It is not strange that, as his biographer relates: When raised to the Cardinalate, the venerable prelate not only continued his yearly practice of repairing to the College Church of the company to venerate the tomb of Aloysius on his anniversary, but used to make a devout visit to the room whence he had taken his flight to Heaven, and there would shed tears of tenderness in memory of their last parting. Gladly would we carry further our illustrations of S. Aloysius's character, but we shall perhaps more suitably ? express our gratitude for the lesson he teaches us, if we turn from him to pursue those thoughts relative to heroic virtue which become quickened in our minds as we muse on his life. A polemical age loses much in this matter. Catholic controversialists have by necessity been thrown so much upon answers to petty cavils and captious negations relative to the veneration of the Saints that they have not always been able to insist as strongly as they might otherwise have done on the great positive principles and moral ideas involved in such veneration, and the practical loss incurred by communities which discard it. What the Catholic asserts is, of course, not merely that the practice is defensible, but that the neglect of it is indefensible:-not that it is no remnant of Pagan idolatry, but that it is the Christian's especial preservation against the practical revival of that idolatry, either in the form of nature-worship, or of hero-worship. He does not affirm only that to venerate God's Saints is not, as the petulance and precipitance of the Sects assumed, to separate ourselves from God:-he affirms that not to venerate them, is to separate ourselves grievously from the citizens of God's kingdom, both on earth and in heaven, and to cut off many channels of communication between the lower part of that kingdom and the King of Saints. It is when we study the lives of the Saints that we regard this vast subject, as it were from within, and see how closely it bears on our Sanctification. Children learn to speak mainly through sympathy and imitation, and they exercise those instincts because they associate frankly with those who know how to speak. The earlier instincts both of honour and of conscience are developed under similar conditions, and are often therefore not formed, or most imperfectly formed, in the hearts of castaways brought up among the courts and alleys of great cities. Among these last, even when removed at a later time to regions of less temptation, the higher instincts sometimes will not grow, because, again and again, some rude shock used to break the finer tendrils of their roots just when they were beginning to knit themselves in the soil. Habitudes are not to be formed out of maxims; and long before the passions of the child have begun to prove a temptation to him his moral sense may become irrevocably stultified because he has lived among those who regard right and wrong indifferently. At a later period he may receive moral, as he receives intellectual instruction; but it is communicated to him after a barren fashion, as when we teach mathematics to a child in whom the scientific faculty is not yet developed, and who has to which the imagination can but pour us forth the "Vinum Demonum "-the lesson that the truest Greatness is Goodness. Their Saint is their hero, because he was preeminently good; and he was preeminently good, not because he fought hard for the world's esteem, but because he sought the lowest place. They are proud of their Saint; and in praising him they praise God, Whose praise alone he desired to set forth. He brought them the Faith, perhaps 1,500 years ago, and they still rejoice as if a siege had been raised, and their city delivered from destruction, an hour before! Time and its centuries have not made them forget their benefactor:-the world with its illusions has not taught them to prefer false glory to true. What discernment, what fidelity, what generosity, what an exalted and authentic standard of all that man should venerate and imitate! To what do the peasants owe these gifts? To the circumstance that they have remained on speaking terms with God's Saints! The world, in ceasing to have sympathies with these, falls to a distance from them,-a distance that must ever increase. First, men cease to aspiro after heroic sanctity: next they cease to believe in it:-at last the very idea of it departs from their mind, as some ideal of poetry or architecture gradually vanishes from the world. The imagination of society renounces its baptism, and becomes reconverted to Paganism. There can here be no neutral position. The saintly ideal was that which expelled the Pagan ideal native to man's heart —that ideal in which sensuousness and pride combine to dress out the beautiful. Nothing could have effected this miracle but a genuine Christianity, a Christianity which conquers an animalized humanity by a spiritualized humanity. Pentecost was a beam from that celestial light which ever lives beyond the "flammantia monia" of mortal life; and as the sunshine puts out the fire, so this beam from afar extinguished the flame that played on the Pagan altar. In the Church, Pentecost is not a mere historic fact passed and gone-but an ever-living light and life. Among the sects, and in the world, the Pagan imagination repossesses itself of its abandoned seat. This is proved by the fact that to the diseased modern intelligence the Saints wear the aspect of Demigods, and the veneration of them seems a new sort of mythology. It is strange! A Newton can see the analogy between diamond and a bit of black charcoal; but the savage is unable to see the difference between gold and any worthless thing that glitters. Equally incompetent seems the clownish intelligence to discriminate between Christian Saints and Pagan Gods. No wonder that others should advance a step further, and VOL. IX.—NO. XVIII. [New Series.] Y |