SAINTLINESS
249
sound sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an
anarchist poet writes: —
“Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you have,
“Shall you become beautiful;
“You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;
“Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and healthy,
but rather by discarding them . . .
“For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh
furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave behind;
“Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely use
and handle is an impediment.”
1
In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either
on doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject
to spiritual excitement throw away possessions as so many clogs.
Only those who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight
away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea
we have to guard. When a brother novice came to Saint Francis,
saying: “Father, it would be a great consolation to me to own a
psalter, but even supposing that our general should concede to
me this indulgence, still I should like also to have your consent,”
Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne, Roland, and
Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally dying
on the field of battle. “So care not,” he said, “for owning books and
knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.” And when some
weeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the
psalter, Francis said: “After you have got your psalter you will crave
a breviary; and after you have got your breviary you will sit in your
stall like a grand prelate, and will say to your brother: ‘Hand me
my breviary.’ . . . And thenceforward he denied all such requests,
saying: A man possesses of learning only so much as comes out of
him in action, and a monk is a good preacher only so far as his
deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is known by its fruits.”
2
But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in
doing and being, there is, in the desire of not having, something
profounder still, something related to that fundamental mystery of
religious experience, the satisfaction found in absolute surrender to
1
E
DWARD
C
ARPENTER
: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.
2
Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. S
ABATIER
, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13.
250THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
the larger power. So long as any secular safeguard is retained, so long
as any residual prudential guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender
is incomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel,
and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, look-
ing to God, it is true, after a fashion, but also holding by our proper
machinations. In certain medical experiences we have the same
critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine
maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the doctor to wean
him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence. The
tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies
of it among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in
case of need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in
his own expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the
chronically wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself
on God, but if he should need the other help, there it will be also.
Every one knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire
for reform, — drunkards whom, with all their self-reproaches and
resolves, one perceives to be quite unwilling seriously to contemplate
never being drunk again! Really to give up anything, on which we
have relied, to give it up definitively, “for good and all” and forever,
signifies one of those radical alterations of character which came
under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In it the inner man
rolls over into an entirely different position of equilibrium, lives
in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the turning-point
and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve the sincere
acceptance of certain nakednesses and destitutions.
Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this
ever-recurring note: Fling yourself upon God’s providence without
making any reserve whatever, — take no thought for the morrow,
— sell all you have and give it to the poor, — only when the sacrifice
is ruthless and reckless will the higher safety really arrive. As a con-
crete example let me read a page from the biography of Antoinette
Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted in her day by both
Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take her religion
at second hand. When a young girl, in her father’s house, —
“She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: Lord, what wilt thou
have me to do?
And being one night in a most profound penitence, she
said from the bottom of her heart: ‘O my Lord! What must I do to please