The Saints in Maine

...Had Cynthia, driving her cow along Maine roadsides in the dog-days of August, but known of Saint Bride and her countless lambs, there might earlier and with less difficulty have sprung up in her conscience-ridden little soul that quick and creative life...

...We knew that Saint George had once killed a dragon...

...At times we become frankly personal over our grievance...

...How like the New England character was that of this Spanish saint with its strong practicality, its good sense, its natural shrewdness, its candor in the face of superiors...

...In the village academy, to be sure, we heard of Saint Francis, who was also presented to us with no prefix and whom for years I associated with a thin, long-faced gentleman sent out by some society to deliver at our front doors folded verses of Scripture called Comfort Powders...

...but above all she was profoundly versed in theology and school divinity, so that the doctors were confounded by her argumentative powers...

...Only some halfdozen of them were, under scriptural sanction, accepted in our seacoast village and those by no appellation save their given names...

...Between the Remarkable Providences of Increase Mather and The Little Flowers of Saint Francis there is singularly little difference save in nomenclature...

...And in what a comely manner did the 11,000 meet the martyrdom, which they had sought, at the hands of fierce barbarians "who rushed upon the virgins as a pack of gaunt and hungry wolves might fall on a flock of milk-white lambs...

...Had she but known in her childhood of that Celtic saint, she affirms, her driving of the family cow on misty mornings had been fraught with excitement and the familiar roadsides bathed in apocalyptical splendor...

...One was good because it was right, dutiful, and altogether desirable to be good, not because it was beautiful and harmonious...

...and that cultured Greek physician and poet,i the author of the Third Gospel and the Book of the Acts, was, in matters of address at least, accorded no more respect than was tendered the village idiot, who bore his name...

...nor heard of that simple brother who, in spite of much labor and sorrow, could learn but Ave Maria 1, but from whose dead lips sprang a white lily in token of the Virgin's understanding and honor...

...Truth, justice, duty, righteousness—great and necessary names, indeed...

...Always after her phillippic, Cynthia stands apart from me and looks at the sheep...

...The second, which suggested an apotheosized parish meeting or Christian Endeavor convention, struck me, even at that age, as both absurd and blasphemous...

...It may be said, however, that the docile, unromantic piety on the faces of the ten at Bruges whom Hans Memling managed to depict within the shelter of Saint Ursula's robe, leaves anyone of imagination somewhat grateful for the limitations of art...

...How appealing is Saint Ursula of Brittainy, the patron saint of school-girls and of those who strive to teach them...

...Once while frying some fish she had a vision—but she did not leave the fish...

...And yet, in spite of our unwillingness to canonize by the words of our mouths these flaming spirits, we did sing loudly on Sunday evenings our intention of gathering with them by the river on that day which is to herald a new and spiritual democracy...

...and on certain solemn occasions we repeated together in strained accents that phrase from the Apostles' Creed which bound us to believe in communion with them—a phrase which early caused me no little anxiety...

...My Sundayschool teacher, a patient, quite scripless pilgrim of the straight and narrow way, explained to me on the occasion of my "joining" the village church that this statement in which I was expected to pledge my complete faith might be interpreted in one of two ways: either it referred to our belief in the celestial conversations of those pious souls who were already among the blest, or it strove to deify the conferences of the faithful who were still among us...

...Cynthia feels that she has been disastrously cheated in the matter of Saint Bride...

...Let even an inadequate flock of sheep, grazing in a rocky pasture or pensive beneath sunlit beeches, come within her view, and she discourses freely and rebelliously upon her loss...

...Our slight acquaintance with both saints, indeed— and it was very slight—left us rather stupidly impressed by their greati goodness and by their service to mankind which we must ever seek to emulate...

...But not to have heard of her existence until the late twenties is a fact difficult to endure graciously...

...But when, unwilling to accept either, I stammeringly asked if the provoking words might not possibly suggest unknown yet open avenues of grace between us and certain Shining Ones, I was told in horror-stricken tones that such an interpretation was contrary to the nature of the church to which I had sworn my allegiance, that It savored strongly of the pernicious doctrine of a sect to be avoided, and that I must immediately take steps to correct my error by repairing to the parsonage for more light I As to saints outside the scriptural wing, we knew almost nothing of them until we entered college where they were held in somewhat higher repute...

...and the Greek ideal of a barely discernible separation between the ethical and the aesthetic would have been scorned among us, in spite of our classical heritage, as a "flighty" doctrine, one obviously contrary to the dictates of plain, common sense...

...We heard, too, of Joan of Arc, then unsainted, but as in the case of Saint Francis she was presented from the moral rather than from the romantic viewpoint...

...the poets and philosophers were to her what childish recreations are to others...

...With her fair and glorious company of 11,000 virgins she undertook a journey to the holy shrines throughout Europe, and was miraculously conducted over the rocks and snows of the Alps by six angels, "who went before them perpetually, clearing the road from all impediments, throwing bridges over mountain torrents, and even at night pitching tents for their shelter and refreshment...

...Yet those tales and legends which might nourish hungry and repressed imaginations, refresh the careworn, and add grace and truth to hard, unquiet lives, have remained, in larger part at least, the legacy of the Mother Church, that institution which old Cotton Mather in his Wonders of the Invisible World calls in stern uncompromise the devil's eldest son...

...Is it to be apprehended only by hypothesis and syllogism ? Rather is it not to be apprehended by the individual when he is once conscious of a quick and creative life springing up within him to become henceforth the deepest thing in his nature ? If such is true, then truth must of necessity have various forms according to the character of this creative life...

...And of late we have been more clearly conscious of that curious, seemingly inconsistent mysticism in the New England character, yearning in the eyes of farmhouse women, wise and sure iii the gaze of those who go down to the sea in ships...

...Our Protestant community, like all others of its kind, stood immovably against Mariology, and even in ancient and beautiful legends saw a dimming of the hard, bright light of truth...

...yet New England hills and valleys might have nurtured saints and pilgrims as well as Aegean heroes and immortals...

...and doubtless God Who allowed Parson Avery to stand in deep waters as though his feet were upon dry ground was not far removed from the angel called Marvellous who once bore good Brother Bernard, across a dark and terrible river...

...The latter—be it said with thanksgiving I—were not kept far from us...

...You can believe in fairies," an uncompromising elder once told Cynthia and me, "but you must know they are not true...

...nor stood with the monks in amazed wonder to see Our Lady wipe with a fold of her blue mantle the sweat from the brow of Barnabas, the juggler, head downward before her statue and juggling with six brass balls and twelve shining knives...

...and then I know that she is saying to herself certain lines of Fiona Macleod, dear to us both and to many others who knew his haunting measures in those days when literary endeavor was freer and less impaired than it is at present: To this day on Am Fheill Bridge shepherds are wont to hear in the mists the crying of innumerable young lambs and that without the bleating of the ewes, and by this token know that holy Saint Bride has passed that way, bringing with her the countless lambs soon to be born on all the hills and pastures of the world...

...The plaintive sound of Saint Francis Xavier's silver bell calling the children to their devotions along the white, sun-swept streets of Goa...

...Such, then, was our provincialism in matters spiritual...

...and we surmised that Saint Patrick, whom we vaguely associated with reputed spectacular achievements In Ireland, was the subject of jokes in other and more metropolitan places...

...But to many of us they are the "frail spells" of Shelley's Hymn: whose uttered charm might not avail to sever From all we hear and all we see Doubt, chance, and mutability...

...What sweet contentments doth the soul enjoy by the senses...

...and had I earlier loved Saint Ursula, gathering about her the 11,000 spotless virgins in the enameled meadows of Brittainy, something might have happened even to my more stodgy nature...

...What is truth and where is it...

...What a subject she might have afforded for sympathetic presentation and discussion before one of those first club meetings of the women of Boston, organized by Mistress Anne Hutchinson, who herself claimed to possess "a peculiar indwelling of the Holy Ghost...

...His sermon to his little brothers, the birds, his bearing in his arms the vision-struck little boy who had tied his cord to that of the saint, the delightful chronicle of the wolf of Gubbio—those which should be the birthright of every child were not ours...

...It is hardly necessary to add that the Virgin, though held to be blessed among women, was revered among us only because of reflected glory...

...To some of us it is inevitable that the truth aesthetic will transcend the truth literal,, that the truth poetic and artistic is more to be desired than the truth intrinsic...

...What wonder that the mediaeval artist suffered anxiety in that it was impossible to devise any means by which the whole faithful company might be represented—in that there were several thousands to whom justice could not be done...

...For although our Puritan forbears were right in condemning both tales as false when viewed, as they viewed them, in the light of truth intrinsic, their grace and beauty are a part of that Truth which must be God...

...Gazing from a Maine hill-top across the waters of Penobscot Bay, we have seen a land and sea kind and clement enough for any saint...

...The thought and imagination of our childhood which they might have nourished and colored existed without them like the dimly burning wicks of the prophet...

...we ask with Pilate, not jestingly, as Sir Francis Bacon would have it, but with the bewilderment which, for aught we know, was in his voice...

...So Cynthia and I never glimpsed the wheat field by the Nile as it sprang to golden harvest at one gracious word...

...In these last years, however, conscious of our loss, Cynthia and I, though still Protestant, yea Puritan in certain inescapable moments, have embraced the saints, and in their charming companionship have found true the genial promise of John Donne concerning the times and seasons of God: "He," writes that most intriguing of divines, "can bring thy summer out of winter, though thou have no spring...

...Our stumbling feet demand easier and more tangible means of approach, for we, too, would see from afar the Shining City of God, And what is truth...

...and then answers himself by the affirmation that they are the "Gates and windows of its knowledge, the organs of its delight...

...In contemplating my own deprivations I am torn between Saints Ursula and Teresa of Avila, those learned ladies of the sixth and sixteenth centuries, the one who would have been my joy at fourteen, the other who is today my special solace and delight...

...Again we are regretful that at least a taste for sainthood was not given earlier to us, for then we should not have shied a bit at Lady Lovat's thick, blue book and set it aside for a season while we devoured shorter and less worthy tales of less compelling souls...

...Neither explanation satisfied my groping, fourteen-year-old mind...

...and Nausicaa with her maidens quite uselessly playing at ball, presumably on a Monday morning, lighted many candles in the youthful imaginations of Maine...

...Saint Francis journeying on brown roads with his brothers, Saint Columba encircling the islands in his coracle of reeds...

...he who, standing in the porch of the high priest's palace, thrice denied his Lord, whose very imperfections should make him the willing intercessor of us all, received from us no glorifying prefix to soften and illumine his remorseful condemnation...

...the black and bitter cold which Saint Brendan endured for five years among the pillars of glittering ice...

...Her mind was a perfect storehouse of wisdom and knowledge: she had read about the stars and the courses of the winds...

...the sweet perfume as of innumerable gardens which drifted from the cell of the dying Saint Vincent when the angels visited him—the generous and gracious influences of such as these, like the "large and melodious thoughts" which descended upon Walt Whitman as he walked beneath the trees, might a quarter of a century ago have ministered unto Cynthia and me had the saints been accorded good standing along the coast of Maine...

...and we little knew what treasures were hidden beneath that ancient Domremy tree and by that quiet pool, which once imaged in its crystal-clear depths the forms of celestial visitors...

...all that had ever happened in the world from the days of Adam she had by heart...

...Both escaped me until a few short years ago, and, like Cynthia, I, too, ani remonstrant...

...and neither struggles with the aorist and optative nor despair over irregular verbs could dull for us the sudden and stupendous perception, born of Homeric hexameters, that beauty might exist for itself alone...

...the red roses of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary...

...For in spite of divergence in things temporal, things eternal differ only in interpretation whether they happen in a Carmelite convent or on Beacon Hill, where, it may be said in passing, a certain good Bostonian once dismissed his good cook because she timed her boiling eggs by Ave) Marias and Pater Nosters instead of by the kitchen clock...

...Saint Teresa of Avila, that Spanish mystic of the sixteenth century, who preached and lived a life of harmony and order, has for some time past delighted Cynthia and me...

...Saint Teresa insisted upon the most rigorous of discipline, had no sympathy with the vagueness and vagaries often mistaken for mystical states, and once dared to reprove God Himself for procrastination and indifference, whereupon He immediately responded with money for a new foundation of the order...

...but the grace and beauty of themselves, the incidents, human and humorous, clustering about them, the consciousness that they had known God, and not by precept— with these we had nothing to do...

...The first was too remote for comfort...

...Has the philosopher or the theologian found it for any save himself...

...But in our childhood there were few shifting and colorful rays in the hard, bright light of Puritan truth and little warmth in the means of grace afforded us...

...Such communion surely smacked only of, at best, a Barmecide feast...

...It must be admitted, however, that the cherubim, who in all the great books according to old Richard de Bury, expand their wings, flash their swords less ominously in the Little Flowers...

...Indeed, for the fortunate New England children subjected to them, the classics struck wells of water in a Puritan Valley of Baca...

...The truth was the truth—to be determined after a simple and logical manner, then embraced, and afterward tenaciously held...

...the holy light that surrounded Saint Francis and Saint Clare as they ate together sitting on the bare ground, whereat the men and the women of Assisi wondered...

...asks William Drummond of Hawthornden in his Cypress Grove...

...Even children must not stray from it...

...The text for the Sunday sermon was taken from Matthew, never from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew...

...we had a picture of Saint Cecilia playing the organ among the falling roses of cherubs...

...A quaint biographer describes her thus: She was not only wonderfully beautiful and gifted with all the external graces of her sex, but accomplished in all the learning of the time...

...In fact, my sister Cynthia and I, but recently comparing notes, agree that the special brand of Puritanism to which we were subjected a quarter of a century ago was devoid of any beauty save the ethical and moral, and in proof of our contention recall with amusement how our adolescent delight in the triumphal glory of Saint Paul's life and words was once quenched by the caustic observation of our Sunday-school teacher that In view of his early sins he richly deserved the stonings and the shipwrecks, the cold and the nakedness, the perils in various parts so joyously chronicled in his second letter to Corinth...