The Good Humor of the Saints [pp. 127-138]

128 THE GOOD HUMOl? OF THE SAJArTS. [Oct.,
having the happiness of living in the friendship of God, were
often blessed with a sense of humor pure and delicious.
What else, indeed, but a sense of humor could have enabled
Father Faber to strip from the shoulders of his penitents the
comforting mantle of self-deception in which they had shrouded their more petted faults? With what half-veiled amusement
he contemplates the fashionably devout ladies who crowd the
church of the Oratory! With what keen satire he lays bare the
mingled piety and worldliness that fill the feminine soul!
"Their voluntary social arrangements," he says in his S~fritua1 Conferences, "are the tyranny of indispensable circumstances claiming our tenderest pity, and to be managed like the work of a Xavier or a Vincent of
Paul, which hardly left those saints time to pray. Their she~r worldliness
is to be regarded as an interior trial, with all manner of cloudy grand
things to be said about it. They must avoid all uneasiness, for such great
graces as theirs can only grow in calmness and tranquillity."
And again when he ventures to make what he acknowledges to
be an unpopular complaint, and to deride that spirit of liberalism which we have trained ourselves to accept as the essential
virtue of an advanced civilization:
"The old-fashioned hatred of heresy is becoming scarce. It is assumed
that God must do nothing painful and his dominion must not allow itself
to take the shape of an inconvenience or a trammel to the liberty of his
creatures. If the world has outgrown the idea of exclusiveness, God must
follow in our lead and lay it aside as a principle in his dealings with us."
Father Faber can also be epigrammatic when he is so inclined,
and the terseness and vigor with which he expresses a happy
thought, makes it live ft~r ever as a warning to our souls:
"A moderation," he carefully explains, "which consists in taking immoderate liberties with God is hardly what the Fathers of the Desert
meant when they preached their crusade in favor of discretion."
And in sheer despair over the perverse contrariety of human
nature he cries out with whimsical dismay:
"Self-deceit seems actually to thrive on prayer and to grow fat on contemplation."
But we must not dwell too long on one example of the power
of humor when there are so many claiming our attention. Let
us take that spiritual writer who of all others is most read, not
only by Catholics and their enthusiastic imitators in the Anglican denomination, but by many thoughtful men and women of
various creeds or of no creed at all. We mean Thomas a'