December 20 — Amateur Saints
If there is any one thing more particularly repulsive to me than another it is the way the average clerical person speaks of religious things. One would suppose that such matters, if one really believed them, would be the profoundest sentiments of one’s nature, and be mentioned with the reserve and reverence with which the lay person treats the deeper sentiments, such as love, honour, or patriotism.
A little pamphlet came by mail to-day, which proved to be a sort of begging letter from a community of Protestant clergymen, who are undertaking to imitate monasticism in America. Under a heading of a cross is this text, “If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great matter if we shall reap your worldly things?” And there follows an appeal for assistance in building a monastery on the Hudson. The language of this pamphlet is the usual language of begging letters, only with that flavour of smug religiosity and bland business-like dealing with matters of the soul which amazes the lay mind.
This community of, presumably, able-bodied men who desire to reap of our worldly things naively sets forth in the following programme the manner in which they intend to occupy their time:
| 5 A.M. | Rise. |
| 5.30 to 6. | Meditation in Chapel. |
| 6. | Morning Prayer and Prime. |
| 6.50 to 8. | Celebrations of the Holy Eucharist. |
| 8. | Breakfast. |
| 9.30. | Terce and Intercessions. |
| 12 M. | Sext and None. |
| 12.30 P.M. | Dinner. |
| 1 to 1.20. | Recreation (in common). |
| 4.45. | Evensong. |
| 5.15 to 5.45. | Meditation. |
| 6. | Supper. |
| 6.30 to 7.15. | Recreation (in common). |
| 8.30. | Compline. |
| 10. | Lights extinguished. |
And it is to permit them to spend their days in such fruitful fashion that one is called upon to contribute the money earned by men who toil! That many have already contributed is to be inferred from the fact that this community has become possessed of seventy-five acres of valuable land, and has spent some forty thousand dollars on the erection of a monastery.
Of course, there are worthless idlers everywhere, but very few of them in our practical day assume their indolence as a merit, or call upon their neighbours to support them, in the name of the deeper sentiments of life.
Hare, in “A Pair of Spectacles” remarks cynically, when asked to help an indigent widow, “Oh, I know that indigent widow; she comes from Sheffield.” One knows these sturdy beggars. They come from out the Middle Ages, when it was still felt that there was some special virtue in abandoning the obvious duties of life to take up others more appealing to the Saint; more appealing precisely because they were anything but obvious.
The very name of Saint is a stench in my heretical nostrils. I never knew or read of one who was not a vain egoist, with all the cruelty, obstinacy, and selfishness of the egoist. Read the Lives of the Saints. Not one of these absurd chronicles but is a repulsive tale of an insane vanity trampling on the rights and feelings of others to achieve notoriety. St. Louis is a sample of the type: renouncing his duties to his unlucky wife, squabbling with every other monarch unfortunate enough to be associated with him, and wrecking the expeditions in which he joined because of some petty qualm about his meagre, unimportant little soul.
The person who extorts my reverence is not Saint Elizabeth, but that poor boy, her husband, bearing the torments of her hysterical squeamishness with such noble patience and chivalry. One can picture that tired, sleepy young fellow, busy with his duties of government all day, dragged out of his proper slumber to behold his ridiculous wife climbing out of bed to lie on the cold floor in her nightgown, while the attendants stood about and crossed themselves in admiration.
St. Theresa seems to have been a sort of Moyen-Age Hedda Gabler; no better than an ecclesiastic flirt. Go through the whole list and the story is always the same. One never hears of a person with a sense of humour—which implies a sense of proportion—setting up as a saint. The breath in the nostrils of these gentry is the stare of the unthinking multitude, who are awed by anything out of the ordinary. And yet it takes so much finer patience, so much greater self-abnegation, to do the plain duties of life. I feel far more like crossing myself when I look at the humble commuter, who has sat on a stool all day, and travels with his arms full of parcels to that cheap, draughty cottage in the cold dusk of Lonelyville, to listen patiently to Emily’s recitals of Johnny’s cut finger and Mary Ann’s impudence. It is upon such as he that civilization and the world’s happiness and sunshine depend. He has done a man’s duties; upon him depends a helpless woman, and innocent children. His tedious, petty drudgeries rise to nobility compared with the lives of these fat and lazy grubs with their complines and sexts and primes.
St. Theresa seems vulgar to me contrasted with the anxious Emily cheapening chops at the butcher’s, and fighting around the bargain counter to make her laborious commuter’s meagre salary stretch over the needs of her family. It requires a finer and sweeter, a more saintly nature to walk the floor patiently with a teething baby than to pose as a saint on the floor to no one’s benefit but one’s own.
Ah, those humble, lovely souls bearing the whips and scorns of Time, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes—their commonplace daily halos make the saints’ diadems look like imitation jewels.