Person has given condign satisfaction to God for all the



532 iloliness.

sins of men, and has made amends with infinite superabundance for the wrong and outrage offered to His dlvine glory. The Son of

God made flesh, the Incarnate Wisdom of God, enlightens all who care to know what their mortal diseases are, and how to cure them,

and remedies of omnipotent efficacy are placed within the reach of all.

What are the deadly poisons that everywhere and always do their fell work among men? "The concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life " (1 John

ii. 16), the lust for sensual pleasure, for wealth and for the esteem of men. We are simply saturated with these terribly stimulating poisons. A little consideration will let anyone see how potently and pervadingly pride, that is, inordinate esteem of ourselves, and vanity, that is, inordinate craving for the esteem of others, enslave us. The fierce way we resent the least contempt shows what a hold

they have upon us. When they do not kill the soul outright, they

wound and enfeeble it in a thousand ways. All this is true too of

sensuality and greed of gain, the workings of which need no further

comment. When we consider how these three evil principles have become so worked into us, as to become part and parcel of our very

being, we begin to get some notion, in what sense it was necessary for the perfect restoration of human nature, that God Himself made

man should set us the example He did. His sufferings and death are for all without exception, but they are above all for those who, not content with serving and obeying Him in an ordinary way, long to make Him something like an adequate return of love.

He who made us, alone knows us fully. He saw our diseases, He saw the only way they could be cured in this world, which His Providence is guiding according toI His Wisdom for some incompre hensible good He nas ina view. It requires the infinite wisdom and goodness of Him, who made the human heart, to find out a way of

winning it, to its own healing and eternal health, and His glory. In the first place, then, perfect freedom from the slavery of sin

and passion requires, not only that we should not yield to the fascinations of pride and greed and sensuality, but that we should smite these foes to the ground, and spoil them of all their arms and

means of injuring us. This can only be done thoroughly by acquir

ing a positive relish and love for their opposites, so that we are not

quite safe from them, till we actually love poverty, humiliations, sufferings. God who made us, and knows our strange nature, has

inade this loving of all that of ourselves we hate and shrink from, not

only possible, but for those whom He calls to close union with



She who dwelt among the Sycamores. 533

Himself, the source of their deepest satisfaction. Love will make human beings do or endure anything. No danger daunts, no toil distresses, no trial exhausts great, strong love. Now see. God, who only can fill the human heart, but whom sin had made im

possible for the human heart to possess, Himself, to show us His love for us, becomes man with body and soul and heart, and reveals in the most affecting way the divine love by letting it flow out on us

through and from a human heart. By a life of toil and privation, and by a death of shame and torture, He saves us from hell and from the power of the devil, earns for us the right to be forgiven, nakes known to us the mysteries of grace and glory, and invites

all without exception to profit by what He has done for them, and to save themselves through Him. For those who know something of and believe all that the Church teaches of the nature and work ing of grace, is it not perfectly intelligible, that there should be

men, women, andchildren, who become possessedof great, stronglove for the God-Man, who first loved them with such bewildering longing and affection ? It really on our own principles is not strange, that

such should love to be like Him. Poor and faint though our own love be; we may at any rate most profitably admire with intelligent faith the chosen souls, who make it the one aim of their lives to imitate, as perfectly as by divine grace they can, the example set

them by their Lord. The imitation of Christ from love of Him, is

what makes saints, and it is the key to all that puzzles human reason in their conduct.

SHE WHO DWELT AMONG THE SYCAMORES.

A FANCY.

A little boy outside the sycamore wood

Saw on the wood's edge gleam an ash-grey feather;

A kid, held by one soft white ear for tether,

Trotted beside him in a playful mood.

A little boy inside the sycamore wood

Followed a ringdove's ash-grey gleam of feather;

Noon wrapt the trees in veils of violet weather,

And on tiptoe the winds a-whispering stood.

Deep in the woodland paused they, the six feet,

Lapped in the lemon daffodils; a bee

In the long grass-four eyes droop low-a seat

Of moss, a maiden weaving. Singeth she:

"I am lone Lady Quietness, my sweet,

And on this loom I weave thy destiny." W. B. YEATS.



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Holiness