Download or read book A Royal Son and Mother written by Baroness Pauline von Hügel and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is rather strange that no times should have differed from one another more widely than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We feel more in sympathy with, say the fourth or fifth century, that produced a Jerome, an Augustine, and a John Chrysostom—an age of decadence, no doubt; and yet one of intense intellectual activity, of deep heart-searching, of vehement thirst after truth,—than with those days so comparatively close to our own, when all seemed so cold, so colorless, so shallow; when the very first need of man—his need of God—was as though it had died away. Then came the French Revolution, succeeded by the terrible Napoleonic days, when apathy and indolence had perforce to be shaken off, and men were roused to the consciousness that there was still such a thing as patriotism in the world; that noble enthusiasms needed but the strong winds of adversity to fan them into flame. And yet how deep-seated were the nervelessness and indolence of the children of an effete civilization! Had the Corsican tyrant worn his laurels with one degree less of insolence, had his despotism been a little less brutal, German princes and Russian statesmen and Italian diplomatists might have gone on obligingly handing him over crown after crown. An age barren in patriots is also an age barren in saints. The man who can not be fired to a lofty enthusiasm, to heroic self-sacrifice for his country, is not made of the same stuff as those blessedly violent ones who carry the kingdom of heaven by storm. Hence we see a lamentable dead level in the religious life of the eighteenth century. The gentle Anna Emmerich was almost persecuted by good men for having the stigmata; anything abnormal, anything like direct interference on the part of Heaven with the ordinary jog-trot of human existence, aroused suspicion, even resentment. There was indeed faith, beautiful and deep-rooted, among the Catholic poor; but the wise of this world had not only lost faith, but lost all respect for faith; it was looked upon as something obsolete, useless, no longer capable of exercising any power over the lives of men. Bound, as they said, to die out among the lower orders of society, the upper classes had already flung it aside, as soon as the fashionable French philosophy had won the day. It was at this period of spiritual darkness, as yet showing no signs of the grand revival to come, that Amalie von Schmettau was born in Berlin, in the year 1748. Field-Marshal Count von Schmettau, her father, was a Protestant; but, as her mother was a nominal Catholic, Amalie was to be brought up in the old faith. She was sent at a very early age to a convent school in Breslau, from whence at fourteen she returned good and innocent but with a very imperfect education. "I felt," she wrote in later years, "as though I had dropped from the skies, to find myself abruptly removed from the atmosphere of an enclosed convent to that of my mother's house, one of those most frequented by the gay world of Berlin."
