Since, according to Sabatier, an objective view of history is a “utopia,”
he urges a critical examination of saints’ biographies, accusing official
Church historians of adorning their narratives with superfluous “embellishments”
and portraying saints as “superhuman creatures, having nothing
in common with us:”
they are privileged characters, marked with the divine seal; they are, as the litanies
say, vials of election, into which God has poured the sweetest perfumes; their sanctity
is revealed almost in spite of themselves; they are born saints as others are born
kings or slaves, their life is set out against the golden background of a triptych, and
not against the sombre background of reality. By such means the saints, perhaps,
gain something in the respect of the superstitious; but their lives lose something
of virtue and of communicable strength. Forgetting that they were men like ourselves,
we no longer bear in our conscience the command, “Go and do likewise.”
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