Chapter 2
A vision to dizzy and appal
Our best comfort is her light
John Henry Newman scanned the human condition, present and
past, in a well known passage beginning: “To consider the world in its
length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts,
their fortunes, mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits,
governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses,
their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
long-standing facts, the token so faint and broken of superintending design,
the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers, the progress of
things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the
greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration,
the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of
good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and
intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary
hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly
described in the Apostle’s, words ‘having no hope and without God in the
world’, – all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind
the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human
solution” (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Chapter V).
Confronting the canvas unrolled by Newman, little Bernadette
seems to be fighting outside her division. But perhaps not; indeed, the
reverse may be true; for Bernadette’s weapons belong to a higher order.
Newman was one of the greatest masters of the language in the
nineteenth century; yet even his genius might have been defeated by ‘things
seen’ in the twentieth century, a period in which evil manifested itself with
unprecedented, terrifying power. Depravity and madness were revealed not
only in the fury of battlefield slaughter, but also in the quiet corridors of
planners and experimenters; on the drawing boards of engineers; in the
laboratories of research chemists; and in the minds of so-called scientists.
Quietly, efficiently and methodically they went about their work. With the
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