Gently
indeed should we speak even of the dreams of some self-imagined
"Bride of Christ," when we picture to ourselves the bitter agonies
which must have been endured ere a human soul could develop so
fantastically diseased a growth. "She was only a hysterical nun."
Well, and what more tragical object, to those who will look patiently
and lovingly at human nature, than a hysterical nun? She may have
been driven into a convent by some disappointment in love. And has
not disappointed affection been confessed, in all climes and ages, to
enshroud its victim ever after in a sanctuary of reverent pity? If
sorrow "broke her brains," as well as broke her heart, shall we do
aught but love her the more for her capacity of love? Or she may
have entered the convent, as thousands did, in girlish simplicity, to
escape from a world she had not tried, before she had discovered that
the world could give her something which the convent could not. What
more tragical than her discovery in herself of a capacity for love
which could never be satisfied within that prison? And when that
capacity began to vindicate itself in strange forms of disease,
seemingly to her supernatural, often agonising, often degrading, and
at the same time (strange contradiction) mixed itself up with her
noblest thoughts, to ennoble them still more, and inspire her not
only with a desire of physical self-torture, which would seem holy
both in her own eyes and her priest's, but with a love for all that
is fair and lofty, for self-devotion and self-sacrifice--shall we
blame her--shall we even smile at her if, after the dreadful
question: "Is this the possession of a demon?" had alternated with,
"Is this the inspiration of a god?" she settled down, as the only
escape from madness and suicide, into the latter thought and believed
that she found in the ideal and perfect manhood of One whom she was
told to revere and love as a God, and who had sacrificed His own life
for her, a substitute for that merely human affection from which she
was for ever debarred? Why blame her for not numbering that which
was wanting, or making straight that which was crooked? Let God
judge her, not we: and the fit critics of her conduct are not the
easy gentlemanlike scholars, like Mr. Vaughan's Athertons and Gowers,
discussing the "aberrations of fanaticism" over wine and walnuts; or
the gay girl, Kate; hardly even the happy mother, Mrs. Atherton; but
those whose hairs are gray wit