Page 187 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

him, for all his practice of humility, by the comparison. To
merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder
for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant
failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his
soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a
growth of doubts and scruples. His soul traversed a period
of desolation in which the sacraments themselves seemed to
have turned into dried-up sources. His confession became a
channel for the escape of scrupulous and unrepented imper-
fections. His actual reception of the eucharist did not bring
him the same dissolving moments of virginal self-surrender
as did those spiritual communions made by him sometimes
at the close of some visit to the Blessed Sacrament. The book
which he used for these visits was an old neglected book
written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters
and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love
and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by
the reading of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles
was interwoven with the communicant’s prayers. An inau-
dible voice seemed to caress the soul, telling her names and
glories, bidding her arise as for espousal and come away,
bidding her look forth, a spouse, from Amana and from the
mountains of the leopards; and the soul seemed to answer
with the same inaudible voice, surrendering herself: INTER
UBERA MEA COMMORABITUR.
This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his
mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insis-
tent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again
during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense

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