Life of St John-Baptist Vianney, Cure of Ars

Henry Edward Cardinal Manning writes: "It would seem as if God were dealing with us now as He dealt with the world in the beginning of the Gospel. To the corrupt intellectual refinement of Greece and Rome, He opposed the illiterate sanctity of the Apostles; to the spiritual miseries of this age He opposes the simplicity of a man who in learning hardly complied with the conditions required for Holy Orders, but, like the B. John Colombini and St. Francis of Assisi, drew the souls of men to him by the irresistible power of a supernatural life. It is a wholesome rebuke to the intellectual pride of this age, inflated by science, that God has chosen from the midst of the learned, as His instrument of surpassing works of grace upon the hearts of men, one of the least cultivated of the pastors of His Church. "No one can read the life of the Cure of Ars without being reminded of that of St. Francis and his companions. Thel'e is a homely and rural beauty about it which vividly recalls the plains of Umbria and their simple inhabitants; Dardilly, Ecully, and the "Chantemerle" remind us of Foligno, Perugia, and Gli Angeli; and the lowly and lonely pastor wandering among the corn-fields and the orchards of Ars is such a picture of evangelical poverty as we read in the Fioretti di San Francesco. Another supernatural beauty in this life is the peculiar nature of the miracles by which God manifested His love and care of His servant; such as, the multiplication of the corn in the grenier, the wine in the barrel, and the flour under the hand that was kneading it for the oven. No one can read them without remembering the lives of the Prophets Elias and Eliseus, with the wonderful and homely beauty of their miracles, the visible revelations of the loving Providence which invisibly is interwoven with all our lives, and ministers to all our needs. And lastly, it is impossible to read of the days of un-resting toil, till his wasted frame was carried from the confessional to his chamber, and the nights of unceasing prayer, in which he gazed with eyes radiant with supernatural light upon God Incarnate on the altar, without remembering One who "had not so much as time to eat," and who, when the toil of the day was done, "went up into a mountain alone," and" continued all night in the prayer of God." One of his spiritual children said of him, "He would gaze at the Tabernacle with a smile which gladdened the heart. I have seen it Dlany a time myself; itseemed as if he sald our Lord. I was always struckwith my own spiritual misery before God, when I saw,by the light of the sanctuary-lamp, that wasted andwithered form, and that brilliant glance fixed upon thedoor of the Tabernacle, with an expression of happinesswhich it is impossible to describe."