For Greater Things | Page 3

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FOR GREATER THINGS The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka
by William T. Kane, S.J. with a preface by James J. Daly, S.J.
PREFACE
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. Natural reaction against sinful excess, thwarted ambitions,
disappointed hopes, meek conformity with environment, ecclesiastical
manipulation of pliant material, tame acquiescence in family traditions
and arrangements, these and all the other stock "explanations," with
which a groveling world seeks to pull down the Saints to its own dreary
level, cannot be invoked to dissipate the mystery and the glory
surrounding Stanislaus. How did he come so early in life, and in a
nobleman's family, to set such store upon spiritual values? How did his
tender and immature mind grasp with such swift sureness the one
lesson of all