The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1917-10-20

interviews with ones own recOllec-
lions, patience and much unfounded
contentment. why do you bring a
suit for libel two years after you
were called hippopotamus?" asked
the judge. well, your honor" re-
pliel the plaintiff, ut was only yester-
day that for the first time I saw the
animal The number of suits for
libel against self-revelation would
certainly crowd the docket if seeing
ourselves as others see us came to be
the fashion.
There are immense difficulties to
producing in man this true redec-.
ton of himself. How many editors
have succeeded in making their re-
jected contributors see themselves as
they have been seen? We pause for.
reply, but as eternity is long, let
us ask rather whether it is the mirror
or my lady's eyes which are response
BILE for what parades the avenue.
I Here is tale which gives one reason
why self-ignorance has so long life:
There was once lad who must have
derived his ideas of mans anatomy
from an onion. At any rate, he be-
lieved that everyone grew up by
building around himself another layer.
If you peeled off the man, you could
find, he thought, the boy. In certain
cases there would be numerous layers,
and the labor would be immense, for
example, to get them an ex-president
70 hoh NV DIT hot to
self and try to peel off the layers built
up around the true knowledge of what
you are. Take a cross section of your
soul and you would have to cut
through successes, dreams, ideals,
batteries, congratulations, dotings of
fond parents, ambitions, receptions,
various hand-shakings and shoulder
clippings of friends until you finally
reached the shrunken and wrinl1led
kernel of self No wonder the Greeks
admired the man who said, Know thy
self! and considered him one of the
seven wise men of the world.
There was a certain Spanish sol
der who had hidden himself behind
a life of distractions, of loves, hates,
gamblings, designations, day-dreaming,
novel-reading, quarreling, soldering.
He broke down all those intrench-
ments and got to a knowledge of self,
but it was a heroic struggle. The
process started with a cannon ball,
and a surgical operation, and long
sickness, and the process ended by
his giving up home and wealth and
honors, by fasting and meditation on
Christs life and by many months of
retirement alone in a cave. He wrote
a book in which he formulated the
science of seeing yourself as God sees
you, which is an Improvement on the
Scotch formula. The Spaniard was
Ignatius of Loyola: his recipe for self
knowledge is called retreat. In
those exercises he does not seem to
have left out much of his own expert
ence except the cannon-ball He
would likely use that in extreme cases.
Surgery, however, and prayer and
fasting and exile and silence and
caves of solitude are used to cut away
self-deceptions. Besides this external
surgery, DIS IL ulSuC uo CdIiOu, IhoAo 10
an immense amount, of internal sur
gerry also, but we can not go into
that here.
Retreats will not be popular until
people cease to be afraid of hippopota-
muses.. There was a short retreat
given once upon time. The supreme
excellence of the director dispensed
with long explanations. His exer-
CHANTS saw themselves as God saw
them, and they dropped their stones
and went out one after another, be-
ginning with the oldest. Sightseeing
is potent discourager of stone
throwing.
F. p. DonnelIp, S. j.