The Saints as Symbols
THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The...
...The universi- hide its secret dissatisfaction with itself...
...books, tative...
...The meat of even said by William James, whose professional task its remarks to man is that he will die...
...But the saint is the proof that human That is why the channel through which Christianity nature can be altered, not artificially, but naturally and actually reaches the multitude in any age is the saint...
...One might almost new clothes and new shoes so many times a year, the suppose-for Mr...
...Volume IV New York, Wednesday, September 22, 1926 Number 20 CONTENTS The Saints as Symbols 45S Communications 471 Week by Week 4S7 Patience At the Fireside 460 Sonnets Kenneth Slade Ailing, Joseph The Campus Blooms Again 461 Lewis French, Jessie Storrs Butler, The Gap in Kentucky History Grace Hazard Conkling 473 William L. Reenan 462 The Play R. Dana Skinner 474 Italian Catholic Literature...
...And, of he saw that the beginning of religious wisdom is a course, it is evident to anyone who cares to think change of heart-an humble understanding that rest- historically that everything valuable in the fundamenlessness is dispelled only by a vision of eternal peace...
...The only diffimuch interested in conformity as the non-conformist, culty is that it would cease to be a religion-a creed because he lives and breathes through the assumed that is bound to something as firm and enduring as rightness of his own conclusions...
...The apostles of modern reform may have such practices there is a basic feeling that Christianity their way for awhile, but when they have done speakcan march along with civilization...
...laborare echoes of the abiding, bottomless hunger of human- ers, but more amply paid and more thoroughly eduity for the sight of a victor over human nature...
...Sometimes the human race can later the lesser things lose their hold...
...Civilization may accomplish a Christ and the evangelical manner of life shone forth great many things, but when it is wise it will rest con- more lifelike and strikingly than in Saint Francis...
...It cannot, for the ing and the world has tired listening, majestic voices reason that civilization is a matter of multiplied things old and new will still ring out from the charitable -like votes and electric lights-while Christianity is temples or the contemplative hills...
...In them will be always a matter of one thing...
...Swift for liberty of opinion are those who insist that there may conceivably grow some more...
...It may-and if shall be only one opinion-in the public school, in the the scientific philosophy is right, it will-rise to a voting state...
...among the saints, there are almost numberless comNevertheless, it is true that Christianity is constantly peers...
...Civilization is rapidly outgrowing church activities should see something ominous in the everything of that sort except in the spheres of public fact that, while the factory supplies everybody with service for public convenience...
...How ridiculous place but they are looking...
...It is even, in a very true heard the notes of comfort and victory...
...There are ties may know more about Shakespeare, or the divine opiates for the pain that goes with living...
...tal culture of western Europe was, in one way or anIt is being approached, hesitatingly no doubt, in this other, produced and guaranteed by the Virgin...
...In him is demonof Neo-Platonic myth-there is the golden fact that strated both the practicability and the value of the they actually hope to find, to produce, an illustrious Christian experiment...
...Amidst all the inanity of the theoso- revive...
...And how many have by comparison is the confidence in civilization...
...That searched with them l Fogazzaro and his more than reposes, when one has analyzed it carefully, upon the relatively hysterical Benedetto...
...tent with its ancient definition as "the temporal wel- But though he may be, in a certain sense, supreme fare...
...For they sense, always a matter of one person...
...A divine who talks excellently about seen themselves...
...Marvelous, indeed, has been the luminous exin need of adaptation to the circumstances in which ample of the frail young woman whose life as a nun it finds itself...
...But those may ruin his voice...
...When someone atthese various devices have not got the majority of tempts to modify or weaken it, the healing effect is Americans out of bed on Sunday mornings...
...very time of distracted and errant faith, by all those Thus does experience prove amply how the saint is who are looking everywhere for an exemplar of noble the only possible form in which religion can truly human character...
...Can was carrying people to the point of believing that citiit be that there is need for a change, not merely (if zens should all be cut from the same new piece and one dare employ the phrase) in the organization of stamped with the same bright label...
...Compare with all the effectiveness of changing sysThe whole essence of that is the conviction that no tem the influence of a man like Saint Francis...
...significance in the fact that those who clamor loudest The civilization that is accredited by Mr...
...But the road to improvement is obviously not human story of Jean Cocteau who, crowned with the an alteration or adulteration of Christianity...
...They are looking in the wrong ligious fact that everybody can see...
...But sooner or Christian experience...
...Nor can one fail to be touched by the very dull...
...the very aberrations of Adventism-all these but more pleasant and easily assimilated books...
...Christianity, but even in its basic product...
...Nobody is so very likely acquire their circulation...
...The in the nobly ascetic Father Charles the example of point was made well and long ago by Augustin when life to which his soul could not but cling...
...the Russian mystics belief that human nature does not change-that it and their expectancy of a national religious represen- will keep on needing food, but better food...
...Preaching is almost the fundamental query of modern Protes- an easy job if, instead of having something to say, you tantism...
...A church which The individualistic temperament is normally also a adopted the platform of the cheaper magazines would passionately missionary temperament...
...It was hill will ever be taller than Calvary...
...A Christian was measuring influences, that if modern society mind always adheres firmly to two poles-eternal hope wished to solve its social problems it would have to and unescapable doom...
...But when they have truly of a popular demand in order then to gather them seen the saint they can never forget, because they have into the church...
...cated laborers...
...Morrison Swift, wardrobe...
...merely have something to repeat...
...At any rate, after a generation of us who believe that Christianity is a cure know also or so of the practice it ought to be fairly clear that that it is a regimen and not a drug...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...Shakespeare or the modern poets may muster a sizable Themselves, that is, transfigured by the fulness of audience for the appended prayer...
...There is strange God...
...It is being averred by a vast is that it knows a safe road between these two, its only throng in this far-off commemoration of his death that binding claim is that traffic regulations on this high- "there has never been anyone in whom the image of way must be obeyed...
...Men may lose their There may be something in perfection of outward sys- liking for the attractive images of sculpture, or the tem, in the business of rallying people to the support characters of ideal poetry...
...It is, of course, quite natural that sanctity and authority, and advertise this authority by citizens more or less professionally identified with a peculiar garb...
...The method of preaching which en- was ended by her glorification as Sainte Therese of thralls one generation will strike another as hopelessly Lisieux...
...Swift has many companions in institution of religion endows an increasingly dwin- his philosophy-that admiration for factory methods dling number with principles and habits of belief...
...In all gone...
...shall be the voices of successful saints...
...He is the one triumphant refollower of Christ...
...Thus a letter addressed to the editor of stature unimaginable now, and need a complete new the Springfield Republican, by Mr...
...But whatever its size and point of view, 456 THE COMMONWEAL September 22, 1926 it cannot ever be the same thing as the Christian faith...
...Its only positive assumption become Franciscan...
...it is a honors that come with great literary success, found reawakening, a realignment of human nature...
...according to the laws of beauty...
...Though Obviously, you can make religion popular by turnthe question bothers Catholics to some extent, it is ing it into what the unbelievers believe...
...For the saint, in an august, austere and yet phists-that weird group of vastly out-of-date disciples very human manner, is a symbol...
...Arrigo Levasti 463 Pieta (verse) Kathryn White Ryan 465 Books Carl Cransen, Padraic Colum, Mediocrity and Music Martha Genung Stearns, Thomas Julia Duncan Buchanan 466 Walsh, George N. Shuster, The Greenhorn Marjorie Cone 468 Lurton Blassingame 475 A Corner of Old France Barbara de Courson 470 The Quiet Corner 481 THE SAINTS AS SYMBOLS REVAMPING religion is one of the special hob- has this to say: "May an organization set itself apart bies of those who are knee-deep in the modern from the rest of the community, claim a peculiar current of reform...
Vol. 4 • September 1926 • No. 20
