There is a dear and precious period in the life of man, which, brief as
sweet, is best appreciated in recollection; when but to exist is to
enjoy; when the rapid pulse throbs, wildly, with the vague delight which
fills the careless heart, and when it may be truly said, “that nothing
is, but what is not.”
While this rainbow hour lasted, the thorny wreath, which faith had
plaited round Hilarion’s brow, was worn as cheerily, as if the rose of
pleasure had glowed upon his temple. The vows he had made were ever
present to his mind. The ceremonies of his religion occupied his
imagination; and its forms, no less than its spirit, engaged his whole
existence. He had taken holy orders, and was frequently engaged in the
interesting offices of the priesthood. He studied, with unwearied
ardour, the sacred legends and records of the convent library, and,
during six years of monastic seclusion, his pure and sinless life had
been so distinguished by religious discipline and pious austerity; by
devotional zeal and fervid enthusiasm; by charitable exertion and rigid
self-denial; and by an eloquence in the cause of religion, so profound,
so brilliant, and so touching, that, even envy, which, in a cloister’s
gloom, survives the death of better passions, flung not its venom on
his sacred character; and the celebrity of the _man without a fault_ had
extended far beyond the confines of his own secluded monastery.
The monks conceived, that his illustrious birth, not less than his
eminent genius and unrivalled piety, threw a splendour on their order,
and they daily looked forward to the hour when the Father Hilarion
should wave the banner of successful controversy over the prostrate
necks of the fallen Jesuits. Yet the brotherhood had hitherto but
remotely hinted their wishes, or suggested their expectations. The
familiar ease of the novice had faded away with the purple bloom of the
youth; and the reserved dignity of the man threw, at an hopeless
distance, those whom the monk, indeed, in the meekness of religious
phraseology, called his superiors; but whom the saint and the nobleman
equally felt unworthy to be classed with him, as beings of the same
species; he stood alone, lofty and aspiring, self-wrapt and dignified;
and no external discipline, no internal humiliation, had so crucified
the human weakness in his bosom, as wholly to exclude the leaven of
mortality from the perfection of religious excellence.
Hitherto the life of the young monk resembled the pure and holy dream of
saintly slumbers, for it was still a dream; splendid indeed, but
visionary; pure, but useless; bright, but unsubstantial. Dead to all
those ties, which, at once, constitute the charm and the anxiety of
existence, which agitate while they bless the life of man, the spring of
human affection lay untouched within his bosom, and the faculty of human
reason unused within his mind. Hitherto, his genius had alone betrayed
its powers, in deceiving others, or himself, by those imposing
creations, by which faith was secured through the medium of imagination;
and the ardour of his tender feelings wasted, in visions of holy
illusion, or dreams of pious fraud. Yet these feelings, though
unexercised, were not extinct; they betrayed their existence even in the
torpid life he had chosen; for the true source of his religion,
enveloped as it was in mysteries and dogmas, was but a divine and
tender impulse of gratitude towards the First Cause; and his benevolent
charity, which he coldly called his duty, but the extension of that
impulse towards his fellow-creature! His habits, though they had tended
to calm the impetuosity of his complexional character, and to purify and
strengthen his moral principles, had added to his enthusiasm, what they
had subtracted from his passions, and had given to his zeal, all that
they had taken from his heart: but when the animated fervour of
adolescence subsided in the dignified tranquillity of manhood, when the
reiteration of the same images denied the same vivacity of sensation as
had distinguished their original impression, then the visions, which
had entranced his dreaming youth, ceased to people and to cheer his
unbroken solitude; then, even Religion, though she lost nothing of her
influence, lost much of her charm. While the faith which occupied his
soul was not sufficient, in its pure but passive effects, to engage his
life; the active vital principle, which dictates to man, the sphere for
which he was created, preyed on its own existence, and he turned upon
himself those exertions, which were intended to benefit the species to
which he belonged: his religious discipline became more severe; his
mortifications more numerous; his prayers and penance more rigid and
more frequent; and that which was but the result of the weakness of
human nature, conscious of its frailty, added new lustre to the
reputation of the saint, and excited a warmer reverence for the virtues
of the man. Accustomed to pursue the bold wanderings of the human mind,
upon subjects whose awful mystery escapes all human research, intense
study finally gave place to ceaseless meditation. Connecting, or
endeavouring to connect, his incongruous ideas, by abstract principles,
he lost sight of fact, in pursuit of inference; and, excluded from all
social intercourse, from all active engagement, his ardent imagination
became his ruling faculty, while the wild magnificence of the scenes by
which he was surrounded, threw its correspondent influence on his
disordered mind; and all within, and all without his monastery,
contributed to cherish and to perpetuate the religious melancholy and
gloomy enthusiasm of his character. More zealous in his faith at
twenty-six than he had been at eighteen, it yet no longer opened to his
view the heaven which smiled upon his head; but, beneath his feet, an
abyss which seemed ready to ingulf him. He sometimes wildly talked of
evil deeds which crossed his brain; of evil passions which shook his
frame; and doubted if the mercy of his Redeemer extended to him, whose
sinless life was not a sufficient propitiation for sinful thoughts: and
this sensitive delicacy of a morbid conscience plunged him into habitual
sadness, while it added to his holy fame, and excited a still higher
veneration for his character, in those who were the witnesses of its
perfection.
He frequently spent days, devoted to religious exercises, in the gloomy
woods of the monastery; and the monk, who, from kindness or from
curiosity, pursued his wanderings, sometimes found him cradled on a
beetling cliff, rocked by the rising storm; sometimes buried amidst the
ruins of the Moorish castle, the companion of the solitary bittern; and
sometimes hanging over the lake, whose subterraneous thunder scared all
ears but his.
The change which had gradually taken place in the character and manners
of the monk had long awakened the attention of the Prior and the
brotherhood of St. Francis; but such was the veneration he had
established for his character, by the austerity of his life, and the
superiority of his genius, by the rank he had sacrificed, and the
dignity he had retained, that his associates sought not in natural or
moral causes for the source of effects so striking and so extraordinary:
they said, “It is the mysterious workings of divine grace; it is a
vocation from Heaven; a miracle is about to be wrought, and it is
reserved for a member of the order of St. Francis to perform it.”
These observations had reached the ears of the Father Hilarion, when
those who pronounced them believed him lost in spiritual meditation;
they became imprinted on his mind; they fastened on his imagination;
they occupied his waking thought, and influenced his broken dream. It
was in one of those suspensions of the senses, when a doubtful sleep
unlinks the ideas, without wholly subduing the powers of the mind, that
he fancied a favourite dove had flown from his bosom, where it was wont
to nestle, towards the east; that, suddenly endowed with the power of
flight, he pursued the bird of peace through regions of air, till he
beheld its delicate form absorbed in the effulgence of the rising sun,
whose splendour shone so intensely on him, that, even when he awoke, he
still felt its warmth, and shrank beneath its brightness. He perceived,
also, that the dove, which had been the subject of his vision, and which
had drooped and pined during the preceding day, lay dead upon his bosom.
This dream made a strong impression on his mind. The effects of that
impression were betrayed in a discourse which he delivered on the eve of
the festival of St. Hilarion. He took for his subject the life of Paul,
whom he called the first missionary. He spoke of the faith of the
apostle, not as it touched himself only, but as to its beneficent
relations towards others.
In the picture which he had drawn, the monks perceived the state of his
own mind. They said, “It is not of St. Paul alone he speaks, but of
himself; he is consumed with an insatiable thirst for the conversion of
souls; for the dilatation and honour of the kingdom of Christ. It is
through him that the heretical tenets of the Jesuits will be confounded
and exposed. Let us honour ourselves and our order, by promoting his
inspired views.” In a few days, therefore, his mission to India was
determined on. Arrangements for his departure were effected, permission
from the Governor of the order to leave the convent was obtained, and he
repaired to Lisbon, to procure the necessary credentials for his
perilous enterprise.
After a separation of fifteen years, the Father Hilarion appeared before
his guardian uncle, and his brother, the Duke d’Acugna; and never did a
mortal form present a finer image of what man was, when God first
created him after his own likeness, and sin had not yet effaced the
glorious impress of the Divinity. Nature stood honoured in this most
perfect model of her power; and the expression of the best and highest
of the human passions would have marred that pure and splendid character
of look, which seemed to belong to something beyond the high perfection
of human power or of human genius. Lofty and dignified in his air, there
was an aspiring grandeur in the figure of the Monk, which resembled the
transfiguration of mortal into heavenly greatness: and, though his
eagle-eye, when raised from earth, flashed all the fire of inspiration;
yet, when again it sunk in holy meekness, the softer excellence of
heavenly mercy hung its tender traits upon his pensive brow; his
up-turned glance beaming the heroic fortitude of the martyr; his
down-cast look, the tender sympathies of the saint; each, respectively,
marking the heroism of a great soul, prepared to suffer and to resist;
the sensibility of a feeling heart, created to pity and to relieve;
indicating a character, formed upon that bright model, which so
intimately associated the attributes of the God with the feelings of the
man.
The Duke and the Archbishop stood awed in the presence of this
extraordinary being. They secretly smiled at what they deemed the
romance of his intentions; but they had not the courage to oppose them:
they were rich in worldly arguments, against an enterprise so full of
danger, and so destitute of recompense; but how could they offer them to
one, who breathed not of this world; to whom earthly passions, and
earthly views, were alike unknown; who already seemed to belong to that
heaven, to which he was about to lead millions of erring creatures: all,
therefore, that was reserved for them to effect, was, to throw a
splendour over his mission, correspondent to his illustrious rank; and,
in spite of the intrigues of the Jesuits, the reluctance of the Spanish
vice-reine, and the wishes of the minister, Miguel Vasconcellas, the
united influence of the houses of Braganza and Acugna procured a brief
from the Pope’s legate, then resident in Lisbon, constituting a
Franciscan monk apostolic nuncio in India, and appointing Goa, then
deemed the bulwark of Christianity, in Hindostan, the centre of his
mission.
Followed to the shore by a multitude of persons, who beheld in the
apostolic nuncio another Francis Xaverius, the Father Hilarion embarked
with the Indian fleet, on board the admiral’s ship, which also carried
the governor-general, recently appointed to the government of Goa. The
Nuncio was accompanied by a coadjutor, a young man strongly recommended
by the Archbishop of Braga, a Jesuit, and the professed enemy of the
Franciscans, who had obtained the appointment of his protegé by his
influence with the minister.
During the voyage, the rank and character of the Missionary procured him
the particular attentions of the Viceroy; but the man of God was not to
be tempted to mingle with the profane crowd which surrounded the man of
the world. Devoted to a higher communion, his soul only stooped from
heaven to earth, to relieve the sufferings he pitied, or to correct the
errors he condemned; to substitute peace for animosity; to restrain the
blasphemies of the profane; to dispel the darkness of the ignorant; to
support the sick; to solace the wretched; to strengthen the weak, and to
encourage the timid; to watch, to pray, to fast, and to suffer for all.
Such was the occupation of a life, active as it was sinless.
Such was the tenour of a conduct, which raised him, in the estimation of
those who witnessed its excellence, to the character of a saint; but
endeared him still more to their hearts, as a man who mingled sympathy
with relief, and who added to the awful sentiment of veneration he
inspired, the tender feeling of gratitude his mild benevolence was
calculated to awaken.
Yet, over this bright display of virtues, scarcely human, one trait of
conduct, something less than saintly, threw a transient shadow. He had
disgraced the coadjutor from his appointment, for an irregularity of
conduct almost venial from the circumstances connected with it. With
him, virtue was not a relative, but an abstract quality, referable only
to love of Deity, and independent of human temptation and mortal events;
he, therefore, publicly rebuked the coadjutor as a person unworthy to
belong to the congregation of the mission. He said, “Let us be merciful
to all but to ourselves; it is not by our preaching alone we can promote
the sacred cause in which we have embarked--it is also by our example.”
Even the mediation of the Viceroy was urged in vain. Firm of purpose,
rigid, inflexible, he acted only from conviction, the purest and the
strongest; but once resolved, his decree was immutable as the law of the
God he served. His severe justice added to the veneration he inspired;
but as he wept while he condemned, it detracted nothing from the general
sentiment of affection he excited.
The voyage had been far from prosperous. The fleet had suffered much
from repeated storms; and danger the most imminent, accompanied by all
those awful appearances, with which conflicting elements strike terror
into the boldest heart, had betrayed in the sufferers exposed to their
rage, all the symptoms of human weakness, reduced to a feeling sense of
its own insignificance, by impending destruction, under the most
terrific and awful forms of divine power. The Missionary, alone, seemed
uninfluenced by the threatened approach of that dreadful and untimely
death, to which he stood exposed, in common with others. Calm and firm,
his counsel and exertions alike displayed the soul incapable of fear; to
whom life was indifferent, and for whom death had no terrors; while his
frame, as if partaking the immortality of his soul, resisted the
influence of fatigue, and the vicissitudes of the elements. He met,
unappalled, the midnight storm; he beheld, unmoved, the tumultuous
billows, which rushed loudly on, pouring destruction in their course,
and bore, with uncomplaining firmness, the chilling cold of Cape Verd,
the burning heats of Guinea, and the pestilential vapours of the line.
It was on the first day of the sixth month of the voyage, that the fleet
sailed up the Indian seas, and, through the clear bright atmosphere, the
shores and mighty regions of the East presented themselves to the view,
while the imagination of the Missionary, escaping beyond the limits of
human vision, stretched over those various and wondrous tracts, so
diversified by clime and soil, by government and by religion, and which
present to the contemplation of philosophy a boundless variety in form
and spirit. Towards the west, it rested on the Arochosian mountains,
which divide the territories of Persia from those of India--primæval
mountains! whose wondrous formation preceded that of all organic matter,
coequal with the globe which bears them! and which still embosom, in
their stupendous shades, a nest of warlike states, rude as the aspects
of their native regions, and wild as the storms that visit them; the
descendants of those warrior hordes, which once spread desolation over
the eastern hemisphere, till the powerful genius of an individual
triumphed over the combined forces of nations, and the Affgans found,
that the natural bulwark of their native mountains was alone a
sufficient barrier against the victorious arms of Tamerlane.
From the recollection of the character and prowess of the Tartar hero,
the mind of the Missionary turned towards the shores, which were rather
imagined than perceived in so great an interval of distance; and the
Impostor of Mecca occurred to his recollection, with the scenes of his
nativity and success. Bold in error, dauntless in imposition, enslaving
the moral freedom while he subverted the natural liberty of mankind, and
spreading, by the force of his single and singular genius, the wild
doctrines he had invented, over the greatest empires of the earth, from
the shores of the Atlantic to the walls of China; his success appeared
even more wondrous, and his genius more powerful, than that of the
Tartar conqueror. The soul of the Missionary swelled in the
contemplation of scenes so calculated to elevate the ideas, to inflame
the imagination, and to recall the memory to those æras in time, to
those events in human history, which stimulate, by their example, the
powers of latent genius, rouse the dormant passions into action, and
excite man to sow the seeds of great and distant events, to found
empires, or to destroy them.
His spirit, awakening to a new impulse, partook, for a moment, the
sublimity of the objects he contemplated, the force of the characters
he reflected on, and, expanding with its elevation, mingled with the
universe. He remembered, that he, too, might have been an hero; he, too,
might have founded states, and given birth to doctrines; for what had
Timur boasted, or Mahomet possessed, that nature had denied to him? A
frame of Herculean mould; a soul of fire; a mind of infinite resource;
energy to impel; genius to execute; an arm to strike; a tongue to
persuade; and a vital activity of spirit to give impulse and motion to
the whole:--such were the endowments, which, coming from God himself,
give to man so dangerous an ascendant over his species; and such were
his. For the first time, his energy of feeling, his enthusiasm of fancy,
received a new object for its exercise. He pursued, with an eagle
glance, the sun’s majestic course: “To-day,” he said, “it rose upon the
Pagoda of Brahma; it hastens to gild, with equal rays, the temple once
dedicated to its own divinity, in the deserts of Palmyra; to illumine
the Caaba of Mecca; and to shine upon the tabernacle of Jerusalem!” He
started at the climax. The empires of the earth, and the genius of man;
suddenly faded from his mind; he thought of Him, in whose eye empire was
a speck, and man an atom; he stood self-accused, humbled, awed; and
invoked the protection of Him, who reigns only in perfect love in that
heart, where worldly ambition has ceased to linger, and from whence
human passions have long been exterminated.
The vessel in which he had embarked, was among the last to reach the
port of Goa; and the reputation of his sanctity, and the history of his
rank, his genius, and his mission, had preceded his arrival. The places
under the civil and ecclesiastical government of Goa, were filled by
Spaniards, but the Portuguese constituted the mass of the people[2].
They groaned under the tyranny of the Spanish Jesuits, and they heard,
with a rapture which their policy should have taught them to conceal,
that an apostolic nuncio, of the royal line of Portugal, and of the
order of St. Francis, was come to visit their settlements, to correct
the abuses of the church, and to pursue the task of conversion, by means
more consonant to the evangelical principles of a mild and pure
religion. An enthusiast multitude rushed to the shore, to hail his
arrival: the splendid train of the Viceroy was scarcely observed; and
the man of God, who disclaimed the pomp of all worldly glory,
exclusively received it. He moved slowly on, in all the majesty of
religious meekness: awful in his humility--commanding in his subjection:
his finely formed head, unshaded, even by his cowl; his naked feet
unshrinking from the sharpness of the stony pavement; the peace of
Heaven stamped on his countenance; and the cross he had taken up,
pressed to his bosom. All that could touch in the saint, or impose in
the man, breathed around him: the sublimity of religion, and the
splendour of beauty, the purity of faith, and the dignity of manhood;
grace and majesty, holiness and simplicity, diffusing their combined
influence over his form and motions, his look and air.
He passed before the residence of the Grand Inquisitor, who stood,
surrounded by his ecclesiastical court, at a balcony, and witnessed this
singular procession. At the moment when the Missionary reached the
portals of a Carmelite monastery, where he was to take up his residence,
the monks approached to receive him; the multitude called for his
benediction: ere he retired from its view he bestowed it; and never had
the sacred ceremony been performed with a zeal so touching, with an
enthusiasm so devout, with a look, an attitude, an air so pure, so
tender, so holy, and so inspired. The portals closed upon the saint; and
those who had touched the hem of his garment, believed themselves
peculiarly favoured by Heaven.
The next day he received an audience from the Bishop and Grand
Inquisitor of Goa; marked by a distinction due to his rank; but
characterized by a coldness, and by some invidious observations, little
consonant to the enthusiasm of his own character, and unbefitting an
enterprise so laudable and magnanimous as that in which he had
engaged.--The Missionary, disgusted with all he saw and all he heard,
with the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical court, and with the
chilling haughtiness and illiberal sentiments of those who presided over
it, and who openly condemned the tenets of the order to which he
belonged[3]; quickly resolved on an immediate departure from Goa. A few
days, however, were requisite to arrange the circumstances necessary for
the promotion of his mission. His vow of poverty related only to
himself; but his mission required worldly means, as well as divine
inspiration, to effect its beneficent purpose; and the charity which
became a duty towards persons of his own order in Christendom, must, in
a country where his religion was not known, depend upon the casualty of
natural feeling: something, therefore, which belonged to earth, entered
into an enterprise which referred ultimately to heaven; and the saint
was obliged to provide for the contingencies of the prelate and the
man.
The route which he laid out for his mission, was from Tatta to Lahore,
by the course of the Indus, and from Lahore to the province of Cashmire.
To fix upon this remote and little known province, as the peculiar
object of his mission, was an idea belonging to that higher order of
genius, which grasps, by a single view, what mediocrity contemplates in
detail, or considers impracticable in accomplishment. To penetrate into
those regions, which the spirit of invasion, or the enterprise of
commerce, had never yet reached; to pass that boundary, which the
hallowed footstep of Christianity had never yet consecrated; to preach
the doctrine of a self-denying faith, in the land of perpetual
enjoyment; and, amidst the luxurious shades, which the Indian fancy
contemplates as the model of its own heavenly Indra, to attack, in the
birth-place of Brahma, the vital soul of a religion, supposed to have
existed by its enthusiast votary beyond all æra of human record, beyond
all reach of human tradition, which had so long survived the
vicissitudes of time, the shock of conquest, and the persecution of
intolerance: this was a view of a bold and an enthusiastic mind,
confident in the powers of a genius which would rise with the occasion,
and superior to all earthly obstacles, which might oppose its efforts;
of a mind, to be incited, rather than to be repelled, by difficulties;
to be animated, rather than subdued, by danger.
The person, the character, the life, the eloquence of the Missionary,
were all calculated to awaken a popular feeling in his favour; and,
during the few weeks he remained at Goa, the confessional from which he
absolved, and the pulpit whence he preached, became the shrines of
popular devotion.
His eloquence was irresistible: it was the language of fearless genius,
of enthusiastic zeal; vehement and impassioned, it ever aspired at the
pathetic, or reached the sublime; and if it were, sometimes, more
dazzling than judicious, more affecting than correct, still it
persuaded, when it failed to convince, still it was distinguished by
those touches of tenderness, by those visions of Enthusiasm, which
blend and assimilate, so intimately, with human feeling, which ever
address themselves, with such invariable success, to human passion!
The departure of the Nuncio from Goa was attended by circumstances which
accorded not with the character of the apostle of Him, who, in
approaching the spot whence he was to announce his divine mission to the
rulers of the people, “came riding on an ass;” for the departure of the
Missionary was triumphant and splendid. The most illustrious of the
Portuguese families in Goa attended in his train, and the homage of the
multitude pursued him to the shore, whence he was to embark for Tatta.
He moved meekly on in the midst of the crowd; but through the profound
humility of his countenance shone such magnanimity of soul, such perfect
consciousness of a genius and a zeal equal to the sacred enterprise in
which he had embarked, that the most favourable presages were formed of
the success of a man, who seemed to blend, in his character, the piety
of the saint with the energy of the hero. He embarked:--the anchor was
raised; a favourable breeze swelled the sails. The Missionary stood on
the deck, dignified, but not unmoved: the triumph of religion, softened
by its meekness, sat on his brow! The happy auspices under which he had
left the centre of his mission, promised him a return still more
triumphant: his soul swelled with emotions, which diffused themselves
over his countenance; and as the vessel receded from the shore, his ear
still caught the murmured homage offered to his unrivalled excellence.
The humility of the monk rejected the unmerited tribute; but the heart
of the man throbbed with an ardour, not all saintly, as he received it;
and the pious visionary, who attempted, by an abstraction of mind, to
love God, without enjoying the pleasure which accompanies that love,
now, with a natural feeling, superior to the influence of a stoical
zeal, unconsciously rejoiced, even in the suffrages of man.