How Christ guides and inspires the Saints
2 min • Digitized on August 18, 2021
From The Lives of the Saints of Egypt and Principal European Saints, page 177
By Rev. Alban Butler
If we look into the lives of all the saints, we shall find that it was by a spirit and gift of prayer that the Holy Ghost formed in their hearts the most perfect sentiments of all virtues.
It is this which enlightens the understanding, and infuses a spiritual knowledge and a heavenly wisdom which is incomparably more excellent than that in which philosophers pride themselves.
The same purifies the affections, sanctifies the soul, adorns it with virtues, and enriches it with every gift of heaven.
Christ, who is the eternal wisdom, came down among us on earth to teach us more perfectly this heavenly language, and he alone is our master in it. He vouchsafed also to be our model.
In the first moment in which his holy soul began to exist, it exerted all its powers in contemplating and adoring the divine Trinity, and employed his affections in the most ardent acts of praise, love, thanksgiving, oblation, and the like.
His whole mortal life was an uninterrupted prayer; more freely to apply himself to this exercise, and to set us an example, he often retired into mountains and deserts, and spent whole nights in prayer; and to this employment he consecrated his last breath upon the cross.
By him the saints were inspired to conceive an infinite esteem for holy prayer, and such a wonderful assiduity and ardour in this exercise, that many renounced altogether the commerce of men for only that of God and his angels; and the rest learned the art of conversing secretly with heaven even amid their exterior employments, which they only undertook for God.
Holy pastors have always made retirement and a life of prayer their apprenticeship or preparation for the ministry, and afterward, amid its functions, were still men of prayer in them, having God always present to their mind, and setting apart intervals in the day, and a considerable part of the nights, to apply themselves with their whole attention to this exercise, in the silence of all creatures.
1 total