FROM The Creator And The Creature; Or The Wonders Of Divine Love (1857) by Fr. Frederick William Faber:

The world is no better than a complication of awkward riddles, or a gloomy storehouse of disquieting mysteries, unless we look at it by the light of this simple truth, that the eternal God is blessedly the last and only end of every soul of man. Life as it runs out is daily letting us down into His Bosom; and thus each day and hour is a step homeward, a danger over, a good secured.

Hence it is, because God alone is our last end, that He alone never fails us. All else fails us but He. Alas! How often is life but a succession of worn-out friendships? Youth passes, with its romance, and crowds whom we loved have drifted away from us. They have not been unfaithful to us, nor we to them. We have both but obeyed a law of life, and have exemplified a- world-wide experience. The pressure of life has parted us. Then comes middle life, the grand season of cruel misunderstandings, as if reason were wantoning in its maturity, and by suspicions and circumventions and constructions were putting to death our affections. All we love and lean upon fails us. We pass through a succession of acquaintanceships; we tire out numberless friendships; we use up the kindness of kindred; we drain to the dregs the confidence of our fellow-labourers; there is a point beyond which we must not trespass on the forbearance of our neighbours. And s0 we drift on into the solitary havens of old age, to weary by our numberless wants the fidelity which deems it a religion to minister to our decay. And there we see that God has outlived and outlasted all: the Friend who was never doubtful, the Partner who never suspected, the Acquaintance who loved us better, at least it seemed so, the more evil He knew of us, the Fellow-labourer who did our work for us as well as His own, and the Neighbour who thought He had never done enough for us, the sole Superior who was neither rude nor inconsiderate, the one Love, that unlike all created loves, was never cruel, exacting, precipitate, or overbearing. He has had patience with us, has believed in us, and has stood by us. What should we have done if we had not had Him? All men have been liars; even those who seemed saints broke down, when our imperfections leaned on them, and wounded us, and the wound was poisoned; but He has been faithful and true. On this account alone He is to us what neither kinsman, friend, or fellow-labourer can be.

The more deeply we enter into these plain truths and the more assiduously we meditate upon them, the more we find growing over us a certain humility, which consists not so much in prostrating ourselves before the majesty of God, as in a kind of hatred of ourselves which increases together with our increase in the love of God. It is not the contempt of our own vileness which follows after sin, and is a part of Christian repentance. It is not like that fresh burst of love to God, which follows when He has inflicted some just punishment upon us for our sins, and which turns our hearts with such exceeding tenderness towards Him. It is a sort of ignoring of our own claims and interests, a forgetting of ourselves because of the keenness of our remembrance of God, and an abandonment of our own cause for His: and all this with a sort of dislike of ourselves, of patient impatience with our own meanness, a pleasure in acknowledging our own unworthiness, like the pleasure of a contrite confession, a grateful wonder that God should treat us so differently from what we deserve, and ultimately a desire to remind Him of our own self-abasement, of that intolerable demerit of ours, which He seems in His mercy so entirely to forget. In a word, self-abasement is the genius of a creature as a creature; it is his most reasonable frame of mind; it is that which is true about him when all else is false.

Yet, in apparent contradiction to this self-hatred, the idea of our Creator is accompanied with a familiarity, for which it is difficult to account, but which seems an essential part of our filial piety towards our Heavenly Father. We can say to Him what we cannot say to our fellow-creatures. We can take liberties with Him, which in no wise impair our reverence. We are more at ease when only His eye is full upon us than when the gaze of men is fixed upon our actions. He misunderstands nothing. He takes no umbrage. He makes us at home with Him. Childlike simplicity is the only ceremonial of our most secret intercourse with Him. His presence does not oppress our privacy. His knowledge of our nature, or rather our knowledge that He created it, gives us a kind of familiarity with Him, for it is a question of kind rather than of degree, such as we can never have with the great ones of the earth, nor even with those nearest and dearest to us. We could not bear to let our fellow creatures always see us. But nothing makes us common to God. He never — may we say it? — loses His reverence for those whom He has deigned eternally to love.

— Comments —

Barbara from NJ writes:

This is one of the Fr. Faber books I have not read, which is now going on the Wish List. Whenever I read him, I often feel like he has dived into the center of my soul and seen its contents.

Sometimes I wish your site had an automatic comment feature, as I could say something on just about everything you post. But that it is a bit more difficult to submit a comment helps me refrain from drawing attention to self.

Still chuckling over the one you posted a while back of Nixon’s phone call from 1972. Where do you find this stuff?!

Laura writes:

Just searching, that’s all.

Fr. Faber was a magnificent writer and it’s hard to come away from reading anything he wrote without disliking yourself more. He was a true master on the subject of Christian perfection, a psychological genius and a literary giant. That he is so little known and read today is proof that he was right about the conditions of the modern world.

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