Read Ebook: The Catholic World Vol. 06 October 1867 to March 1868. by Various

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Sayings Of The Fathers Of The Desert.

Abbot Alois said: "Unless a man say in his heart, 'Only God and I are in this world,' he will not find rest."

Abbot Hyperchius said: "He is really wise who teaches others by his deeds, and not by his words."

Abbot Moses said: "When the hand of the Lord slew the first-born of Egypt, there was no house in that land in which there lay not one dead."

A brother asked him: "What does this mean?"

The father answered: "If we look at our own sins, we will not see the sins of others. It is foolishness for a man having a corpse in his own house to leave it and go to weep over that of his neighbor."

Abbot Marcus said to Abbot Arsenius: "Why do you avoid us?"

He answered: "God knows I love you, but I cannot be with God and with men."

An Old Guide to Good Manners.

Wine, of course, ought to be taken in moderation, if it is taken at all; and it is well to mix it always with water, and not to drink it during the heat of the day, when the blood is already warm enough, but to wait until the cool of the evening. Even water, however, must be drunk sparingly, "so that the food may not be drowned, but ground down in order to digestion." What a disgusting picture the holy philosopher draws of those "miserable wretches whose life is nothing but revel, debauchery, bath, excess, idleness, drink!" "You may see some of them, half-drunk, staggering, with crowns round their necks like wine-jars, vomiting drink on one another in the name of good-fellowship; and others, full of the effects of their debauch, dirty, pale in the face, and still, above yesterday's bout, pouring another bout to last till next morning." Moreover, he entirely disapproves of importing wines. If one must drink, the product of one's native vines ought to suffice. "There are the fragrant Thasian wine, and the pleasant-breathing Lesbian, and a sweet Cretan wine, and sweet Syracusan wine, and Medusian and Egyptian wine, and the insular Naxian, the highly perfumed and flavored, another wine of the land of Italy. These are many names, but for the temperate drinker one wine suffices."

St. Clement concerns himself not only with what people ought to eat and drink, but with how they ought to eat and drink it. The chief thing necessary at table is temperance; the next is good manners. We remember to have had the pleasure and profit of reading once a modern hand-book of etiquette which abounded in the most amazing instructions for gentlemen and ladies at their meals. When you go to a dinner party, it said, do not pick your teeth much at table. Do not breathe hard over your beef. Don't snort while you are eating. Don't make a disgusting noise with your lips while taking in soup. And don't do twenty other horrible things which no gentleman or lady would any more have thought of doing than of standing up on their chairs or jumping upon the table. But St. Clement's directions for polite behavior show that worse things than these were in vogue in those beastly old days. He pours out words of indignation and contempt upon those 'gluttonous feasters who raise themselves from the couches on which the ancients used to recline at their banquets, stretch out their necks, and all but pitch their faces into the dishes "that they may catch the wandering steam by breathing in it." They grab every minute at the sauce; they besmear their hands with condiments; they cram themselves ravenously--in such a hurry that both jaws are stuffed out at once, the veins about the face are raised, and the perspiration runs all over as they pant and are tightened with their insatiable greed.

Suppose St. Clement had dined on board an American steamboat!

Then about drinking. In this, too, the old Alexandrians must have had some queer ways. "We are to drink without contortions of the face," says the saint, "not greedily grasping the cup, nor, before drinking, making the eyes roll with unseemly motion; nor from intemperance are we to drain the cup at a draught; nor besprinkle the chin, nor splash the garments while gulping down all the liquor at once--our face all but filling the bowl, and drowned in it. For the gurgling occasioned by the drink rushing with violence, and by its being drawn in with a great deal of breath, as if it were being poured into an earthenware vessel, while the throat makes a noise through the rapidity of ingurgitation, is a shameful and unseemly spectacle of intemperance. ... Do not haste to mischief, my friend. Your drink is not being taken from you. Be not eager to burst by draining it down with gaping throat." Sad to say, even the women were addicted to "revelling in luxurious riot," and "drawing hiccups like men." It used to be the fashion for ladies to drink out of alabaster vessels with narrow mouths--quite too narrow, Clement complains and, to get at the liquor, they had to throw their heads back so far as to bare their necks in a very unseemly manner to their male boon companions, and so pour the wine down their throats. This custom the saint strenuously condemns. It was adopted because the women were afraid of widening their mouths and so spoiling their beauty, if they rent their lips apart by stretching them on broad drinking-cups.

Music at feasts is an abomination to be carefully shunned, and a comic song is unworthy of a Christian gentleman, for "burlesque singing is the boon companion of drunkenness." If people occupy their time with "pipes and psalteries, and Egyptian clapping of hands," they become, by degrees, quite intractable, and even descend so low as to "beat on cymbals and drums, and make a noise on the instruments of delusion." We must be on our guard against whatever pleasure effeminates the soul by tickling the eye or the ear, and so must shun "the licentious and mischievous art of music," which disturbs the mind and corrupts the morals. Grave, temperate, and modest music may, indeed, be permitted, but "liquid" strains and "chromatic harmonies" are only for immodest revels. All which shows that in Clement's time there must have been a wickedness associated with music which that glorious art has now happily lost. The psalmist, it is true, exhorts us to praise the Lord in the sound of the trumpet, with the psaltery, the lyre, the timbrel and dance, the chords, and the organ, and the clashing cymbals; but the Alexandrian philosopher interprets all this passage symbolically. The trumpet to which King David refers is the blast which shall wake the dead on the last day. The lyre is the mouth struck by the spirit. The timbrel and dance are the church "meditating on the resurrection of the dead in the resounding skin." Our body is the organ; its nerves are the strings by which it has received harmonious tension; and the clashing cymbal is the tongue, resounding with the pulsations of the mouth. Reading St. Clement's instructions, with no light by which to interpret them, except the bare words of the text itself, it would seem to be but a solemn and joyless life which he inculcated a perpetual Puritan Sunday--than, which, probably, nothing more doleful was ever imagined of man. But we must remember that he lived in an age of ineffable vileness. Amusements, the most innocent in themselves, were the recognized cloaks or accompaniments of horrible deeds of licentiousness. The employment of certain kinds of music at banquets naturally suggested the criminal excesses with which such music was ordinarily associated. It was like meats offered to idols. Christians were bound to shun it, not because it was bad, but because it had been dedicated to bad uses. So was it also with burlesque singing. The songs were not only comical, but wicked. And it is in pretty much the same sense that we must understand the saint's curious chapter on laughing, in which he rebukes ludicrous remarks, buffoonery, and "waggery," and declares that "imitators of ludicrous sensations" ought to be driven out of good society. It is disgraceful to travesty speech, which is the most precious of human endowments, though pleasantry is allowable, provided laughter be kept within bounds. But we ought not to laugh in the presence of elderly persons or others to whom we owe respect, unless they indulge in pleasantries for our amusement; and women and children ought to be especially careful not to laugh too much, lest they slip into scandal. It is best to confine ourselves to a gentle smile, which our author describes as the seemly relaxation of the countenance in a harmonious manner, like the relaxation of a musical instrument. "But the discordant relaxation of the countenance in the case of women is called a giggle, and is meretricious laughter; in the case of men a guffaw, and is savage and insulting laughter." Of all such as this, it is needless to say, St. Clement disapproves.

Young men and young women ought never to be seen at banquets, and it is especially disgraceful for an unmarried woman to sit at a feast of men. When you go to a banquet, you ought to keep your eyes downcast, and recline upon your elbow without moving; or, if you sit, don't cross your legs or rest your chin upon your hand. It is vulgar not to bear one's self without support, and a sign of frivolousness to be perpetually shifting the position. Then, when the food is placed upon the table, don't grab at it. What if you are hungry? Curb your appetite: hold back your hand for a moment; take but little at a time; and leave off early, so as to appear, indifferent to what is set before you. If you are an old man, you may now and then, but very rarely, joke and play with the young; but let your jokes have some useful end in view. For instance, suppose you had a very bashful and silent son with you; it would be a most proper and notable good joke to say, "This son of mine is perpetually talking." That would not only be very funny, but it would be an indirect encomium upon the young man's modesty. Old men may talk at table, provided they talk sense. The young should speak briefly and with hesitation when they are called upon; but they ought to wait until they are called at least twice. Don't whistle at table. Don't chirrup. Don't call the waiter by blowing through your fingers. Don't spit often, or clear your throat, or blow your nose. If you have to sneeze or hiccup, don't startle your neighbors with a loud explosion, but do it gently. Don't scrape your teeth till the gums bleed, and don't scratch your ear!

They had a very silly and preposterous custom, those disgusting old pagans, of crowning themselves with flowers, and anointing their head and feet with perfumed ointments, especially on occasion of grand banquets and drinking bouts. St. Clement had no patience with this. Oils may be good, he says, for medicinal and certain other purposes. Flowers are not only pretty, but useful in their proper place. But what is the sense of sticking a chaplet of roses on the top of your head where you can neither see it nor smell it? It is pleasant in spring-time to while away the hours in the blooming meads, surrounded by the perfume of roses and violets and lilies; but no crowns of flowers for my head, if you please! They are too cold; they are too moist. The brain is naturally cold: to add coolness to it is plainly against nature. Then he enumerates the various kinds of ointments made from plants and flowers and other substances. Leave these, he says, to the physicians. To smear the body with them out of pure wanton luxury is disgraceful.

After supper, first thank God: then go to bed. No magnificent bedclothes, no gold-embroidered carpets, no rich purple sleeping-robes, or cloaks of fleece, or thick mantles, or couches softer than sleep itself; no silver-footed couches, savoring of ostentation; none of those lazy contrivances for producing sleep. Neither, on the other hand, is it necessary to imitate Ulysses, who rectified the unevenness of his couch with a stone; or Diomede, who reposed stretched on a wild bull's hide; or Jacob, who slept on the ground with a stone for his pillow. St. Clement was not too severe in his instructions. He taught moderation to all men, leaving the difficulties of asceticism to the few who were called to encounter them. He never forbade comfort, but only rebuked luxury. Our beds, he says, ought to be simple and frugal, but they ought to keep us cool in summer and warm in winter. Those abominable inventions called feather-beds, which let the body "fall down as into a yawning hollow," he stigmatizes with deserved contempt. "For they are not convenient for sleepers turning in them, on account of the bed rising into a hill on either side of the body. Nor are they suitable for the digestion of the food, but rather for burning it up, and so destroying the nutriment." Who that has groaned through a restless night on one of those vile things--we were going to say, tossed through the night, but one can't toss in a feather-bed--has been half-suffocated by the stuffy smell of the feathers, and oppressed in his dreams by the surging hills of bedding which threaten to engulf him on either hand like the billows of some horrible sea, will not thank good, sensible St. Clement for setting his face against them, and wonder how they have survived to the present time? The Alexandrian philosopher knew how to make a good bed as well as the most fashionable of modern upholsterers. It ought to be moderately soft, yet not receive too readily the impress of the body. It ought to be smooth and level, so that one can turn over easily. But the reason he gives for this direction is rather comical: the bed is a sort of nocturnal gymnasium, on which the sleeper may digest his food by frequent rollings and tumblings in his dreams.

The couch ought not to be elaborately carved, and the feet of it ought to be smooth and plain. The reason for this is not only the avoidance of luxury; but "elaborate turnings form occasionally paths for creeping things, which twine themselves about the mouldings and do not slip off."

Our saintly censor devotes an indignant chapter to "the stones which silly women wear fastened to chains and set in necklaces;" and he compares the eagerness with which they rush after glittering jewelry to the senseless attraction which draws children to a blazing fire. He quotes from Aristophanes a whole catalogue of female ornaments:

There were particular fashions in jewelry and ornament toward which the saint had a special dislike. Bracelets in the form of a serpent, he calls the manifest badges of the evil one. Golden chains and necklaces are nothing better than fetters. Earrings and ear-drops he forbids as contrary to nature, and he beseeches his female hearers not to have their ears pierced. If you pierce your ears, he says, why not have rings in your noses also? A signet-ring may be worn on the finger, because it is useful for sealing; but no good Christian ought to wear rings for mere ornament. Yet he makes one curious exception to this rule. If a woman have, unfortunately, a dissipated husband, she may adorn herself as much as she can, for the purpose of keeping him at home.

The daily occupations of women must not be too sedentary, yet neither, on the other hand, ought the gentler sex to be "encouraged in wrestling or running!" Instead of dawdling about the shops of the silk merchant, the goldsmith, and the perfumer, or riding aimlessly about town in litters, just to be admired, the true lady will employ herself in spinning and weaving, and, if necessary, will superintend the cooking. She must not be above turning the mill, or getting her husband a good dinner. She must shake up the beds, reach drink to her husband when he is thirsty, set the table as neatly as possible, and when anything is wanted from the store, let her go for it and fetch it home herself. We fear it is not the fashion, even yet, to follow St. Clement's advice. She ought to keep her face clean, and her glances cast down, and to beware of languishing looks, and "ogling, which is to wink with the eyes," and of a mincing gait.

Ran away to Sea.

A treacherous spirit came up from the sea, And passing inland found a boy where he Lay underneath the green roof of a tree, In the golden summer weather.

And to the boy it whispered soft and low-- Come! let us leave this weary land, and go Over the seas where the free breezes blow, In the golden summer weather.

I know green isles in far-off sunny seas, Where grow great cocoa-palms and orange-trees, And spicy odors perfume every breeze, In the golden summer weather.

There, underneath the ever-glowing skies, Gay parrokeets and birds of paradise, Make bright the woods with plumes of gorgeous dyes, In the golden summer weather.

And in that land a happy people stay: No hateful books perplex them night nor day; No cares of business fret their lives away, In the golden summer weather.

But all day long they wander where they please, Plucking delicious fruits, that on the trees Hang all the year and never know decrease, In the golden summer weather.

Or over flower-enamelled vale and slope They chase the silv'ry-footed antelope; Or with the pard in manly conflict cope In the golden summer weather.

And in those islands troops of maidens are, Whose lovely shapes no foolish fashions mar; Eyes black as Night, and brighter than her stars In the golden summer weather.

Earth hath no maidens like them otherwhere; With teeth like pearls and wreaths of jetty hair, And lips more sweet than tinted syrups are, In the golden summer weather.

Ah! what a life it were to live with them! 'Twould pass by sweetly as a happy dream: The years like days, the days like minutes seem, In the golden summer weather.

Come! let us go! the wind blows fair and free; The clouds sail seaward, and to-morrow we May see the billows dancing on the sea, In the golden summer weather.

The heavens were bright, the earth was fair to see, A thousand birds sang round the boy, but he Heard nothing but that spirit from the sea, In the golden summer weather.

All night, as sleepless on his bed he lay, He seemed to hear that treacherous spirit say, Come, let us seek those islands far away, In the golden summer weather.

So ere the morning in the east grew red, He stole adown the stairs with barefoot tread, Unbarred the door with trembling hands, and fled In the golden summer weather.

In the last hour of night the city slept; Upon his beat the drowsy watchman stept; When like a thief along the streets he crept, In the golden summer weather.

And when the sun brought in the busy day, His father's home afar behind him lay, And he stood 'mongst the sailors on the quay, In the golden summer weather.

Like sleeping swans, with white wings folded, ride The great ships at their moorings, side by side; Moving but with the pulses of the tide, In the golden summer weather.

And one is slowly ruffling out her wings For flight, as seaward round her bowsprit swings; Whilst at the capstan-bars the sailor sings In the golden summer weather.

He is aboard. The wind blows fresh abeam: The ship drifts slowly seaward with the stream; And soon the land fades from him like a dream, In the golden summer weather.

And if he found those islands far away, Or those fair maidens, there is none can say: For ship or boy returned not since that day, In the golden summer weather.

E. YOUNG.

A Royal Nun.

The little girl, thus left motherless at the age of five years, was consigned to the care of her great-aunt, the abbess of Beaumont les Tours, about sixty leagues from Paris. All the religious assembled to receive the little princess on the day of her arrival, and everything was done to please her. After showing her all the interior of the convent, she was asked where she would like to go. "Oh! take me," cried she, "where there is the most noise." Poor child! she was destined to find her after-life a little too noisy. She next chose to go into the choir while the nuns chanted compline; but before the end of the first psalm whispered to her attendant, "I have had enough." In these peaceful walls her childhood passed away. She grew fond of the convent, and gave every mark of external piety. She was wont to declare afterward that the grace of God had made little interior progress in her heart; nevertheless, a solid foundation of good instruction had been laid, which was hereafter to bear fruit. At twelve years of age she made her first communion, and then returned to Paris to finish her education in a convent there, "to prepare her for the world."

"Sire: It is not at the moment when I am about to have the happiness of consecrating myself to God that I could forget for the first time what I owe to my king. I have for long past felt myself called to the religious state, and I have come to Turin, where the kindness and friendship of the Queen of Sardinia has given me the means to execute my design--a design which has been well examined and reflected upon; but, before its final accomplishment, I supplicate your majesty to deign to give your consent to it. I ask it with the more confidence because I am certain it will not be refused, and that your piety, sire, will cause you to find consolation in seeing a princess of your blood invested with the livery of Jesus Christ. May God, whose infinite mercy I have so wonderfully experienced, hear the prayers I shall constantly make for the reestablishment of the altar and the throne in my unfortunate country. They will be as earnest as the efforts of my relatives for the same object. The desire for the personal happiness of your majesty is equally in my heart. I implore him to be persuaded of it. I am, etc.,

"Louise Ad?laide De Bourbon Cond?. "Turin, November, 1795."

"Trois g?n?rations vont ensemble ? la gloire."

The king wrote back to the royal postulant:

"You have deeply reflected, my dear cousin, on the step which you have taken. Your father has given his consent. I give mine also, or rather, I give you up to Providence, who requires this sacrifice from me. I will not conceal from you that it is a great one, and it is with deep regret that I give up the hope of seeing you by your virtues become one day an example to my court, and an edification to all my subjects. I have but one consolation, and it is that of thinking that, while the courage and talents of your nearest relations are aiding me to recover the throne of St. Louis, your prayers will draw down the benedictions of the Most High on my cause, and afterward on all my reign. I recommend it to you, and I pray you, my dear cousin, to be well persuaded of my friendship for you.

"Louis."

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