Weariness in Well-doing, from "Let us next look at the mischief" to the end (paras 972–996)

Let us next look at the mischief which it does.

It makes us leave off good works, or suspend spiritual exercises. It breeds in us a spurious kind of prudence. Because we feel a burden, we argue that we have taken too much upon ourselves. We have committed ourselves to God indiscreetly. We must draw back while we can. We must abridge our hours of prayer. We must strike off some of our little mortifications, because, though very little, they are exceedingly tiresome. We reason like men who think they need not keep Lent, because fasting weakens them and more or less tells upon their health, which of course it was meant to do within certain bounds. It is in our seasons of weariness that we come down the mountain a little, and put ourselves on a slightly lower level, and applaud our timely discretion. Alas! many slight descents come to make a considerable descent in time, and we, who began with determining to be saints,— where are we now?

When weariness does not cause us to leave things off, it leads us to do them badly and perfunctorily. We think our fatigue an adequate dispensation from vigilance and recollection,—as a man who is preaching a Lent does not trouble himself so much as usual about distractions in saying Office. Now, what if it should be true in the spiritual life that the not doing of a thing at all, provided it is not of obligation, is a less evil than the doing of it badly? I should not wonder if it were so. Indeed, I am inclined to suspect it is. At any rate, the ill doing of a good thing is a very great evil. For it not only renders unmeritorious those works by which we might greatly merit, but it makes them also perfect nests of venial sins. Moreover, such fraudulent doing of God's work has a special curse attached to it in Scripture, and is full of grave consequences to the soul.

Furthermore, weariness makes us impatient of God's company. Holiness is the companionship of God. It requires a renovation of the heart by grace, the infusion of heavenly instincts, a complete revolutionizing of our natural tastes, an unearthly appreciation of things, before we can taste this company of God and find it sweet. There must be a great change in us before he can be our resting-place. We need conversion. We require strengthening with that "perfect" or "principal" spirit of which David speaks in the fiftieth Psalm. Now, it is our spiritual tastes which are the first things for weariness to vitiate. God becomes dull to us. He is uninteresting. He is undemonstrative. He cannot be in the wrong, because he is God. But he is not positively attractive. How ever was it that we took such delight in prayer? That overpowering sweetness,—was it not simply a physical affair? That little dawn of love of suffering which began to lighten in our hearts,—was it not some foolish delusion? That delicious feeling of sinking lower and lower in the sense of our own unworthiness,—was it not all a mistake, or perhaps a dream? We not only cannot feel as we felt before, but we cannot believe that we ever felt so before. Converts sometimes do a blameless wrong to those who are still unconverted, because they cannot even in thought make themselves masters of their old position. So we cannot understand now the relation in which we once stood to God. On the contrary, though we dare not put it into words so plainly, his vicinity has become an annoyance to us. His very condescension frets us. We would be peevish in our prayers, if we dared. We almost repent we ever went so far with him. Is not this a misery? To be weary of God, to turn away with impatience from our eternal home, to have taken the bloom off this world and to be sick of the other! We tire of Him, never to be tired of whom is in itself our everlasting bliss! Oh, if we die in the attempt, we must push on. We cannot be quiet for an hour under the pressure of such unblessed fatigue as this.

But this leads further. It leads into that endless, hopeless business of seeking consolations and recreations outside of God, and, shortly afterward, far away from God. I sometimes think that to be near God but outside of him is to be at a greater distance than when we are far away from him, as we speak in the spiritual life. To wish to be comforted by any one but him is always a sad misfortune, and very often a positive sin. But to turn away from him, and seek in creatures what we profess not to have found adequately in him,—this is surely of all miseries the nearest to a state of sin. As I said, it is an endless and a hopeless business. There is no end to it, because it is a search which can never find, a chase which can never come up with its prey, a journey which has no termination. Like bees among distasteful flowers, we fly from one to another, hardly lighting, merely tasting; but the honey which we taste is drugged. It stimulates, or intoxicates, or makes us drowsy. Thus our taste becomes more and more vitiated. We are just as far as ever from finding what we sought, but we are immeasurably farther from what we have left. Strange to say, creature-consolation becomes more of a necessity to us the less we are satisfied by it. The more completely we despair of finding it, the more obstinately do we persist in seeking it. It is a kind of spiritual debauchery, which at last will leave the soul a perfect wreck, with all its powers of self-recovery gone, and with no possible hope except in a miracle of grace, the only likelihood of which is in that peculiar love of God which seems to be only the more patiently excited by the special unlovingness of our desertion of him. When we see a soul in such a state as this, we involuntarily hold our breath, as when we see a man upon the verge of some perilous height. What, then, should we think and feel if our own soul is consciously travelling that way?

This vain research of creature-consolation, like all failures, and more than most failures, makes us peevish with others. We wreak our disappointment upon them, as if they were to blame because they were creatures and could not do what God has reserved to himself alone the right of being able to do. Peevishness, as usual, brings with it the feeling of a bad conscience, and any thing like true prayer becomes almost impossible. In this state of perpetual irritation we soon become disgusted with ourselves, and this disgust is so little like an humble hatred of ourselves that it is incompatible with it. It is the very antipodes of humility. It borders closely upon despair, which, rightly considered, is nothing more than the extinguishing of humility. But we cannot live in such a state as this. It would be too unbearable. We must restore peace of some kind to our soul. We must sweeten our dispositions by some means or other. This leads us yet a step lower. We give in to natural repose. We seek compensation in bodily comforts for what we suffer in spiritual things. Self-indulgence gives us a kind of amiability,—spurious indeed, and perhaps only temporary. Yet it serves for the moment, and we are content. This is the end of our feeling of weariness. It has not so much torn open our spiritual life as unstitched it. But it has done this completely. The old original leaving of our bodily comforts was our first step toward union with God, and here we are arrived at them again. Who, then, will dare to leave unwatched, or passively to bear, this insidious feeling of being tired, which comes to such an evil end at last?

But, before we conclude, we ought to say something on the treatment of this weariness. This will not take us long, because so much has been implied already. We must remember, first of all, that our struggle against it must be equal, whatever the source of the weariness may be; because the danger is equal, whatever may be the excuse. We must not fret and toss under it, like a sick man who cannot sleep; but still we must not be passive. In the next place, we must watch with an exceeding jealousy against all worshipping of health. The encroachments of this idolatry are very insidious. No other angel of darkness simulates an angel of light so well. None can argue so well, or talk so reasonably, or so successfully feign the excellences of moderation and discretion. Nevertheless all spiritual writers agree that it is one of the most common, as well as most fatal, enemies of devotion. When it has established itself, weariness is its first-born. Health has of course to be considered, because it not only involves our external work, which represents our duties to others, but it also rules our interior life, which is our intercourse with God. On the whole, in cases of doubt, it is safer to decide against health than for it. But the safest thing of all is to follow the dispassionate judgment of others, provided that on the one hand our questions are put fairly and are not mere fishings for particular answers, and on the other that we have not chosen a guide who through good nature or indifference will always ratify the demands of our own softness. Yet this is hard to do; for, after all, the sick man is the only man in most cases who understands what he suffers, better than either priest or physician. Yet we know that if he made this his rule of action with his body he would soon be dead; and the case is the same with the treatment of his soul.

It is a custom, which many have practised with advantage when this weariness has been upon them, to bind themselves by vows for extremely short periods,—vows to get up at a certain hour in the morning, or to examine their conscience for a given time before going to bed, or to persevere in that thing, whatever it may be, which the feeling of weariness makes us imagine just then to be impossible. But this also is a rule which can only be followed under advice. We must also regulate our actions very carefully. Punctuality, always a thing of huge importance in the pursuit of perfection, is now indispensable. It has become a matter of life and death. We must be quiet and not precipitate, steady and not intermittent. We must deal firmly with ourselves, but it must be a very gentle firmness. We must consider our weariness either as a punishment to be endured reverently, or as a suffering to be borne in union with the Passion of our Blessed Lord. Above all, we must fix our energies courageously on it, and not allow ourselves to underrate its importance. What we have already said will surely persuade us to this most cogently. For we have seen that it first of all undoes old and long habits of good, secondly that it leads to a nausea of spiritual things, and thirdly that it pushes us to the distinct abandonment of the higher level we took at first, and to the taking of a lower one, which will most probably have also to be abandoned in its turn.

But it is a great trial, and I wish I could console you more efficaciously under it. It is a very real suffering. Nevertheless we must either push on, or give up the strife. As to this last, I do not say, Who will dare to do it? but rather, Whose love of God will let him do it? It is cruel to drag a man up and down a room after he has been overdosed with laudanum, while he is moaning with weariness and entreating to be allowed to lie down and sleep. Yet it is one of those cruelties which are part of the imperiousness of mercy. So we must let ourselves be shaken, and forced onward, and pricked with needles, if need be, and beaten as though we were flagging beasts of burden. I take it for granted that we are clear about our not doing as much for God as we very well might do. Let us hold on, tired as we are. We shall be less tired when we come to our second wind, if we may be allowed so to name that second fervor which is so often granted to the lukewarm, and which spiritual writers too much ignore. Life is short. The thing is—to be ready to die, and to be free from reproach at that dread hour; and is there one of us who would quite like to die, doing as little for God as we are doing now?