Saint John Berchmans

This little book is an attempt at a study and interpretation of a lovable young saint, whose tercentenary this year will, it is to be hoped, increase special devotion to him. Saint John Berchmans is recommended as a patron and helper in solving the difficult problem of maintaining agreeable and efficient relations with the practical life of the hour without cooling in faith and reverence, of making the love of God the dominant motive of conduct without sacrificing any of the courtesies or failing in human sympathies. I have depended for most of the facts in my sketch upon the excellent and exhaustive biography of the Saint by the Rev. Francis Goldie, S.J. The English Jesuit drew a large part of his material from official processes and enquiries, and from the contemporary Life by Father Cepari, S.J., the Saint's superior and confessor. As far as facts go, I can, to use a quaint phraseJ be tracked in their snow. In the interpretation of facts I have sometimes allowed myself latitude. IN the following brief sketch of the life of Saint John Berchmans there will not be room for an elaborate description of the rich historical setting which Europe, and especially the Brabant and the Rome of that time afforded. To tell the truth, there is not much call for it. The interest of John's life lay in its contact with the big affairs of another world than this. The Saint touched human life, not at its points of earthly splendor and importance, but at its less obtrusive and less impressive surfaces of homely and domestic rounds of routine. The single hour of glorious life that is worth an age without a name, never came to John. Like most of us he was forced by circumstances into a pack-horse gait. His days, like ours, were much of a kind, singularly beggarly in their opportunities for spectacular heroism. And yet he achieved heroism. With the scanty materials supplied by the stern realism of an ordinary every-day life, he succeeded in kindling a splendor which has burnt its way brightly through the mists of time, and, after three centuries, remains a fixed and steady glow in the night that has fallen upon the deeds of by-gone generations.