Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/19

Rh attenuated under the attentions of our modern Cheynes and Sayces. The God of Epicurus or of Victor Hugo is coming to the front in the vast modern Pantheon.

In individual actions also the psychological method of the modern historian, biographer, and novelist tends to reduce the operation of Divine grace to a minimum. St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Ignatius have been repeatedly exhumed from the religious catacomb and dissected, and their conversions have been reduced to the sphere of natural law. Auscultory hallucinations are now preferred to voices floating in the air, crying ‘Tolle, Lege’; dreams are more congenial than visions, and exalted ideas in a neurotic or hysterical temperament are calmly substituted, even by spiritual writers, for ‘voices speaking in the heart.’ ‘Vocations’ to a spiritual life are usually admitted to be susceptible of a satisfactory ‘human’ explanation; the providential agency is wisely presumed to have merely presided over the more immediate and tangible agencies.

But in treating of modern vocations there are few cases in which even the psychological method will find matter of interest and romance. Monasteries and nunneries are no longer refuges of converted sinners, of disgusted roués, of maimed knights-errant, and betrayed women. One does not need the pen of a Huysman to describe the souls en route to the higher life of the religious world. The sources from which