responsive fibre, so that I knew that I was not after all quite alien
to them. Could it be that there was that in me that made me, or could
make me, of their company? But how could I attain to their faith?
What could give back to a modern man, tortured by a thousand
perplexities of knowledge of which they never dreamed, the reality of
Christ which they possessed? And then the answer came--not suddenly,
but as a still small voice slowly growing louder, more positive, more
intense--_Live the Life_. Try to do some at least of the things that
Jesus did. Seek through experience what can never come through
ratiocination. _Be_ a Francis; then it may be thou shalt think like
him, and know Jesus as he knew Him. Live the life--there is no other
way.
Simple and far from novel as the answer seems yet it came to me with
the authority of a revelation. It illumined the entire circumference
of life. I could no longer hesitate: Jesus had never spoken from the
Syrian heavens more surely to the heart of Saul of Tarsus than He had
to me. And in the moment that He spoke, I also, like Saul, found all
my feelings altered, altered incredibly, miraculously, so that I
scarcely recognized myself. I no longer stood aloof from men, and
found pleasure in intellectual superiority; I was willing to "become a
fool for Christ's sake" if by any means I might save some. I issued a
card of invitation to the services of my Church with this motto of St.
Paul's upon it, which I now felt was mine. I had had for years
feelings of resentment towards one who I thought had wronged me; those
feelings were now dead. In another case I had been harsh and
unforgiving under great provocation; but when I met after a long
interval of time, the one who had injured me, my heart had only love
and pity for him. I sought out the drunkard and the harlot, and, when
I found them, all repulsion perished in the flow of infinite compassion
which I felt. I prayed with fallen women, sought them in their
miserable abodes, fought with them for their own souls, and O exquisite
moment!--I saw the soul awake in them, I saw in their tear-filled eyes
the look that Jesus saw in the eyes of Magdalene. On my last Sabbath
in London before leaving for America, one of these rescued girls, now
as pure of look and manner as those most sweetly nurtured, called at my
house to give my daughter a little present bought with the first money
she had earned by honest toil in many years. On the day we sailed
another said a special mass for us, and held the day sacred for prayer,
in the convent where her bruised life had been nursed back to moral
beauty. Love had triumphed in them, and I had brought them that love.
I had lived the life, I had tried to do something that Jesus did, and
behold Jesus had come back to me, and I knew His presence with me even
as Francis knew it when he washed the leper's sores, and Catherine when
she gathered to her bosom the murderer's guilty head, drew from him the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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