The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1913-01-25

| gins III oil IuOuSuJ1u1 WIN IAO
consciousness of our first grave blum.
der. IF l had it to do again!" cries
seventeen, as bitterly as seventy;
only seventeen should have the miti-
cation of greater physical strength,
Has it? 1t seems to the writer that
in the grief and self-reproach of youth
for a preventable blunder, there is a
strength of passion, a potency OF de-
spair from which maturity is free.
Youth is quite certain that no one
ever, made just this blunder before,
and that, therefore, it will be resented
as an unheard of thing. Maturity
knows it is but a repetition of mil
lions of histories, and commencing it's
grief to God says: Il can't do much,
but 1 will do something, to set the
blunder right"
If we could know the history of
some of the greatest poems of regret
and of remorse which comes when
blunder is complicated with sin, we
should find them to be usually the
production of youth. The writer re-
members two poems by young girl,
one written in her eighteenth year,
and the other at about twenty-five,
which were simply tempests of self
Ireproach, but because of their passion
ate sincerity, bid fair to outlast all of
the more rational work of her later
life.
The vast number of suicides among
the unbelieving or dimly believing
youth of our own time testifies to this
same tendency in it's acutest form.
Young anguish is headlong, desperate.
Of course, the cure is not difficult if
it can be persuaded to open it's heart
to kindly and experienced maturity
Who shall count the valuable lives
saved to the world by the Catholic
confessional? Maturity and old age
marvel at the Interpretation in youth
of it's long reasonable expectation of
life," and it's consequent chance to re-
deem itself.
eff l were only twenty" says fifty.
eff l were but forty!" cries seventy.
Their prayer is just as vain as that of
the anquished youth who cries up to
Heaven: "Oh, God! if l could turn the
clock back by one little hour"
1t behooves us, therefore, no matter
how few or how many our years to
have done with bitter retrospection,
and to substitute, even for plain and
clear wrong-doing, repentance for re-
morse. Let it be New Years resolu-
ton; for, from the days of our first
clear apprehension, of blunder and
sin, even to the end of our lives, the
New Years vigil is especially a time
of temptation. The young have no
very availing excuse. It is their duty
to shake off the shyness which pre-
vents them from seeking prudent
counsel, and laying once for all, the
fury which torments them. They may
find in the subsequent lives of those
who went before them the solution of
all their difficulties. Thus Tennyson
long ago borrowed from Saint Angus
tine:
hold it truth with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things
For the middle-aged, it is harder;
and yet, was it not for them, just a
little more than for others, that the
Apostle wrote: Work while it is day,
for the night cometh in which no man
can work" The intense quality of
youthful grief, and the fashion in
which it often involves the mind with
the body, makes it harder, especially
| for the girl, to seek relief in mental
or manual labor. She does not dream
how fortunate she is, if she must.
But maturity has largely outgrown the
passionate form of any kind of sor-
row. Unless in abnormal cases, cir
cumstances have disciplined the will,
and often it can find not only distrac-
ton but presently strength and cour-
age in application to labor. Neither
condition can do without the Divine
Help. If ever we realize our own
weakness it is in the first moment
of clear, assured conviction of our
mistake or ignorance, and the catas-
| trophies to ourselves and others which
are always possible in it; or in the
worse conviction of wilful wrong-do-
ing, when the House of Life is blazing
about us from the torch with which
we have wilfully kindled the fire.
But for old age, with strength gone,
with hope slow to lift it's head, with
no means of reparation in it's hand,
and slight possibility of achieving
any, there is absolutely nothing to
do but to trust in God, to repent, not
morosely but humbly, and pray. Fruit
less retrospection, "the bankrupt's
calculation of gain and loss," is at all
times an aggravation of the original
offense; but worst of all in old age,
which can at least, endure quietly
and pray that the Omnipotent will
take the case into His hands, and in
some way of which we could never
have dreamed, but clear to the supera-
bundance of His mercy, arrest the con-
sequences of our act
Press on, therefore, to the things
that are before. This world may never
again be the same for us, but life
here, after all, is a mere apprentice
ship for a greater and fuller life in
which we shall go on from strength