the smallest details of this world derive
infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order.
The thought of this order yields him a superior denomination of
happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare.
In social relations his serviceability is exemplary; he abounds in
impulses to help. His help is inward as well as outward, for his
sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected
faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common men place
it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement,
which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls
unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and
when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending
his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person.
Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from
the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social
intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a clean man for a
companion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity--these
are splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows them in the
completest possible measure.

But, as we saw, all these things together do not make saints
infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into
all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption,
self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability
to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry
ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be
even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man
would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally
only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards,
placing him in his environment, and estimating his total function.

Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must bear in mind that
it is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as
a vice to the individual, for in religious and theological matters he
probably absorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we must
not confound the essentials of saintliness, which are those general
passions of which I have spoken, with its accidents, which are the
special determinations of these passions at any historical moment. In
these determinations the saints will usually be loyal t