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Show PROTESTANT ADMIRATION FOR SAINTS. Xobody who makes any pretense of being abreast of the thjies can have failed to notice the changed attitude of Protestants toAvards principles, practices, prac-tices, devotions, etc.,. once held to be "Romish" and hence abominable. In no wayis this 'niore clearly and strikingly manifested than in tfiV growth bf Protestant admiration for some of the saints. Indeed In-deed one would suppose that poor St. Francis of Assisi were a true blue Protestant, from, the way our separated brethren have adopted him into their gallery of heroes. St. Catherine of Seine is another of our saints who has fallen into Protestant hands, as it Mere. Miss Yida D. Scudder has just written a book about the saint, "St. Catherine of Siena as seen in Her Letters,", and from this book the Protestant Pro-testant and secular press has discovered how much sanity and spiritual excellence there Mas in-the character of a Catholic mystic. The Churchman (Protestant Episcopalian) says, in reviewing Mias Scuddcr's book : "Until the saint of Assisi won his way to our hearts and minds, there was in the modern world a certain antipathy or at least a lack of sympathy for the medieval saints. Even now, to a vast majority of Protestants, St. Francis is the exception proving ihe rule; but his popularity has already done much to mitigate prejudice against those of his spiritual type, and to stimulate curiosity at least concerning it. Ten years ago men could see in St. Catherine of Seina little more than an ignorant ecstatic, manifesting man-ifesting religious excitement in grotesque and painful pain-ful fashion. Today students of history and psychology psychol-ogy are recognizing that the important characteristics characteris-tics of this remarkable woman arc not her hysterical eccentricities, but the spiritual sanity of her mind, the common sense and penetration she exhibited in dealing Avith human nature, whether in individuals or affairs of state." - We have no desire to deprive our Protcstaut friends of the luxury of admiring St. Catherine of Siena. They cannot vci-v mcII study her life without with-out profiting thereby. But Ave Avould respectfully ask them not to try to make a Protestant of her. Above, all things they should refrain from calling her "a 'forerunner of Luther." Anything but that. Some nine or ten years ago the London- Daily Chronicle (of course not a Catholic paper) delivered deliv-ered some opinions concerning St. Teresa which it "would be well for Protestant admirers of Catholic saints to read. "St. Teresa," said this London pa per. "Avas winning and Avise, self denying, humorous and discreet, in one simple phrase, she used all her powers in doing, and making others do, the right and righteous thing. Whether ruling a convent, or writing upon the mystical lifc or dealing Avith dignitaries dig-nitaries of the church and state, she kept the golden mean, never straying into tyranny or heresy or rebellion. re-bellion. Her interior life and her public life sIioav 'an equal aspiration after justice, the Avill of God, "the precise and definite truth. To all the reformers she is an example; all who in church and state take the side of absolute right, amid a world of indifference indif-ference and misunderstanding and antagonism, may copy her. She flung no fanatical defiance in the face of the world; she struck out no new 'way of her own; she did not part company with the past She neither clamored like Carlyle, nor wailed like Rousseau, nor thundered like Savonarola; but what she believed to be right, for that she M-orked sparing not soul nor mind nor. body, Avith self -abandonment to the law and light of God'-Sacred Heart Review. Re-view. ' |