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Through Buckle’ Eyes 115
was finished) shows that such language was the common coin of religious
writing and thinking at the time. The Suggestion that persecution by
Protestants in a Protestant country was a contemporary form of
martyrdom was quite explicit. Buckle quotes at length:
It is pleasing to know that throughout this protracted trial so lacerating to
the feelings of a refined and delicate woman she has conducted herself with
the firmness and heroism of a martyr .... Well! We cannot believe that
Almighty God will fail to protect one whom he is putting to such heroic
trials—training for saintliness by a persecution so dreadful, that it is not
very easy to find a parallel to it in the lives even of the holiest Saints and
Martyrs. Her reward, if she remains constant, is so certain that we can
hardly bring ourselves even to pity her.”
However, Buckle was not primarily concerned to present Cornelia as the
martyt-victim in the public arena. Instead, she stresses “the true spirit of
the hidden life she so much loved,’® and presents Cornelia’s sufferings,
especially those brought about by the loss of her children, as an interior,
hidden martyrdom:
It must have been a martyrdom for her to act as she did. ...
All these afflictions seem singly enough to break the heart of a wife and
mother, and to overwhelm the spirit of any religious Foundress—but when
united—what can we say but that Mother Connelly was a martyr in heart
and that the exterior sufferings she endured were sufficient to make a saint
of no ordinary degree of heroic constancy. ...
While this exterior life of religious peace and active labour was being
zealously carried out by Mother Connelly and her Community—her own
heart was undergoing a martyrdom unparalleled in the lives of any holy
person we have known."
This emphasis on the interiority of suffering, and of religious
experience generally, seems to have accorded with Cornelia’s own
preference. Cornelia’s writings stress that it was in and through everyday
circumstances, the ordinary events of community life, that members of the
°1)63:180-181.
©163:11.
°'1)78: 43-44; D63:31-32; D65:103.
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