For Greater Things: The Story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka

From the opening

Among Christian evidences the heroic virtue and holiness of Catholic youth must not be overlooked. Juvenile and adolescent victories of a conspicuous kind, over the flesh, the world, and the devil, can be found in no land and in no age, except a Christian land and age, and in no Church except the Catholic Church. It is of all excellences the very rarest and most difficult, this triumphant mastery over human weakness and human pride. It has defied the life-long strivings of men whom the world recognizes as beings of superior wisdom and power of will. The philosophers who have described it most beautifully and encouraged its pursuit in the most glowing and impressive terms remain themselves sad examples of human futility in the struggle to disengage the spirit from the claws of dragging and unclean influences. For the forces of evil are infinite in their variety, insidious beyond the ability of natural sharpness to detect and guard against, and unsleeping in the pressure of their siege upon the heart of man. Who will explain how it comes to pass that youth, whose callowness and inexperience are the mockery of the world, has laid prostrate in single combat this giant of evil and won fields where the reputations of the world's wisest and noblest and most tried lie buried?

It is a matter of idle curiosity with us how an unbelieving generation, ingenious in devising natural explanations (which are most unnatural) of supernatural phenomena, would explain away the wonder of the young Saint's life which is the subject of the following pages. It presents to us a picture of Divine Condescension guiding and inspiring and aiding human effort, so convincingly clear and transparent in its smallest details and in its general effect as to seem outside the pale of all possible mutilation and misinterpretation by malice or skeptical analysis.

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