e world has so loved the world as these. They are the beacons
of humanity in this matter of love, and how are they, shall we say, how
are they not fathers and mothers, whose spiritual children are all over the
world? Have they not born into the world with travail of soul, the souls of
men and women? These great Lovers of Humanity were not lacking in passion;
had they been they could not have moved the world; but their passion was
transmuted to the service of Humanity itself, for nothing else was great
or wide enough for such a love. Does anyone suppose that it was a mere
instinct of asceticism that drove St. Francis to make out of snow, cold
images of wife and child? Was it not rather the sudden resurgent desire of
the greatest of the saints for some more humanly warm affection, something
more individual, something that nestles more closely to the heart, than
this great service of Humanity? And in a savage irony he mocks his pain.
"There are thy children, there is thy wife," says St. Francis, and his cry
is not the answer of the spirit to a lustful temptation: it was the cry of
a lonely human heart for the human happiness of wife and children and home.
Aye, and I would claim that Our Lord Himself had this desire. For I cannot
doubt that in that glorious young manhood of His, so full of power and
sympathy and love, this agony of longing sometimes swept over Him. He whose
vitality and power were such that He hardly knew fatigue, who was so close
a friend, so much loved and sought by women, so tender to little children,
so young, so strong--is it not certain that He was indeed "tempted in all
things like as we are"? How could one so physically vital, so humanly and
divinely full of love, escape the conflict? That He conquered we know; that
He suffered we cannot doubt. All His perfect humanity speaks to us in that
lonely cry: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but
the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." Do not dream, those of you
who may have to struggle with your own nature, do not dream that Christ
has not been there with you, that He had nothing to feel or to suffer. How
would He have developed that spiritual power, how would He have become so
great a Lover of the world if He knew nothing of that side of life? But He,
and His greatest followers--St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine and St.
Theresa, and countless others who have followed them--learned to transmute
that great creative force, di