“The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas, amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on the part of converts cannot be recited.”
John G. Paton, Missionary to the New Hebrides, an Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p. 243Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French translation, p. 333), “had passed forty years without ever sleeping more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept always on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep he allowed nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie down, it would have been impossible, because his cell was only four feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he never raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain’s strength. He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse sackcloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as scant as possible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff. When the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while the door and little window of his cell. Then he closed them and resumed the mantle—his way, as he told us, of warming himself, and making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequent thing with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the habit. One of his companions has assured me that he has gone sometimes eight days without food. … His poverty was extreme; and his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the others. He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was questioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave to all his words an irresistible charm.”
F. Max Müller: Ramakrishna, His Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180. ↩
Oldenberg: Buddha; translated by W. Hoey, London, 1882, p. 127. ↩
“The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.” Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172. ↩
“When a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and fun,” I read in an American religious paper, “you may be sure that it is running away from Christ.” Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the present plight of many of our churches. ↩
C. B. v. K.: Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by Hamon: Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. XLI. ↩
F. Nietzsche: Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, § 14. I have abridged, and in one place transposed, a sentence. ↩
We all know daft saints, and they inspire a queer kind of aversion. But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose individuals on the same intellectual level. The under-witted strong man, homologous in his sphere with the under-witted saint, is the bully of the slums, the hooligan or rowdy. Surely on this level also the saint preserves a certain superiority. ↩
Newman’s Securus judicat orbis terrarum is another instance. ↩
“Mesopotamia” is the stock comic instance.—An excellent old German lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me her Sehnsucht that she might yet visit “Philadelphia,” whose wondrous name had always haunted her imagination.
Of John Foster it is said that “single words (as chalcedony), or the names of ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. ‘At any time the word hermit was enough to transport him.’ The words woods and forests would produce the most powerful emotion.”
Foster’s Life, by Ryland, New York, 1846, p. 3
The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of himself as follows:—
“I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance—this for lack of a better word—I have frequently had, quite up
