March 24
Daily Gleanings of the Saintly LifeSeragesima Sunday
In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often. 2 Corinthians 11:27.
IT must be sorrow and trial that bring out the Saints. If the cross here, then the crown there. It matters very little what kind of cross, whether such as the Martyrs bore, in the short agony of hideous pangs, when they went up, like Elijah, by a whirlwind to heaven, or the long patient efforts of the Confessors, doubtless often in the sight of God of as great value. That is a most striking expression in Daniel, where it is said of Antichrist, that "he shall wear out the Saints of the Most High." It is just that wearing out which is the glory of the Confessors, both by their external enemies and their own internal traitorous thoughts; it is just that wearing out, too, for deliverance from which all the great mediæval Saints so touchingly long. We must have a share in their afflictions, if only in the perpetual resistance to temptation. Now are we ready to say, as David did, "I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul: there is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land of the Philistines." But is it better? Let the lifelong struggles of many a Saint answer. Many a life will tell you how such a one was pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that he despaired even of life, by some temptation, even the whole of his course; and they that have been so, have generally been the most tender, the most loving, able to help and to console the best. Think how the Saints of the Most High are thus worn out; one can better enter into that verse, which he that wrote it understands more fully now, though yet not perfectly:
Freed from every stain of evil, All their carnal wars are done; For the flesh, made spiritual, And the soul agree in one.