of Christians in the early Church.” The implication was that the works of mercy articulated by Christ in Matthew 25 “must again become the Christian way of life.”[19] Day’s account of the facta of Christ’s life in her autobiography The Long Loneliness highlighted His humble origins, His eschewal of political power, His closeness to the people and concern for their material welfare:
He was born in a stable. . .He did not come to be a temporal King. . . He worked with His hands, spent the first years of His life in exile, and the rest of His early manhood in a crude carpentry shop in Nazareth. He fulfilled His religious duties in the synagogue and the temple. He trod the roads in His public life and the first men He called were fishermen, small owners of boats and nets. He was familiar with the migrant worker and the proletariat, and some of His parables dealt with them. He spoke of the living wage, not equal pay for equal work, in the parable of those who came at the first and the eleventh hour.[20]
Beyond the paramount example of Christ, the subsidiary exemplarity of the saints was frequently referenced by both Day and Maurin. Implicitly gesturing to the broader exemplary tradition, Maurin counselled Day early on in their collaboration that it was “better to know the lives of the saints than the lives of kings and generals.”[21] The advice was, perhaps, superfluous: from an early age, Day had been impressed by saintly demonstrations of piety and driven to imitate them. Long before her conversion to Catholicism, Day’s response to first hearing the story of a saint was to experiment with sleeping on the floor in her own attempt at asceticism.[22] As Day began to drift towards the Church, she was especially drawn to the life of Teresa of Avila, “a saint with whom [she] readily identified,” as Day’s biographer puts it.[23] The magnetic effect that Teresa and other saints had on Day was at first largely a consequence of their exemplary devotion, as Day struggled to transition from liberated bohemian to faithful adherent of the Church’s teachings.[24] Maurin, however, encouraged Day to view the saints not just as exemplars of personal moral probity but as exemplars of radical social action who had pioneered strategies of translating Christian love into active care for the underprivileged.[25] Maurin helped Day to see that the answer
