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

1882.] THE GOOD HUAfOR OF THE SAJArTS. 13S
him as he stood, a living whole, his weaker human nature balancing
in the scale with holy aspirations and the power of divine grace.
This is the view he has endeavored in all sincerity to lay before
his readers, and with what result? In the first place, we are
astonished by the singular sensation of coming so near to these
servants of God, and of finding them men just like all other men,
only stronger, holier, and purer than their unsaintly brothers.
At the same time they are essentially men, and not mere synonyms for strength, holiness, and purity, which is the light in
which we have hitherto been often too apt to regard them. In
the second place, we find them vastly more entertaining, from
a purely secular view, than we had ever been led to suppose.
They are wonderfully light-hearted, these Fathers of the church,
and have a strong tendency to be amusing in their long friendly letters, which is the more surprising when we consider the
troubles among which they lived and that persecution and exile
were common to all.
Let us take St. Chrysostom, the man whom Newman calls "a
bright, cheerful, gentle soul," and who possessed "a sunniness
of mind all his own." An ordinary biographer would of course
tell us that this great saint retired to the mountains when only
twenty-one, and that he lived there with the monks for six years.
A few might even go a step further and say that he chose this
penitential life in order to overcome by strict fasting his natural
daintiness of appetite. But Newman takes us nearer still and
shows us the real anxiety with which the saint regarded the
hardships he was about to embrace. In a letter written at that
time to a friend, he confesses that he has been much concerned
as to
"Whether it would be possible to procure fresh bread for my eating;
whether I should be ordered to use the same oil for my lamp and for my
food, to undergo the hardship of severe toil, such as digging, carrying of
wood and water, and the like. In a word, I made much account of bodily
comfort."
Surely this is very much the way we would ourselves feel in
the matter, and we begin for the first time to realize that it was
as hard for the saints to deny themselves the pleasures of life as
it seems to be for us. Yet six years of such rough discipline
effected its object, and the dreaded austerities became in time a
light and easy yoke.
Towards the end of St. Chrysostom's life his "sunniness of
mind" stood him in good stead; for his exile was but a prolonged