Part 5

“Those who have attained to Saint Teresa’s Prayer of Quiet tell us that it is a new world into which they consciously penetrate--a world with objects, sounds and all the rest--but that these are almost incommunicable even to the brain of the percipient. No adequate image or analogy can be found for those intentions; still less can they be expressed in words. I suppose that this is an illustration of the truth that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us....

“Well, gentlemen, I was aware during those seconds that I was in that state that I had, as it were, slipped through the crust of the world of sense and even of intellectual thought. What I perceived of a person watching me was not on this plane at all. It was not One who in any sense had a human existence, who had ever had one, or ever would. It did not in the least resemble, therefore, an apparition of the dead. But the perception of this was gradual, as also of the nature of the visitation, of which I shall speak in a moment. At first there was only the act of the entrance into my neighborhood, as of one entering a room; then gradually, although with great speed, I perceived the nature of the visitation and the character of the visitant.

“And again that sound, if I may call it so, was not that of a material object; it was not a cry or a word or a movement. Yet it was in some way the expression of a personality. Shall we say”--he stopped again--“well, do you know what the sound of a flame is? There is not exactly a vibration--not a note--not a roar nor a--nor anything. Well, I do not think I can express it more clearly than by saying that that is the nearest analogy I can name in the world of sense. It was as the note of a vivid and intense personality, and it continued during that period and died noiselessly at the end like a sudden singing in the ears.

“Now, I have taken the sense of hearing as the one which best expresses my experience; but it was not really hearing any more than seeing or tasting or feeling. It seemed to me that if it was true, as scientists tell us, that we have but one common sense expressing itself in five ways, that common sense was indirectly affected in this intense and piercing way only beneath its own plane, if I may say so.

“And one thing more. Although this presence seemed to bring on me a kind of paralysis, so that I did not move or even objectively think, yet beneath, my soul was aware of a repulsion and a hatred that I am entirely unable to describe. As God is Absolute Goodness and Love, so this presence affected me with precisely the opposite instinct.... There, I must leave it at that. I must just ask you to take my word for it that there was present to me during those few seconds a kind of distilled quintessence of all that is not God, under the aspect of a person, and of a person, as I have said, quite apart from human existence.”

The priest’s quiet little voice, speaking now even lower than when he began, yet perfectly articulate and unmoved, ceased, and I leaned back in my chair, drawing a long breath. Again I will speak only for myself, and say that he had seemed to be putting into words for the first time in my experience something which I had never undergone and which yet I recognized as simply true. I doubted it no more than if he had described a walk he had taken in Rome.

He looked round at the motionless faces; then he lifted one knee on to the other and began to nurse it.

“Well, gentlemen, it would be about ten minutes, I suppose, before I stood up. I looked over my shoulder before that, yet knowing I should see nothing; and, indeed, there was nothing to see but the old rock and the sky and the silhouette of the grasses against it. I continued to sit there, because I felt too tired to move. It was a kind of complete languor that took possession of me. I had no actual fear now; I knew that the thing, whatever it was, had withdrawn itself--it had whisked, if I may say so, out of my range as swift as a lizard who knows himself observed. I knew perfectly well that it would approach more cautiously if it should ever approach me again, but that for the present I need not fear.

“There was another curious detail, too. I had--and have now--no reflex horror when I think of it. You see that it had not taken place before my senses; not even, indeed, before my intellect or my conscious powers. It was completely in the transcendent sphere, and, therefore--at least I can only suppose that this is the reason--therefore when the door was shut and I was returned to my human existence, I had no associations or even direct memory of the horror. I knew that it had taken place, but my objective imagination was not tarnished by it. Later it was different; but I shall come to that presently. There was the languor, taking its rise, I suppose, in the very essence of my being where I had experienced and resisted the assault, and this languor communicated itself to my mind, just as weariness of mind communicates itself to the body. Then, after a little rest, I got up and went home. It was curious also that after dining the languor had risen even higher; I felt intolerably tired, and slept dreamlessly in my chair the whole afternoon.

“That, then, gentlemen, was the beginning of my visitation. It was only the beginning, and to some degree differed from its continuation. It seemed to me later when I looked back upon it that the personality had changed its assault somewhat, that at first it had rushed upon me unthinking, impelled by its own passion, and that afterward it laid siege with skill and deliberation.... But are you sure, gentlemen, that I am not boring you with all this?”

Monsignor answered for us. I noticed that he cleared his throat slightly before speaking.

“No, no, Father.... Please go on.”

The old priest paused a moment as if to recollect himself, then still nursing his knee, he began again in his quiet little voice.

“I do not know exactly how long it was before I began to understand my danger; but I think the thought first occurred to me one day during my meditation. Soon after my ordination I had read Mme. Guyon’s book on prayer in order to understand exactly what it was that had been condemned in Quietism, and I suppose it had affected me to some extent. It is indeed a very subtle book and extremely beautiful. At any rate, I had long been accustomed to close my meditation with what she calls the ‘awful silence’ in the Presence of God. I do not think that, normally speaking, there is any harm in this; on the contrary, for active-minded people in danger of intellectualism I think it a very useful exercise. Well, it was one day I should think within a fortnight of my experience by the rock that I first understood that for me there was danger. I was in my little chapel before the Blessed Sacrament. Everything was quite quiet; the men were at work and the women in their houses; it was a hot, sunny morning, I remember, breathlessly still. I had finished my formal meditation and was sitting back in my chair.

“You all know, gentlemen, of course, the way in which one can approach the Silence before God. Of course, the simplest can do it if they will take pains.”

Monsignor Maxwell interrupted, still in that slightly strained voice in which he had spoken just now.

“Please describe it,” he said.

The priest looked up deprecatingly.

“Well, then, first I had withdrawn myself from the world of sense. That takes, as you know, sometimes several minutes; it is necessary to sink down in thought in such a manner that sounds no longer distract the attention, even though they may be heard and even considered and reflected upon. Then the second step is to leave behind all intellectual considerations and images, and that, too, sometimes is troublesome, especially if the mind is naturally active. Well, this day I found an extraordinary ease in both the acts.”

Father Brent leaned forward.

“May I interrupt, Father? But I am not sure that I understand.”

The old man pursed his lips. Then he glanced up at the rest of us almost apologetically.

“Well, it is this, my dear Father.... How can I put it?... It is the introversion of the soul. Instead of considering this object or that, either by looking upon it or reflecting upon it, the soul turns inward. There are the two distinct planes on which many men, especially those who pay little or no attention to the soul, live continually. Either they continually seek distractions--they cannot be devout except in company or before an image--or else--as, indeed, many do who have even the gift of recollection--they dwell entirely upon considerations and mental images. Now the true introversion is beneath all this. The soul sinks, turning inward upon itself ... there are no actual considerations at all; these become in their turn as much distractions to the energy of the soul as external objects to the energy of the mind.... Is that clearer, my dear Father?”

It was all said with a kind of patient and apologetic simplicity. Father Brent nodded pensively two or three times, and dropped his chin again upon his hand. The old priest went on.

“Well, gentlemen, as I said just now, on this morning I came into the Silence without an effort. First the sensible world dropped away; I heard a woman open and shut her door fifty yards away down the street, but it was no more than a sound. Then almost immediately the world of images and considerations went past me and vanished, and I found myself in perfect stillness.

“For an instant it seemed to me that all was well. There was that strange tranquillity all about me.... I cannot put it into words except by saying, as all do who practise that method, that it is a living tranquillity full of a very vital energy. This is not, of course, that to which contemplatives penetrate; St. John of the Cross makes that very plain; it is no more than that in which we ought always to live. It is that Kingdom of God within of which our Blessed Lord tells us, but it is not the Palace itself.... However, as I have said, when one has but learned the way there--and the difficulty of doing so lies only in its extreme and singular simplicity--when one has learned the way there it is full of pleasure and consolation.

“I remained there, as my manner was, drawing a long breath or two, as one is obliged to do. I do not know why--and at first all seemed well. There was that peace about me which may be described under the image of any one of the five senses. I prefer to speak of it now as under the image of light--a very radiant, mellow light full of warmth and sweetness. There was, too, just at first, that sense of profound abasement and adoration which is so familiar.... As I said, gentlemen, I do not, of course, for an instant pretend to the gift of pure contemplation; that is something far beyond.

“Then, all in an instant that sense of adoration vanished.

“Now, it was not that I had risen back again to meditation; there were no images before my attention, no reflections of any formulated kind. It was still the pure perception, and yet all sense of adoration and of God’s majesty was gone. The light and the peace were there still, but--but not God....

“Then I perceived, if I may say so, that something was on the point of disclosure. It was as if something was about to manifest itself. I perceived that the light was not as it had been. It was like that strange, vivid sunlight that we see sometimes when a heavy cloud is overhead. That is the only way in which I can express it. It is for that reason that I called it _light_ rather than sound or touch. For an instant still I hesitated. The thought of what had happened to me by the rock never came to my mind, and with inconceivable swiftness the process passed on. To use an auditory metaphor for a moment it was like the change of an orchestra. The minor note steals in; a light passes over the character of the sound, and simultaneously the volume increases, the chords expand, tearing the heart with them, and the listener perceives that a moment later the climax will break in thunder.”

He had raised his voice a little by now; his eyes glanced this way and that, though still without a trace of self-consciousness. Then again his voice dropped.

“Well, gentlemen, before that final moment came I had remembered; the vision of the rock and the chatter of the stream was before me sharp as a landscape under lightning.... I do not know what I did, but I was aware of making a kind of terrified effort. My soul sprang up as a diver who chokes under water, and in an instant the whole thing was gone. Then I became aware that my eyes were open and that I was standing up. I was still terrified by the suddenness of the experience, and stood there, saying something aloud to Our Lord in the Tabernacle. Then I heard the door open behind me.

“‘Did you cry out, Father?’ said Bridget. ‘Why, Mother of Mercy----’

“I felt myself beginning to sway on my feet. Well, gentlemen, I need not trouble you with all that. The truth was that Bridget, who was washing up my breakfast things in the kitchen, heard me cry out. She told me afterward that when she saw my face she thought that I was dying.... I sat down a little then, and she fetched me something, and presently I was able to walk out.

“Well, gentlemen, that is enough for this evening.”

He stopped abruptly.

We got up and went to night-prayers.

II

“Well, so far,” began Father Girdlestone on the following evening--“so far you see two things had happened to me. First there seems to have been a kind of unpremeditated assault that affected my body, mind, and soul. That was the attack by the rock. Then he began to lay siege more deliberately, and attacked me in my meditation, in what I may call the innermost chamber, that anteroom of the transcendent world. Now, I have to tell you of his next assault.”

There was a rustle of expectation as we settled ourselves to listen. I had found on questioning the others in the morning that they were in the same attitude as myself, impressed, but not convinced--indeed, strangely impressed by the extreme subtlety of the experience related to us. Yet there had been no proof, no tangible evidence, such as we are accustomed to demand, that the incidents had been anything more than subjective. At the same time there had been something remarkable in the priest’s assurance as well as in the precise particularity of his narrative. It seemed now, however, from what he said, that perhaps we were to have more materialistic elements presented to us.

“The result, of course,” continued Father Girdlestone, “of the attack upon my soul was that I became terrified at the thought of any further act of introversion. It seemed to me on reflection that I had probably overstrained my faculties a little and that I had better be more distinctly meditative in devotion.

“I fetched down, therefore, from my shelves a copy of the ‘Spiritual Exercises,’ and set to work. I began with a carefully objective act of the Presence of God, dwelling chiefly upon the Blessed Sacrament, and then pursued carefully the lines laid down. Two or three times every day, I should say, I was tempted to fall back upon the Prayer of Quiet, and each time I resisted it. It was a kind of frightened fascination that I felt for it. It was as if it had been a cupboard where something terrible lurked in silence and darkness, ready to tear me if I opened the door. Of course I should have opened it boldly; any priest of experience would have told me so at once; but I did not fully understand what was wrong. The result was as you shall hear.

“All went well for several days. I meditated with care, making the prescribed considerations--the preludes, the pictures, and all the rest, observing to go straight from the intellectual act to the voluntary. I became soothed and content again. Then, without any warning, the new assault was made. It came about in this fashion:

“I was meditating upon the Particular Judgment, and had formed the picture as vividly as possible of my soul before the Judge. I saw the wounds and the stains on one side, the ineffably piercing grace and holiness on the other. I saw the reproach in the Judge’s face. I seized my soul by the neck, as it were, and crushed it down in humility and penitence. And then suddenly it seemed to me that my hold relaxed, and all faded. Now this assault came to me in intellectual form, yet I cannot remember the arguments. It began, if I may say so, as a blot upon the subject of my meditation, effacing the image of my Judge and of myself, and it spread with inconceivable swiftness over the whole of my faith....”

The priest paused, smiling steadily at the fire.

“How shall I put it?” he said.... “Well, in a word, it was intellectual doubt of the whole thing. A kind of cloud of infidelity seemed to envelop me. I beat against it, but it passed on, thick and black. There seemed to me no Person behind it; it was the very negation of Personality that surrounded me. ‘After all,’ it seemed to say to me, yet without words or intellect, you understand--‘after all, this is a pretty picture, but where is the proof? What shadow of a proof is there that the whole thing is not a dream? If there were objective proof, how could any man doubt? If there is not objective proof, what reason have you to trust in religion at all--far more, to sacrifice your life to it?... Death, too, what is that but the resolving of the elements that issue in what you call the soul? And when the elements resolve the soul disperses.’... And so on, and so on. You know it, gentlemen.... It suggested horrible things against Our Lord when I turned to the Tabernacle. And then, on a sudden, as it had done in the deeper plane, it spread upward to an intolerable climax. I began to see myself as a dying spark in a burning-out world, and there was no escape, for there was nothing but empty space about me--no God, no heaven, not even a devil to hint at life in some form at least after death. I looked during those seconds into the gulf of annihilation.... I cried out in my heart that I would sooner live in hell than die there ... and the vision, if I may call it so, of ultimate eternal blackness cleared every instant before my intellect until it was imminent upon me as a demonstrable certainty; and then, once more, before that loomed out as actually intellectually certain, I struggled and stood up, saying something aloud, the name of God, I think, while the sweat poured down my face.

“It passed then--at least, in its acuteness. There was the little domed tabernacle before me with its white curtains, and the altar-cards and the gilt candlesticks, and a woman went past the window in clogs, and I heard a bird twitter beneath the eaves, and it was all, for a while, natural and peaceful again.”

The priest stopped.

“Now, gentlemen,” he said very slowly, “intellectual difficulties have occurred to most people, I imagine. How should it not be so? If religion were small enough for our intellects it could not be great enough for our soul’s requirements. But this was not just that fleeting transient obscurity that we call intellectual difficulty. It was to ordinary darkness what substance is to imagination, what a visible concrete scene is to a fancy, what life is to dreaming. I know I cannot express what I mean; but I want you to take it on my word that this visitation in the realm of the intellect was a solid blackness, compared with which all other difficulties that I have ever heard of or experienced are as a mere lowering of intellectual lights. It was paralleled only by my experience in introversion. That, too, had not been an emotional withdrawal, or a spiritual dryness, as we commonly use those words. It had been a solid, unutterably heavy burden--real beyond description.... And further, I want you to consider my dilemma. I had been routed in my soul and dared not take refuge there; I had been overwhelmed, too, in my intellect, and even when the first misery had passed it seemed to me that the arguments against the Faith were stronger than those for it. I did not dare to pit one against the other. A heavy deposit had been left upon my understanding. I did not dare to sit down and argue; I did not dare to run for refuge to the Silence of God. I was driven out into the sole thing that was left--the world of sense.”

Again he stopped, still with that tranquil smile. I hardly understood him, though I think I saw very dimly what he had called his dilemma. Yet I did not understand what he meant by the “world of sense.”

After a little pause he went on.

“To the world of sense,” he repeated. “It seemed to me now that this was all that was left. I determined then and there to drop my meditation and to confine myself to mass, office and rosary. I would say the words with my lips, quickly and steadily, keeping my mind fixed upon them rather than upon their meaning, and I would trust that presently the clouds would pass.

“Well, gentlemen, for about two months I continued this. The misery I suffered is simply indescribable. You can imagine all the suggestions I made to myself when I was off my guard. I told myself that I was a coward and a sham--that I had lost my faith and that I continued to act as a priest! What was especially hard to bear was the devotion of my parishioners. As I knelt in front saying the rosary and they responded I could hear the thrill of conviction in every word they uttered. Oh, those Irish! The things they said to me sometimes were like swords for pain ... the masses they asked me to say...!

“I went to a priest at a distance once or twice and told him the bare outline--not as I have told it to you. He laughed at me, kindly, of course. He told me that it was the effect of loneliness, while I knew that at the best it was the work of One who bore me continual company now and who was stronger than I. He told me that all young priests had to win the victory in some form or other; that every priest thought his own case the most desperate.... Yet I knew from every word that he said that he did not understand, and that I could never make him understand. Yet, somehow, I set my teeth; I told God that I was willing to bear this dereliction for as long as He willed--so paradoxical and mysterious is the gift of Faith--if He would but save my soul, and at last, in a kind of defiance, I began to look once more at my designs for the church I was to build.

“You see, gentlemen, what I meant by taking refuge in the world of sense. I deliberately contemplated never daring to face God again interiorly, or even my own soul. I would do my duty as a priest; I would say my mass and office; I would preach strictly what the Church enjoined; I would live and die like that, with my teeth set. Better God beaten and denied than all the world beside in prosperity!”

For the first time in the whole of his narrative Father Girdlestone’s voice trembled a little. He passed his thin old hand over his mouth once or twice, shifted his position and began again.

“It was on the first of October that I took down my plans again. I had not looked at them for two months; I had not the heart to do so.

“Now let me describe to you exactly the room in which I sat, and the other necessary circumstances.

“In the centre of my room stood my table, with two windows on my left, the fire in front, and the door behind me to the right. The windows were hung with serge curtains. I had no carpet, but a little mat only beneath my table and another before the fire.

“It was in the beginning of October--to be accurate, the third of the month--that this thing happened that I am about to tell you.

“I awoke early that morning, said my mass as usual, with attention and care, but no sensible devotion, and after my thanksgiving sat down to breakfast. It was then that I first had any uneasiness.