By Henry Aloysius Barry
Yes, there is a resultant prosaicness in our lives. We have not cultivated the mystic sense. Ruskin has sought to express under the faculty of imagination a sort of shadow of this spiritual faculty. "The imagination," he goes on to say, "sees the heart and inner nature and makes them felt; it is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its giving outer detail; a seer in the prophetic sense, calling the things that are not, as though they were, and forever delighting to dwell on that which is tangibly present." Faith has given us a shower of jewels, spiritual gems, and we are childlike, if not swine-like, in our dull appreciation of the brilliants. The poet of nature goes to the fields, he gambols in them, and he goes out to the woodlands, and he gets at the heart of Nature; he goes in search of it. His soul grows in familiar communing with the meadows, the brooks and buds; he learns their language, hears the message they have to deliver and learns their secrets. Spiritually, we know Godhead in paint; we fail to seek the heart of mysteries, to drink in their treasured sweets, to suck bee-like their honey. God's law is not in our hearts; we have not, indeed, trained the mystic sense, we are barbarous christians. Our inner hearts are far from God; we follow God from afar. How much of the God of creation do they know who live out their whole lives in stuffy cities, in narrow lanes, who never, or very rarely, see God's vast, blue sky and radiant sun? Were they not over-indolent, such people might at times, the least and poorest among them, stroll or ride out into the suburbs and see and explore the green fields and the mountain range and hear the birds chirping and carolling and smell the meadow's breath. The contrast would impress them with the foulness of their abodes and rags and prompt them to a more wholesome existence. Even in their be-gloomed homes, the sprig of green, the tuft of new mown hay from the hay-rick, the little yellow buttercup they had plucked and now preserve in a little vase, bowl or jar would remind them all the week long in their dungeon homes of higher, purer things, not far away. Moralize on this picture. Make the soul the city denizen and the mysteries of Godhead God's blue sky, the golden sun, the meadows, rivulets, birds and bushes. How soon we should envy the saints and not merely patronize them as parvenus patronize the paintings of an artist! How soon we should grow weary of our dull, pessimistic lives! Taste and see! The sorrows of Nature would lose their note of despair. Life's tragedies would take on more of the sapphire's glistening of the throne cloud at sunset rather than the color of human blood, which the veins of the poor supply to the unquenchable dragon thirst of the rich and the powerful. Shall we, indeed, languish in life's misery when the whole expanse of God-head is open to us to make the spirit strong and glad with the wine of its knowledge, its beauties, its transformation, its hopes? Yet we know the rose from the lily, the marigold from the daisy, the chrysanthemum from the Jacqueminot. We discern the individuality of each planet. None so ignorant in our midst but should blush not to know a few, at least, of the starry splendors by their own name.
We know the individuality of our friends, their character and their tastes. When we meet them on the highway we recognize them at once. What embarrassment not to have recognized them ; to have to strive to recall their identity and name! Your friend realizes keenly that you are so superficially aware of his personality. Ah! you were, after all, only an acquaintance of his and hardly that. Coming from behind us, coming before to meet us, crossing and recrossing our lives, every moment of the day and the night, the Holy Ghost is hardly an acquaintance. Aye, He is but a name to us dull christians, who have no memory but for things identified with earth, and that have only an earthly meaning and purely earthly promises in them. We are not acquainted with His individuality, His doings, His dress, as it were, His voice, with His manner of speech; in a word, a lack of spiritual knowledge can be but too truly laid up against our spiritual lethargy. What should we say of a physician who comes and says simply that his patient has a disease, who could not diagnose its particular form? What a criminal ignorance, indeed, would this be, and, as far as the patient is concerned, a ghastly one! No one questions that a physician ought to know his professional duties. Artists are we who use paint but not color, and we cannot, or at least do not, distinguish color from color. You would say that such a one were no artist at all. Grace, grace, say we, and yet we know nothing of its colors. If, indeed, our capacity of mind and word be small, well, fill the pitchers you have. Give to God the widow's mite, all that your capacity can afford. One cannot get at mysteries! No, that is, not entirely, yet, one leaf from the forest, one petal! We may not see all, of course, nor, perhaps, as much as others more bright and willing than we. Large fishes disport themselves far out. To reach them requires good vessels and hardy mariners,—saints of the highest type. We can live on the smaller creatures, caught near the shore. Shame, indeed, that one should be inexpert, inartistic, unrefined in knowledge of things divine!
Yes, there is a resultant prosaicness in our lives. We have not cultivated the mystic sense. Ruskin has sought to express under the faculty of imagination a sort of shadow of this spiritual faculty. "The imagination," he goes on to say, "sees the heart and inner nature and makes them felt; it is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its giving outer detail; a seer in the prophetic sense, calling the things that are not, as though they were, and forever delighting to dwell on that which is tangibly present." Faith has given us a shower of jewels, spiritual gems, and we are childlike, if not swine-like, in our dull appreciation of the brilliants. The poet of nature goes to the fields, he gambols in them, and he goes out to the woodlands, and he gets at the heart of Nature; he goes in search of it. His soul grows in familiar communing with the meadows, the brooks and buds; he learns their language, hears the message they have to deliver and learns their secrets. Spiritually, we know Godhead in paint; we fail to seek the heart of mysteries, to drink in their treasured sweets, to suck bee-like their honey. God's law is not in our hearts; we have not, indeed, trained the mystic sense, we are barbarous christians. Our inner hearts are far from God; we follow God from afar. How much of the God of creation do they know who live out their whole lives in stuffy cities, in narrow lanes, who never, or very rarely, see God's vast, blue sky and radiant sun? Were they not over-indolent, such people might at times, the least and poorest among them, stroll or ride out into the suburbs and see and explore the green fields and the mountain range and hear the birds chirping and carolling and smell the meadow's breath. The contrast would impress them with the foulness of their abodes and rags and prompt them to a more wholesome existence. Even in their be-gloomed homes, the sprig of green, the tuft of new mown hay from the hay-rick, the little yellow buttercup they had plucked and now preserve in a little vase, bowl or jar would remind them all the week long in their dungeon homes of higher, purer things, not far away. Moralize on this picture. Make the soul the city denizen and the mysteries of Godhead God's blue sky, the golden sun, the meadows, rivulets, birds and bushes. How soon we should envy the saints and not merely patronize them as parvenus patronize the paintings of an artist! How soon we should grow weary of our dull, pessimistic lives! Taste and see! The sorrows of Nature would lose their note of despair. Life's tragedies would take on more of the sapphire's glistening of the throne cloud at sunset rather than the color of human blood, which the veins of the poor supply to the unquenchable dragon thirst of the rich and the powerful. Shall we, indeed, languish in life's misery when the whole expanse of God-head is open to us to make the spirit strong and glad with the wine of its knowledge, its beauties, its transformation, its hopes? Yet we know the rose from the lily, the marigold from the daisy, the chrysanthemum from the Jacqueminot. We discern the individuality of each planet. None so ignorant in our midst but should blush not to know a few, at least, of the starry splendors by their own name.
We know the individuality of our friends, their character and their tastes. When we meet them on the highway we recognize them at once. What embarrassment not to have recognized them ; to have to strive to recall their identity and name! Your friend realizes keenly that you are so superficially aware of his personality. Ah! you were, after all, only an acquaintance of his and hardly that. Coming from behind us, coming before to meet us, crossing and recrossing our lives, every moment of the day and the night, the Holy Ghost is hardly an acquaintance. Aye, He is but a name to us dull christians, who have no memory but for things identified with earth, and that have only an earthly meaning and purely earthly promises in them. We are not acquainted with His individuality, His doings, His dress, as it were, His voice, with His manner of speech; in a word, a lack of spiritual knowledge can be but too truly laid up against our spiritual lethargy. What should we say of a physician who comes and says simply that his patient has a disease, who could not diagnose its particular form? What a criminal ignorance, indeed, would this be, and, as far as the patient is concerned, a ghastly one! No one questions that a physician ought to know his professional duties. Artists are we who use paint but not color, and we cannot, or at least do not, distinguish color from color. You would say that such a one were no artist at all. Grace, grace, say we, and yet we know nothing of its colors. If, indeed, our capacity of mind and word be small, well, fill the pitchers you have. Give to God the widow's mite, all that your capacity can afford. One cannot get at mysteries! No, that is, not entirely, yet, one leaf from the forest, one petal! We may not see all, of course, nor, perhaps, as much as others more bright and willing than we. Large fishes disport themselves far out. To reach them requires good vessels and hardy mariners,—saints of the highest type. We can live on the smaller creatures, caught near the shore. Shame, indeed, that one should be inexpert, inartistic, unrefined in knowledge of things divine!
