Catholic Saints: A Protestant View

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 19, 13 May 1909, Page 729

Catholic Saints : A Protestant View

Our valued Presbyterian contemporary, the Outlook (Dunedin), has, in its issue of May 8, a charmingly written leading article on ' Religious Biography.' In the course of it the writer refers to ' men in whom one can see plainly enough the religion, but it is a religion so queerly lodged.' In some of these strange lives (says the Outlook) religion * is like radium in the pitchblende — it takes a good deal of getting at. Let us,' it adds, ' turn to those souls where the spiritual has become predominant and all-mastering; who have breathed the upper, diviner • airs ; who have seen God and eternity everywhere "in the world and time. How significant, when we think of it, that these are a permanent feature in the order of things; permanent, for every age produces them! Men have had to create a word to express what they stand for. The word "saint" is in our vocabulary, the greatest, the richest that "is there. In the darkest ages the saints shine out, exhibiting' amid surrounding barbarisms the overwhelming power of sheer goodness. Always in those times the warrior, the savage bows before the saint. The wildest natures recognise in him something to reverence and to love. They appear

in every rank. Here it is a Louis on the throne cf France, there a Santa Zita, the humble little servant girl of Lucca. And in every creed: here a Jesuib Francis Xavier; there an Anglican George Herbert; there a Quaker John Woolman. The Jesuits have done us a good turn in compiling that Bollandist Ada Sanctorum of theirs, whose 50 odd volumes and 25,000 Lives make such wondrous reading. ' Our good Protestants need to enlarge their view here, and to rid themselves of the supposition that the Christian life went underground at the close of the Apostolic ago, only to re-emerge at the Reformation. It has, they ne3l to remember, been running all the time in a strong and glorious current. They ought to know about Ignatius and Polycarp and Justin Martyr; about Origen and Clement and Cyprian; about Bazil and Gregory of Nazianzeu and Jerome and Augustine; about Martin of Tours and St. Patrick and the Venerable Bede; about Bernard and St. Francis; about Eckhart and the Brothers oi the Common Life; about the Anchoress Julian of Norwich and St. Catherine of Siena and St. Catherine of Genoa. These, out of a countless multitude less known, are examples of the saintly life, lived after the Apostolic time and before the Reformation; possessed, it is true, all of them of opinions which we no longer hold, but whose record is filled full of highest inspirations, of divine facts which no earnest soul can afford to lose. Why do not our pastors, in their pulpit-teaching, deal more fully with these records? There is no richer vein. For are not these lives part of the Divine revelation — a revelation embodied in heaven's action and speech through elect men and women of this earth?'