stoicism or a submissive patience but rather the quickening bread
and wine of an intense and high-keyed life. This is why the Saints,
be the provocation ever so great, never develop nerves, or
experience those melancholy and humiliating reactions which are the
natural ebb-tide of spiritual energies. This is why Saints can fast
and keep their temper sweet, can wear hair-shirts without
cultivating wry faces, can be passed by in the distribution of
honors without being soured, can pray all night without robbing the
day of its due meed of cheerfulness, can rise superior to frailties
and weaknesses without despising those who cannot, can be serious
without being testy and morose, can live for years in a cell or a
desert or a convent-close without perishing of ennui or being
devoured by restlessness, and can mingle with life, where all its
currents meet, without losing their heads or swerving a hairbreadth
from the straight line of a most uncommon and most impressive kind
of common sense.

Unless we keep before our eyes this mainspring of a Saint's life,
that life will be as enigmatical to us as it is to the world. Jesus
balked at no test of the love which He bore towards us: nay, He
devised tests passing all human imagining. Let Him make trial of our
love for Him! We are unhappy till He does! And with this daring
spirit in his heart every Saint enters upon a career of Romance in
its sweetest and highest form. And, we submit, to recur to the
literary style of the following biography, Romance is light-hearted,
light-stepping, cheerful, with the starlight on its face and in its
eyes.

James J. Daly, S.J.