French & English

The word “Faith” is used in two different senses. In ordinary language it means little more than a custom or a name. When people say that Napoleon I. belonged to the Roman Catholic faith, they only mean that he bore the name and followed the external customs of that religion, for we know that his own belief was a kind of fatalistic deism. The facility with which some exalted personages have gone from one faith to another, and in some cases have even repeated the change for obviously political reasons, is explicable only by reading the word “Faith” as a custom or a ceremony.

The sense in which it will be employed in the following pages is that of sincere inward conviction. Evidently this must be far more difficult to ascertain than those acts of external conformity which are intended to be visible by all. In a world like this, where there is so little moral courage, people are easily browbeaten, easily terrorised, and they have in general such an abject dread of any term implying degradation or disgrace, whilst they are at the same time so keenly alive to the advantages of social advancement, that it seems at first sight impossible to find any sure test of the genuineness of their professions.

There is, however, one sure test, and that is sacrifice. When people make real sacrifices for their faith its sincerity is unquestionable. But we must be well on our guard in admitting the reality of the sacrifice. It may seem to be real when it is only a payment for something held to be more valuable than itself. Pecuniary sacrifices prove nothing when the donor gets consideration in return, more valuable to him than superfluous money. It costs no trouble to write a cheque.

Personal labour and trouble, that cannot be delegated to working inferiors, are the best test of sincerity on the active side. On the passive side, there is the sacrifice of the things that make life pleasant, its comforts and luxuries, and the happiness of home and friendship, and especially the renunciation of worldly ambition.

Here is a sketch from life. A young French gentleman, the eldest son of a rich man, leaves father and mother and a luxurious home to join one of the teaching orders. The discipline is severe. To begin with, the aspirant must be ordained, and therefore renounces marriage. He also renounces wealth by taking the vow of voluntary poverty, and he gives up his liberty by the vow of obedience. In this instance, the young man went into exile, as his order was one of the unauthorised congregations, and he sacrificed health because the discipline was more than his delicate frame could bear. The work to be done, year after year, is tedious. Imagine a rich and cultivated young gentleman doing usher’s work in a poor school for less than usher’s pay, indeed for no pay, except a providing of the barest necessaries! The separation from home and family, without being absolutely complete, as in some orders, is nearly so. Rarely, very rarely, the teacher revisited his old home, where his place knew him no more.

I have talked with his father about the immensity of this sacrifice. The father (who is himself a profoundly religious man) feels unable to conceive adequately the strength of a man’s natural will, that can carry out such a sacrifice through life, and accounts for it by the supposition (in his own mind a certainty) that the devotee receives an unfailing supernatural support. It is, at any rate, clear evidence of genuine faith.

In the feminine world we find many examples of sacrifice at least equivalent to this. Not a week before I write this page the daughter of a neighbouring farmer came to say good-bye to us. She belongs to the best class of French peasants, is a comely, well-grown, healthy girl, and might easily have married. She has chosen rather to join a teaching Order, and an Order that is principally employed in the French colonies. It is an austere and hard life that she has before her, and it is highly improbable that she will ever revisit her old home. This case also is evidently one of genuine conviction.

It is unnecessary to multiply examples. It is not the splendour of the Papacy or the episcopate that is the true glory of the Church of Rome, but the steady and modest devotion of her working Orders. What is more beautiful than the life of a Sister of Charity or a “Little Sister of the Poor”? Good Catholics call them “My Sister” when speaking to each of them individually, and so do I who am not a Catholic, for are they not sisters of all of us who may be laid one day on a bed of sickness? If we do not need their gentle watching for ourselves, it soothes our suffering brethren.

And what a dull monotonous existence many of them accept! What tiresome and even repulsive duties they go through without flinching! I know a house kept by some “Little Sisters,” where there are eighty old paupers entirely fed and tended by them. The “Little Sisters” go about begging for remnants of food with a small van, and they never eat anything themselves until they have fed their eighty poor. Two or three of the Sisters do the washing. They are in the washhouse from morning till night to keep the old folks clean. Have I ever done as much?—have you? Till we have sacrificed our own ease and comfort in this way, or in some way equivalent to this, the next best thing we can do is to respect such self-sacrifice in others. One of these “Little Sisters” in the house I know remained humble and unknown like the rest, but when she was gone we learned by accident that she was of princely rank.

Maxime du Camp has studied the charitable self-sacrifice of women belonging to the higher classes. The abundant facts that he collected were not a surprise for me, but if any English reader happens to retain the old prejudice that all Frenchwomen are frivolous he ought to read du Camp’s evidence.

The active sisterhoods are repaid to some extent in this world by a beneficent law of human nature. They have one remarkably uniform characteristic; they seem to be invariably cheerful, with bright moments of innocent gaiety. This serenity of mind may be explained naturally without having recourse to miracle. It is gained by the ever-present sense of duties accomplished in the past and the determination to face them in the future. It is the spirit that inspired Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” with a health surpassing all songs of love and wine.

These are instances of the saintly nature in practice. I remember a very dear Roman Catholic friend of mine, a Frenchman, asking me if I thought it possible that the saintly nature could develop itself under the influences of Protestantism. It seemed to him that Protestantism must check its heroic spirit and bring it down to the commonplace. I answered that the purest example of the saintly nature I had ever known was an Anglican lady. She belongs to no order and is nothing but a lonely old maid, who has taken all who suffer to be her sisters and brethren. She gives them the whole of her time, the whole of her strength, and all her money except what is reserved for a bare subsistence. She spends seven shillings a week on her own food and lodgings, and as for dress, she is content with anything that will cover her.[38] For perfect courage she is as good as any Catholic saint in the calendar. There is no malady so repulsive or so contagious that she will not cheerfully nurse the patient. These practices are by no means of recent adoption. The lady in question has been leading a saint’s life for twenty or thirty years. The intensity of her religious belief reaches the limits of hallucination. Like Joan of Arc, she hears the angels sing. Whenever a good Christian dies she is filled with a serene joy, thinking only of the glad new birth in heaven. Like Sister Dora, she has strong physical health, and can therefore forget the body as the rich need not think of money. Her existence is almost angelic already; she lives in a sort of ecstasy, and is as ignorant of this world as a cloistered nun. Had she been a Roman Catholic she would have attained to papal beatification.

This example is good evidence that the saintly nature may flourish in perfection outside the Church of Rome, though the fact remains that Roman Catholicism encourages the development of that character beyond the limits of reason, whilst the cooler faith of Anglicanism does not encourage it so far. It is therefore not improbable that saints of the heroic type are more common in France than in England.

When we come to religious work done in common life by people without the special saintly vocation, there may be as much of it in England. Many of my readers will be acquainted with English people who quite unostentatiously give time and labour to the lower classes, either directly in the service of Christianity or simply in behalf of civilisation against barbarism. I know a busy English layman who gives a whole day every week, besides one or two evenings, to Christianising work, often sacrificing necessary rest. He is remarkably free from cant of all kinds, and opposed to asceticism. Such examples remain almost unknown, and may therefore be more numerous than we suspect, but it is not usually the male sex that does the most work of this kind. At a time when a book of mine called Human Intercourse was published, an Anglican clergyman wrote me a friendly letter, in which he pointed to a special reason for the intimate alliance between “priests and women” in works requiring time and trouble. He said (in effect if not in words) that the clergy would as willingly appeal to men if they were likely to find in them coadjutors equally zealous, but that men are comparatively useless.[39]

To this I felt inclined to answer, in defence of the irreligious sex, that men have commonly too much on their minds in business to leave them much liberty for religious undertakings. Besides this, independently of all questions of faith, the feminine nature is kinder than ours, and more disposed to beneficent interference.

It shocks a Catholic to be told that a Protestant may have strong and saintly faith, and it equally shocks a Protestant to be told that strong faith may be the ruling motive of an unbeliever in Christianity, yet it may be so. If we admit self-sacrifice as evidence of faith in one case, we must admit it equally in another. There is nothing so galling to human nature as the loss of social place and consideration, and it is usually in that form that unbelievers have learned the hardship of sacrifice. It requires immense faith in the ultimate value of veracity to express an unfashionable opinion.

Now, this kind of faith has been by no means rare in France during the last hundred years. Much of the old spirit of faith, once exclusively religious, has transferred itself in France to political and social convictions. The democratic idea is not without its saints and martyrs, who have been willing to sacrifice all the comforts of existence for a belief and a hope detached from any personal success.