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GREAT CATHOLICS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NBW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS 
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



EDITED BY 

CLAUDE WILLIAMSON, O.S.C. 



'939 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



, S.T.D. 

Censor Lib wrum. 



STEPHEN J. DONAHUE, D.D. 

Adm. f New York. 
New York, January 9, 1939. 



Copyright, 1939, by 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



All rights reserved -no part of this book 
may be reproduced in any form without 
permission in writing from the publisher, 
except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief 
passages in connection with a review written 
tor inclusion in magazine or newspaper. 



PKiNTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
BY THE POLYGUAPHIC COMPANY OFAMEK1CA.N.Y. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

PAUL ; APOSTLE, MARTYR by Rev. C. C. Martindak, S.J.> M.A. . , i 

ST. PAULA by Enid Dinnis . . . , 14 

ST. AUGUSTINE, BISHOP OF HIPPO by Rev. Hugh Pope, O.P., S. T.M. 26 

HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER by G. Elliot Anstruther, K.S.G. 38 

ST. ANTONY OF PADUA by Ernest Oldmeadow 52 

ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA by The Rev. W. E. Orchard, D.D. . . 64 

THOMAS LINACRE by W. J. 'Donovan, M.D., O.B.E 82 

LE CHEVALIER DE BAYARD by Felix Hope , . 92 

ST. THOMAS MORE by Laurence W. Meynell 102 

ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA by The Most Rev. Archbishop Goodier, S.J. .. 114 

CARDINAL POLE by Ernest C. Messenger, Pk.D 124 

ST. TERESA by Vera Barclay 140 

ST. CHARLES BORROMEO by Rev. Francis Holland, O.S.C. .. 152 

FRANCISCO SUAREZ by The Rev. Lewis Watt, S.J., B.Sc 164 

DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER by E. I. Watkin, M.A 1 74 

ST. VINCENT DE PAUL by Rev. J. Leonard, CM. 194 

JOHN DRYDEN by Montague Summers , M.A., F.R.S.L 204 

ST. MARGARET MARY by Margaret Teo 218 

FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FENELON, Archbishop and 

Duke of Cambrai by J. Lewis May 230 

CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON by The Right Rev. Mgr. 

Peter Guilday 244 

JULIE BILLIART by Rt. Rev. Dr. John G. Vance 252 

JOHN LINGARD by Christopher Hollis y M.A. . , - 258 

DANIEL O'CONNELL by Edmund C. Buckley 268 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

THE ABBE MIGNE by Douglas Woodruff 282 

CARDINAL NEWMAN by Shane Leslie) M.A 294 

LEO XIII by Michael de la Bedoyere, M.A 304 

AUGUSTUS WELBY PUGIN by Peter F. Anson 318 

ANTOINE FREDERIC OZANAM by The Rev. Sir John R. 0*Connell> 

M.A., LLD., M.R.I.A 330 

GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL by W. R. Thompson, F.R.S 346 

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS by Rev. Martin D'Arcy, S.J., M.A. . . 358 

DOM HILDEBRAND DE HEMPTiNNE, First Abbot Primate, O.S.B. 

by Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B., M.A. .. . . . . . . 368 

MOTHER JANET STUART by Maud Monahan* 378 

THE VERY NOBLE THE VISCOUNT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD by 

John Gibbons 388 

FRANCIS THOMPSON by Rev. Claude Williamson, O.S.C., F.R.G.S., 

F.RMst.S 400 

CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, S J. by Rev. J. Keating, S.J. . . 420 

AUBREY BEARDSLEY by Isabel C. Clarke 434 

PATRICK CARDINAL HAYES by The Right Rev. Mgr. Fulton J. Sheen 448 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



REV. C. C. MARTTNDALE, S.J., M.A. 



PAUL; APOSTLE, MARTYR 



A.D. ?-62 

SAUL OF TARSUS was destined to live a stormy life in any case, and 
after his death by beheading his history has been no less storm- 
tossed. At first, no one could believe that he had really been converted, 
his welcome amongst the older Christians was nervous if not chilly. 
He was responsible for the first real clash of opinion within the Church. 
The time came when the " reformers " made such ill-use of him that 
even Catholics were found to fear lest he might be somehow " rather 
Protestant " ; the Domes of Rome and of London came to seem almost 
symbolically to confront one another. Then arrived the period when 
it was customary to say that no one ever had written the books to which 
their name, as author, was affixed ; so a " Paul " was practically 
washed out : finally critics found a certain entertainment in saying 
that if Christ had founded Christianity, Paul had invented the Church, 
and that it was he who, drawing upon pagan " mysteries," had 
sacramentalized the innocent first-beginnings of the new Faith. 
Having thus been battered and mauled from every angle, St. Paul 
seems to be resuming the place that always should have been his, 
which Catholic tradition in fact had always assigned to him, namely, 
that of a Christian obedient to Christ, completely at one with the 
older Apostles as to doctrine, but endowed with a colossal personality, 
and held in thrall by a vision which he knew he was called to com- 
municate to the world at large. 

Tarsus was a self-satisfied city, not without reason. We need not 
dwell on its enormous pagan history, simply because the Jewish 
community within it kept rigidly aloof from all that, and because the 
little Saul, " Hebrew, son of Hebrews ; Pharisee, born of Pharisees," 
grew up with a quite undiluted and unentangled psychology. The 
family must have been rich, because he was ? born " a citizen of the 
Empire, and citizenship, in Tarsus, was bestowed only on an inner 
circle of the wealthy. This did not prevent him, of course, from being 
taught a trade ; the Jews considered that a boy who had been taught 
no trade had been taught to be a thief. Hence later on he was always 
able to earn his keep by working at that black Cilician hair-cloth of 



2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

which they made waterproofs and the like. He went to school in 
Jerusalem, and " sat at the feet of Gamaliel " literally, because boys 
squatted round their Rabbi who made them learn the Old Testament 
by heart and then, as we say, catechized them. To the intensely 
sensitive small boy, this visit to Jerusalem must have been everlastingly 
impressive. He returned to Tarsus and is not heard of in Jerusalem 
again till the martyrdom of St. Stephen, and passages in his letters 
afterwards make it clear that he never saw our Lord. 

He breaks suddenly into the Scriptures as holding the cloaks of those 
who had thrown them off that they might the better stone St. Stephen 
into pulp. And immediately after that, a kind of blood-lust infected 
him ; he went straight to the High Priest (probably still Caiaphas) 
and offered himself to join in an absolute war of extermination. The 
memory haunted him till the end. He " forced his way even into 
private houses," and dragged Christians off to gaol ; " with zeal I 
persecuted the Church even to excess I persecuted the Church of 
God and was ravaging her I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, an 
insolent I persecuted this doctrine even unto blood, putting both 
men and women into chains and casting them into prison In my 
excess of madness against them, I would pursue them even into 
distant cities." Such were the sentences that this memory was to 
place upon his lips. 

There is no trace at all that this view of himself had been falsified 
by a morbid brooding on the past. All the more exorbitant does this 
positive persecution-mania appear. One can understand the young 
man duly obedient to Authority, taking the views of the princes of his 
people, and rebuking or even boycotting the Christians. But this 
violent taking of the initiative ; this hunting of the believers out of 
their very homes, this pursuit of them, this ferocity even towards 
women here are reactions that require explanation, unless indeed we 
yield to the temptation to suppose that diabolic agency was at least to 
some degree directly responsible for them. And we agree that the 
frenzy which beset the Refqrmers, causing them to destroy everything 
even remotely connected with the Mass, and again much of what has 
recently been happening in Spain, does strongly suggest a hellish 
invasion of the soul. And we certainly do not think that St. Stephen's 
speech, provocative to infuriation-point as it must have seemed, would 
have sufficed to create so enduring and unbridled a passion. Had 
Saul's rage been suddenly lashed into mania, it would probably have 
expired fairly soon. We are accustomed by now to seeing in these 
fierce psychological reactions a symptom of an interior urge that is 
being repressed with a violence that seeks its compensation as well as 
its disguise in behaviour such as Saul's was. In persecuting the 
Christians, he may well have been savaging his own soul. 



PAUL; APOSTLE, MARTYR 3 

Later expressions used by St. Paul show how intolerable the venerated 
yoke of Pharisaism had in reality been, and indeed that of the Law 
itself as by then interpreted. The Law showed him what was good, 
what evil, but provided him with no help to pursue the one and eschew 
the other. " The evil that I would not, that I do." I do not see this 
adolescent to have been a sinner : he would have been infinitely more 
at peace peace of a de-spiritualized sort if he had been. But I do 
see in him a tumultuous temperament rigidly reduced into austerity ; 
whether or no, left to himself, he would have found fairly soon that he 
was at breaking point, we cannot tell, though we may think it probable. 
But a Christian student would at once recognize that he was not left 
to himself. There was a goad already stabbing at his soul within him, 
and to use a humble simile as a man may actually hurt himself more 
to get rid of this pain or that pain, so Saul began " kicking " against 
that goad, and hurt 1 himself worse still. There are pains which are 
compensatory for one another. 

Possibly it was the " face as of an angel " that he, " looking stead- 
fastly " upon Stephen, had seen, which gave him the first of that long 
series of stabbing torments. To see peace and joy in the eyes of one 
who is denying what you hold most dear and yet feel you are being 
false to, can be maddening. You can see that he would have joined 
in the stoning of Stephen, had he been allowed to. Why was he not ? 
No matter. Possibly because the judges of such a case were also 
normally the executioners, and Saul was still too young to be permitted 
to sit as judge. Possibly because he was beset by a scruple that might 
almost have driven him, by the conflict that it engineered, to delirium 
he may have considered that the whole procedure was (as indeed it 
was) illegitimate, the application of a sort of mob's lynch-law ; so that 
he had to forbid to himself what he so desperately wanted to do. 
Anyhow, he did the minimum that he could, He " held their clothes," 
and stared at the ghastly spectacle which we describe so lightly, " they 
stoned Stephen "... but dare we let ourselves imagine it ? 

The Road to Damascus followed. " Breathing out threats and 
murder," he prepared his caravan, and after a week's riding saw 
Damascus lying beautiful below him. Then came the shattering 
experience. A light out-blazed the noon : he saw a figure he knew 
not whom (" Lord, who art Thou ? ") and he heard the words, 
spoken in Aramaic, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me ? " And, 
on his enquiry, he was told, " I am Jesus, whom thou art persecuting." 
He asked what he was to do, and was sent to a Damascene Jew, 
Ananias, who should tell him the answer to that. 1 

We have, then, I think, the right to see that Saul had had no 

1 I think the futile attempt to detect discrepancies between the three narrations 
of this episode has been abandoned. 



4 GREAT CATHOLICS 

consciousness at all of being wrong ; Indeed, that he thought he was 
right in persecuting the Christians as cruelly as he possibly could, but, 
that his interior conflict (if indeed it existed at all, even unconsciously) 
regarded precisely them y and not Christ. He had not known Christ 
in the flesh ; he had no memories, even bitterly beaten down, of His 
sweet attractiveness ; he knew of Him only as a rebellious heretic 
who had been squalidly executed : possibly it made his hatred for the 
sect of Christians 1 the more hot, because they alleged allegiance to so 
mean a man. But his " goad," so far, had been concerned with 
Judaism versus Christianity, not a personal struggle Saul versus 
Christ. But it was, precisely, Christ who appeared to him, and 
Christ, moreover, identified with His Christians, " Why persecutest 
thou Me ? " 

Saul was " received into the Church " by Ananias and ate, and 
recovered his strength, and asked what he ought to do next (that is a 
psychological change, if you like !). Ananias told him, vaguely, that 
he was a " casket," specially selected for the carrying forth of Christ's 
name to all the peoples of the world. Saul went away at once not to 
do tha^ but into Arabia, though no one knows just where within it, 
and there he " went into retreat." 

What mysteries then took place within him ? Certainly a double 
crisis was involved. He had nothing to change in his beliefs about 
God. The Pharisaic belief in God was pure. Nor yet in what con- 
cerned the nature of man : nor was Saul the man to doubt the existence 
and immortality and responsibility of the soul, nor the fact of Sin that 
had streamed like a " black flood," death in its train, into the world as 
from Adam. But, as St. Paul himself says (Gal. i, 16), ec Christ was 
revealed in me" Jesus, whom he had persecuted, now became the 
centre of his personal life ; but, inasmuch as by persecuting Christians, 
he had been persecuting Christ, it followed that Christ was also the 
centre of all Christian lives, so that Paul and they had one life common 
to all of them Christ's life. This was to become an essential element 
in his existence alike and his preaching. This was to be the " angle " 
from which he contemplated both the world at large, and the Church. 
Hence I hardly think that just now the thought of his destiny in regard 
to the pagans came first in his mind. I think that having seen the role 
that Christ was to play in the world, he simply could not have excluded 
the pagans. Consequential details as to religious observances were 
hardly likely just then to have troubled him. All such casuistry was 
subordinate. What he had never guessed, what now he brooded upon 
till the thought of it became literally a " second nature," was this 
Incorporation into Christ, to which the world was summoned, and to 

1 This name did not yet exist, but it is convenient so to describe the followers of 
Jesus. 



PAUL; APOSTLE, MARTYR 5 

which he was to summon the world ; and the immediate consequence, 
his own co-corporation with every Christian and all men were 
potential Christians. Every veil that had shrouded the earth was now 
torn away for him : the Church Christ were to become co-extensive 
with the world, and with every man for ever. It was his special 
vocation to preach that. 

But the second crisis must surely have been a moral one. However 
heroic a man may be, if but he is sensitive (and Paul certainly was that) 
he cannot feel anything but appalled by the thought that he, who has 
lived in a blaze of publicity, whose name has been created in one way, 
must now come forth into no less a publicity, renouncing everything 
that so far he has proclaimed. Paul had not yet learnt humility-^at 
least, he had not had time to practise more than a very little of it ; 
undoubtedly the vision of Christ had hurled him once and for all off 
the pinnacle of his pride, but the " old self" was many a time to make 
itself felt, and to return to his own people, preaching Christ, and 
foreseeing what indeed happened, that the Christians themselves 
would be incredulous of such a conversion, and that he might find 
himself if not excluded from their community, at least anxiously 
received and chillily into it and being a man belonging nowhere and 
to nothing that was appalling ! Save that he knew himself to be as 
truly now " in Christ,"" as Christ was " in him." " Christ was revealed 
in me" 

Saul returned to Damascus and, as one might have expected, roused 
the orthodox Jews to an absolute frenzy .of passion and they vowed to 
murder him. He escaped to Jerusalem, but there it was the 
Hellenized Jews whose fury blazed up against him (why it should have 
been they, it is hard to see ; just possibly he approached them first, 
feeling that the others would be hopelessly obdurate), and again, at 
the urgent request of the Faithful, who were, I take it, afraid for their 
entire community, for they did not yet thoroughly know and appreciate 
the disconcerting convert, he fled. 

He went home to Tarsus, and there, proving that it was not any 
fanaticism of his that had stirred up these savageries, he remained 
working quietly for a minimum (so I should calculate) of three years and 
possibly more. Nor did he return southwards till he was fetched by 
Barnabas who had befriended him in the nervous days at Jerusalem. 
Barnabas had been sent to see what was happening at Antioch, whence 
tales of pagans being received into the Church were arriving. Barnabas 
was so impressed by what he saw that he went off in person to Tarsus 
and fetched Saul back with him. 

In A.D. 43 a prophet Agabus announced that a great famine was 
impending, and the Antiochene Christians anticipated it by making a 
collection which they sent by Barnabas and Saul to Jerusalem. Herod 



6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Agrippa's persecution must just then have been raging there, but that 
king died suddenly and horribly while celebrating games in honour of 
the Emperor and after having himself been acclaimed as a god. This 
altered the whole situation. Rome resumed the government of the 
territories that had been given to Agrippa and the pagan power 
ensured peace for the Church, just then, such as Jewish rule never could. 
And coincidently with this not only was Saul transported in ecstasy 
to the " third heaven " and heard " words that never can be spoken " 
(for it was too at this point, we hold, that the spiritual marvels related in 
2 Cor. xii, 2-4, may best be referred), but, it was revealed that Saul 
and Barnabas were to be " set aside " in view of a special work, which 
was, in fact, the first deliberately organized missionary journey 
equipped by the Church. The Apostles and their associates had 
travelled into Samaria, up to Antioch, proselytes and pagans had 
already become Christians, the Antiochene Christians had in fact 
become so numerous as to receive that very name as a nickname ; but 
casual events had dictated this. A world-mission, spontaneously 
undertaken because according to the Will of God, was something new. 

This new sort of enterprize is what is here important, rather than the 
details of its implementing. We do not propose to relate the missionary 
journeys that now continuously succeeded one another. It is the whole 
colour of the Christian Church, henceforward unmistakable, that 
concerns us. She definitely is determined to Christianize the world, and 
it can be shown that when she was not missionary in act, this was 
because for various reasons (such as persecution or war) she could 
not be. Herein the Catholic and Catholicizing idea clashes with the 
modern spirit save in so far as that spirit is Communist. Communism 
too is a missionary creed and proposes to change not only a class or a 
country but the world. In very many ways the Christian and the 
Communist movements and indeed the imperial Roman idea and 
system could be compared. Shall we say that the Communist works 
by means of violence and hate ; the Roman Caesar-god, by means of 
violence and scorn ; the Christian, by peaceful methods and with love ? 
There is enough, in those words, to go on with. They do not exhaust 
the facts, but they are more true than false, and all of them are 
antagonistic at any rate to the average English sentiment, which is 
individualist, dislikes propaganda of any sort, and objects strongly 
to interference either with opinion or with " conscience." Yet after 
all, Paul was to come up against something of that sort later on. 1 

The expedition began quietly enough. They went to Cyprus, 
which not only was close at hand, but was Barnabas's home-island* 
The chief event of their stay there was the abrupt transformation of 

l As a matter of fact, we are just beginning, politically to use " propaganda," in 
sheer self-defence against the flood of anti-British propaganda too often broadcast. 



PAUL; APOSTLE, MARTYR 7 

Saul into Paul, and his unquestioned emergence into first place. And 
whatever Barnabas may have thought of Paul's decision forthwith 
to cross the water into the malaria-haunted, brigand-infested ravines 
and mountains of Pamphylia, the young John Mark, a cousin of 
Barnabas, who also was with them, decided to go home and in fact 
went. Later on, when Barnabas proposed to Paul that they should 
again take him with them, Paul flatly refused, so that an embitterment 
occurred between him and Barnabas, who was replaced by Silas. 
However, later still, Mark became not only the assistant and " secre- 
tary " of St. Peter, but was of the highest assistance to St. Paul. 

Religious art has perhaps accustomed us to ail-too placid a picture 
of the Apostles and of St. Paul in particular. The ferocious youth did 
not suddenly curb the tumults that at a moment could rage up within 
him. But never was there anything mean or petty, idle or merely 
resentful about Paul's wrath. He was the most generous-hearted of 
men, as a score of passages in his letters show ; the most sensitive, most 
" temperamental," as we should say, the most mercurial of men. He 
was capable of black depressions and also, we recall, often felt ill ; 
he' could blaze up into exultation ; he was infinitely tender ; he was 
liable to be almost overwhelmed with gratitude both to God and to 
man ; he held, together with his vast visions, an intimate memory and 
appreciation of individuals ; he felt loneliness acutely, yet was ready 
to deprive himself even of his last companion, if but he could thus 
be of service to others who were in need. 

We spoke of his " vast vision." Yet we do not think, as Sir W. M. 
Ramsay loved to argue with much skill, that Paul deliberately formed a 
mental map of the Roman Empire, saw in it an organization geo- 
graphically " Ghrjstianizable " ; that he valued the Greek city-state 
as contrasted with oriental despotisms and the Jewish legalist theocracy ; 
and that though he practically never, or never, mentions art, philosophy, 
politics, history and the like, he was well-educated in all of them. I 
believe that Paul acted direct from his "revelation"; that he 
proceeded or refrained according as he felt himself urged or checked 
by the Spirit, and that his education had not been of the sort that 
Ramsay pictures. I fear that that admirable student, who has done 
more than most men to display to us the material world through which 
Paul moved, is none the less too anxious to make us Englishmen think 
well of him as of a man who had had a " liberal education " and was 
also an organizing genius. Paul managed his journeys sensibly : 
he proceeded according to a very simple plan from place to place, and 
he was apt to come back over the same ground " confirming the 
churches." He was " methodical " in due measure, but not a sort 
of missionary Napoleon ; and it is perhaps because Ramsay does not 
really grasp Paul's supernaturalism that he does not realize how far 



3 GREAT CATHOLICS 

out of perspective all those other elements would have sunk for him, if 
not have vanished altogether. 

Of course I do not mean that Paul never adapted himself to circum- 
stances, but he was far more prepared to expect circumstances to 
adapt themselves to him, or rather, to God. He preached a really 
charming little sermon of " natural religion " to the rough Lystrians ; 
and at Athens he really does seem to have tried to talk " philo- 
sophically," and even quoted an abstract line about God from a Greek 
poet ; but the experiment did not succeed, and he went on to the far less 
promising mercantile and most licentious town, Corinth, very depressed, 
sick, frankly frightened, and all the more determined to " know 
nothing " amongst the Corinthians save " Christ and Him crucified." 
" Wiser than men is God's folly ; stronger than men, His 
weakness . . ." (i Cor. i, 25). Who but Paul would have had the 
courage to say just that ? 

What he had already realized and now saw with extreme clarity 
was, that Christianity was continuous with, and yet in essence different 
from Judaism, and that this involved the complete liberation of the 
Christian not indeed from the moral Law proclaimed by Moses, but 
from all the ritual regulations of the Older Testament, not to dwell on 
the thousand-and-one customs that tradition had piled up during the 
centuries. We need not discuss in any detail this negative aspect of his 
message. He had to fight for his view, but at Jerusalem Peter settled 
the matter dogmatically in Paul's favour, indeed he had himself 
already proclaimed the same truth against, to be sure, his instinct. 
Remember that the Jew loved his hereditary possessions even when they 
irked him. Of course a number of " casuistical " questions cropped up. 
Pagan converts were not obliged to submit to Jewish regulations even 
circumcision granted ! But what of the Jewish convert ? Might 
he discard them ? Would it be, not obligatory, but laudable, in the 
pagan convert, to adopt those immemorial practices ? And so forth. 
The first half of Paul's Christian missionary career was occupied with 
questions of this sort. 

But also, and far more positively, and constructively, with the Free 
Gift of God, which we now call technically cc Grace." And therefore, 
with no abstraction, but with Him who was that Gift " If but you 
knew the Gift of God ! " "I, who am speaking with you, am He." 
He saves. Not the Greek philospher, not the Hebrew legalist, could 
save the world. " We, we preach Christ, Christ crucified to the Jews, 
a shocking thing ; to the Greeks, a silly thing ; but to us, to us who 
are called, whether Jew or Greek, Christ the Power of God, and the 
Wisdom of God ! " Then follow the words we quoted above. 

This led up to something still more positive and more " vital." 
Christ did not save us instead of us. What He did, living, dying, and 



PAUL; APOSTLE, MARTYR $ 

rising, was done for us, not instead of. Herein is cleft the chasm that 
separates the Catholic from the es Reformer," who emphasized just 
that " instead.' 5 God does not accept Christ " instead of" us : He 
accepts Him, because in Him we are incorporate : He accepts us, 
because in us is now Christ and the life of Christ. " If a man be in 
Christ lo ! a new creature ! . . . We, in Him, are to become the 
Righteousness of God ! " (2 Cor. vi, i). " With Christ am I co- 
crucified ; I live, no longer /, but Christ is living in me." (Gal. ii). 
" All you who have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ. 
There exists no more Jew versus Greek, there exists no more slave 
versus free man, nay, no more so much as female versus male all you 
are one person in Jesus Christ." (ib. iii, 27). " To be circumcised to be 
uncircumcised that is nothing ! But a new creation!" (ib. vi, 15). 
Such was the theme that Paul expounded to the untutored uplander 
Galatians no less than to the hearty sensualists the Corinthians, and 
again, in much greater development, to the Romans. And at what 
cost 

Bruised, but not broken ; dismayed, yet not despairing ; hunted, 
yet not fainting ; stoned, but never slain ever bearing about in our 
very body the killing of the Lord Jesus, so that the Life too of Jesus 
may be revealed in this our dying flesh ! . . . Therefore play we not 
the coward ! but even though this our outward man be being 
worn away, yet from day to day our inner self is being renewed ; 
for the trivial anguish of the moment works out for us overwhelmingly, 
overwhelmingly, an eternal weight of glory for we look, not on 
things visible, but on things unseen 1 (a Cor. iii, 7-18). 

Oh, I reckon the sufferings of the moment as not worthy to be 
counted in view of the glory to be revealed in our regard ! Creation 
itself is eager, expectant, of the revelation of God's Sons ! Creation 
was once enthralled and made perverse . . . but she preserved hope, 
seeing that she herself shall be freed, one day, from her destructive 
slavery into the freedom of the glory of the Children of God. Yes 
we know that the whole of creation until this very time joins in our 
groaning, travails along with us, yearning for your adoption, for the 
ransom of our humanity . . . Ah! we know that for those who love 
God, He maketh all things to work together for good ! . . . What 
then are we to say to that ? If God is for us, who is against us ? God 
who spared not His own Son, but gave Him over for us all how then 
shall He not give us all things together with Him ? Who can lay 
charge against the elect of God, God ' ? But God justifies us ! 
Who can condemn us ? ' Christ Jesus ' ? But He died no, rather, 
He rose He is at the right hand of God, and is interceding for us ! 
Who then shall separate us from the love of Christ ? Affliction, or 
stress, or persecution, or hunger, or nakedness, or danger, or the 
sword ? . . . But in these very things we mare than conquer, through 
Him who loved us ! Ah I know well that neither death nor life, 



10 GREAT CATHOLICS 

nor angels, nor spirits, nor the present, nor the future, nor powers, 

nor height, nor depth, nor any thing created shall be able to separate 

us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord ! (Romans 

viii) . 

You see here that the ecstatic acclaim of the divine Charity, which 
raises the 1 3th Chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians to a level 
reached by no uninspired document in world, was realized in Paul, 
He had passed into a world where not the Jewish nationalism, and 
certainly not the confused and tormented aspirations of any part of 
the pagan world could any more preoccupy him, but Christ only, and 
God in Christ, and Christ in him. 

You can read in the Acts the vigorously told story of Paul's arrests, 
culminating in that which brought about his appeal to Caesar, and his 
transportation to Rome, and his first sojourn there. Did St. Luke 
mean to write a second volume about Paul ? Possibly, and I think that 
in fact he did ; if he did, it is lost to us, as many of Paul's own letters 
are lost. But enough survive to enable us to see into whatever 
sublimer realms this supreme doctrine of our incorporation into Christ 
lifted Paul, especially in regard to its consequences in the Christian, 

The great Epistles which matter to us here are those to the 
Philippians, the Colossians and the Ephesians, of which the last bears 
somewhat the same relation to the second as Romans does to Galatians, 
save that it was meant to be an Encyclical and sent from one church 
to another. Disliking to insist on what Paul was combating seeing 
that what has mattered in him was his positive, embracing, and 
constructive vision and work we can say very briefly that what was 
to be called " Gnosticism " dawned already from beneath his horizon. 
There are those who hold that when St. John, in his Apocalypse, brings 
upon his scene a delegated Wild Beast who " spoke like a lamb ..." 
but none the less was doing exactly what Satan's supreme representative 
the Wild Beast " from over-seas," Imperial Rome was doing, he meant 
by this Second Beast, so mealy-mouthed, that flattering philosophy 
which says that everyone is right after their fashion ; religions are 
but variant symbolical forms of the One ineffable Truth. Thus no 
form of religion need be reprobated save one which might say that it 
was the only authenticated Faith, the only quite true-Truth. St. 
Paul undoubtedly alludes quite often to this rising Theosophism, of 
which we have so much nowadays, over against the crude atheism of 
the thorough-paced Communist, But, I repeat, I wish to conclude 
with what was Paul, not by insisting on what was anti-Paul or that 
against which he wrote. 

There now comes into his letters, again and again, the word Pleroma. 
He means by that, first, that the Plenitude of the Divinity resides 
totally in Christ, and is not gradually diluted through a whole series 



PAUL; APOSTLE, MARTYR // 

of Intermediate beings like " spirits " until man be reached. He means 
too that in Christ Is the full storehouse of all those graces in which we 
are meant, through Him alone, to participate. And finally, by 
" Plenitude, 55 he means that Perfect Christ, that Christ who is still 
growing to His " maturity " ; that Christ who is " the Head of the 
Church that is His Body, the Fulfilling of Him who is thus fully 
fulfilling Himself in all" (Eph. i, 23). 

Christ is 

The reflection of God the Invisible, 

Born first, before all creation. 

Yes, in Him were created all things, 

Things in heaven, or on earth, 

Things visible or invisible 

Be they thrones or dominations, principalities or powers 

By means of Him, and unto Him, they all of them were created. 

And Himself is prior to all, 

And in Himself do all things hold together ; 

Yes, and Himself is the Head of the Body, that is, of the Church, 

He who is Origin, and again, Firstborn from the dead, 

So that He might in all things stand forth First 

For in Him it has pleased the Father to make the whole Plenitude to 

dwell. 

God has willed to make known the richness of the glory of this Mystery 
among the very pagans namely, Christ in you> our hope of glory ! 
Him we proclaim, urging it on every man . . . that we may present 
every man mysteriously perfected in Christ. Yes for this do I 
strain and struggle, in the measure of that energy of His that 
energises so mightily in me ! (Eph. i, 12-29). 

All this God set forth in Christ 5 s person, to be dispensed to us as 
the ages grew to their fulfilment. He willed to bring all things as 
to a head in Christ things heavenly and things earthly alike in 
Christ, seeing that in Him we have our lot assigned to us. ... 
(and I pray) that you indeed may know what is the hope to which 
He calls you what is the wealth of His inheritance among the 
saints ; what is the overwhelming greatness of His power towards 
you who believe ... for it is on the scale of the energy of the might 
of His strength that He made to act in the person of Christ, raising 
Him from the dead. . . . Yes, all things hath He set under His feet, 
and Him hath He set as Head Supreme for the Church that is, 
His Body the fulfilling of Him who is fulfilling Himself, fully, 
in all things. (Ibid.) 

I would have wished to quote much more from St. Paul, including 
that Epistle to the Hebrews that has been too rashly dissociated from 
him. I should have liked to dwell on Kis martyrdom which must have 



12 GREAT CATHOLICS 

been almost quite solitary. The " Healthful Fountains " still whisper 
beneath the whispering trees where they beheaded him, and you may 
find it easier to pray to him there than in his vast basilica under which 
still his body lies. 

But I have no space for that. I have wished to indicate certain 
turning-points in his career ; certain ways in which he was made to 
be a fit instrument in the hands of Christ, for the Christianization of 
the world, and, I might say, for its salvation even temporal. For 
until man, and men, are understood and treated as Paul knew them, 
and was fain to treat them, no method is likely to be devised even for 
their earthly welfare individual or social ; and no method at all can 
be invented for the gathering of them together into the everlasting 
divine-human Society. Negatively, Paul had to labour at the tedious 
task of convincing many among the first Christians that salvation was 
in no way bound up with the Mosaic ritual ; positively, he had to 
proclaim with all the force of his Christ-indwelt personality that it 
was bound up with Christ and with Him alone. This, and again 
his own experience, led him to insist on the freedom of this redemption ; 
on Grace. And this, in its turn, to insist on the consequences of 
Grace Incorporation into Christ ; co-corporation with all who 
were thus incorporate in Him. Hence the construction of the only 
true Society, both on this earth, and in heaven ; for, in God's plan, 
human nature is destined for and called to Super-Nature, and, save, 
in Christ, man does not reach its true self at all. From this, flowing 
downwards, come all those consequences of charity, unity and peace, 
which not one of our modern political, economic, diplomatic or other 
schemes have even begun to produce. We need not enter further 
into those consequences ; anyone can see that our world at present 
schismatic, unstable, mendacious, is unlike, antagonistic to, GOD, the 
One, the Eternal, and the True ; and that our hatreds, wars, and 
bitter divisions between men, are hostile to the Eucharistic virtues of 
Charity, Peace and Unity. Others, writing in this series upon great 
Catholics will (even unconsciously) show how these were the very 
things for and by which they lived. 



ENID DINNIS 



ST. PAULA 



A.D. 347~44 

THE HISTORY OF St. Paula (A.D. 347-404) is in one sense the story 
of a Movement the great monastic movement amongst women 
in the Christian Church. Paula's name is not to be separated from 
that of her daughter, Eustochium, of Melania, Marcella, and other 
great Catholic women of the period that succeeded the persecutions, 
a period when Christianity was kneeling at the tombs of the martyrs 
without emulating their spirit. 

It was the hand that greedily collected and conserved the writings 
of St. Jerome that fortuitously preserved for posterity the story of 
Paula. It remains enshrined in the letters of that mighty scribe, and 
St. Paula is ours to-day with all the rich detail of her wonderful life 
and achievement, no cold, classical figure carved in marble, but a 
flesh-and-blood woman, inasmuch as Jerome, her friend and biographer/" 
was a flesh-and-blood saint, a drop of whose heart's blood was mingled* 
with the ink in which he wrote her story. It comes to us as wan/T 
and living as the story handed down by tradition, although the 
succeeding ages have not clothed it in the warm garments of 
legendary lore. 

St. Paula lived in an age in many ways akin to our own. She is 
far more modern than the saints of mediaeval times. Christianity at^ 
the time that she enters into our story was out of the catacombs.. 
Christians were making mixed marriages. Paula's husband was a'y 
pagan, although her own family was devoutly Christian. She came of v 
one of the noblest families in the Empire. St. Jerome lays careful' 
stress on her high birth, inasmuch as it became the instrument of a' 
great renunciation. Paula's marriage was a perfectly happy one. 
She had five children, of whom Eustochium was the fourth. The 
youngest was the only boy, and he remained unbaptized. The four 
.girls were brought up to be devout Christians like their mother. 

We see Paula leading the life of a Roman patrician lady ; mixing 
with the pagan world, scornful of its follies but falling in with its 
conventions. She painted her face as the other Roman ladies did ; 

14 



ST. PAULA JJ 

wore gilt shoes ; was carried about in a litter by slaves, and took her 
daily bath in luxury which our own day might comprehend but which 
would have amazed the Victorians. 

Paganism was dying ; Christianity was in the ascendant. The 
Pope occupied the Imperial Palace, vacated for political reasons 
by the Emperor. The danger to Christianity came from friendship 
rather than enmity with the unbeliever. Softness and luxury, not 
to say vice, were creeping in. Against this state of things there came 
a strong reaction. Certain groups of Christians adopted an austere 
form of life. Many fled to the desert and lived in cells remote from 
the perils of the pagan cities. These were the famous Fathers of the 
Desert. 

In Rome itself there were seen Christian virgins and widows who 
exchanged their finery for a rough brown gown and veiled their 
heads in place of an elaborate head-dress. These consecrated their 
lives to God. Paula made her friends amongst them. Foremost 
was Marcella, whose name figures in the Martyrology. 

Marcella was an immensely wealthy woman who at her husband's 
death had consecrated herself to a single life and her goods to the 
poor. St. Athanasius, as a monk from the desert, had stirred her 
eart, as Rufinus had stirred the heart of the valiant woman Melania, 
was now established in a convent of virgins near Mount Olivet, 
in Palestine. Marcella turned her palace on the Aventine into 
V convent for the young maidens who had vowed themselves to 
** virginity. The sister of St. Ambrose, Marcellina, was one of those 
^whom she mothered, and it was for her community that the saint 
wrote his famous treatise on virginity. 

Paula looked upon Marcella as a sister, and the little Eustochium 
regarded her as a second mother. It was to Marcella that Paula 
took the child when the stunning blow of her husband's death fell 
upon her. 

^ Paula was left a widow at the age of thirty-one. Her grief was 

. tempestuous. She became ill enough for her life to be despaired of. 

( Strong human feelings found a free vent, but in her soul there was 

j no spirit of defeat. She accepted her husband's death as a sign 

that God had called her to a higher life. When she turned her back 

* on the world to embrace the consecrated life it was no sullen hugging 

of a life-sorrow, but a ready response to a call to a new and higher 

enterprise. 

Complete retirement from the world was impossible, for she had 
her children to bring up, but the radical change which took place 
in Paula's life was that which is called conversion. Not, indeed, 
the abandonment of an evil life for a good one, but the ceasing to 
measure out the ointment Paula broke her alabaster vase over 



16 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the feet of her Lord. She was as extravagant as Mary Magdalen, 
and incurred as much censure. 

She fasted and prayed ; visited the sick and the poor in their 
hovels, and practised severe mortifications, keeping pace with 
Marcella and her virgins with whom she loved to spend her time, 
chanting the psalms and studying the Scriptures. 

The Christian spirituality of that era was derived from a deep 
study of y and delight in, the Holy Scriptures. Piety expressed itself 
in visits paid to the tombs of the martyrs which the reigning Pope 
had restored and beautified. Paula and little Eustochium frequently 
made these visits together. The latter was destined to become her 
mother's companion through all the high adventures to which she 
was being led. Paula's other daughters remained attached to the 
world until the sudden widowhood of Blesilla, the eldest, after seven 
months of married life led to her conversion to a life that rivalled her 
mother's in austerity. 

Paula's pagan relatives there were many on her husband's side 
made a great outcry against her new mode of life ; nor were certain 
of her Christian friends over-pleased. Her excesses rebuked their 
mediocrity. Even some who wore the brown gown and demure veil 
were not above getting the best of two worlds. Marcella and her 
following had all the stern qualities of the Fathers of the Desert 
their counterblast to the softness which was sapping the strength of 
the Christian life was no timid one. Yet a gentle child like Eustochium 
could hear in it the voice of the Good Shepherd of the catacombs. 

In the year 382 came events which were to develop Paula's life 
on the lines she had chosen. The bishops of the Church were 
assembled in Rome and Paula was chosen to act as hostess to St. 
Epiphanius. From the latter she heard stories of the desert monas- 
teries and the wonderful lives led by the monks there. Far from the 
glitter and turmoil of pagan Rome, Paula pictured that peace in which 
God speaks to the heart which He has called forth into the solitude. 
That symbolic desert place of the Scripture was still to her a 
geographical one. 

But there were her children. She was still tied to the world. 

It is at this juncture that St. Jerome appears on the scene one 
had almost said " screen ", for Paula's life makes a series of pictures 
that form themselves in the mind as one reads it. St. Jerome ; the 
fierce monk from the desert, the genius with the artist's temperament 
the man of letters who had cast off the spell of Greek and Roman 
profane literature and made the Holy Scriptures his sole library. 
Jerome the saint. 

It was Jerome who was to bring Paula to her full spiritual 
stature. 



ST. PAULA /7 

As for St. Jerome ; in Rome, the benighted city given over to 
softness and vice, he made a discovery. There existed a body of 
noble Christian women who had the courage to lead a life of prayer 
and amazing austerity. Pope Damasus appointed Jerome to give 
a series of conferences on the Holy Scriptures to these same women. 
The monk was somewhat afraid of the other sex 3 but he had no 
choice. Paula was one of those who attended the conferences. 
St. Jerome gives us an idea of the red-hot enthusiasm of the members 
of this Study Circle. He was kept busy by the urgent demands 
of Paula and Marcella to elucidate the difficult passages which they 
encountered when he led them into " the meadow of the Holy 
Scriptures." They would send their own solutions along to him 
by a messenger who was instructed not to return without an answer. 
Jerome wrote these answers at night after his other work was done 
and the messenger must have exercised much patience. They 
formed valuable little treatises on the subject under discussion, 
extracted from him by the wiles of his feminine pupils. It was a 
preliminary to the part which Paula was to play in regard to the 
literary output of the Master-theologian. In years to come the 
bright shadow of Paula would fall across many a priceless script 
produced under duress when Jerome's temperament was at war 
with the magnitude of his task. 

From Jerome Paula learnt the hidden wisdom of the Sacred Text. 
She made contacts with the Mind of God concealed from the reader who 
does not pierce the rind and reach the pith. She and Marcella 
set themselves to learn Hebrew so that they might enter more 
perfectly into the study of the Scriptures. They chanted the Psalms 
in Hebrew in the convent where Marcella gathered her religious 
family. 

St. Jerome called these studies " the food of prayer ", and such 
they certainly were, for prayer was the main occupation of Paula's 
life. Nevertheless, her duty to her children was performed faithfully 
and with passionate devotion. Her outburst of grief at the untimely 
death of her eldest daughter, Blesilla, was as stupendous as her 
widow's grief had been. We find Paula making a very human lapse 
into her natural self on this occasion. There was pomp and splendour 
at Blesilla's funeral. As time went on Paula collected a community 
to live in her own house. St. Jerome called it " the domestic church." 
Rome became agog with the scandal of these patrician women who 
were enticing young girls to give up the idea of marriage and lead 
lives of austerity. St. Jerome turned the scourge of his pen on these 
critics. He knew how to do it. His invectives have come down 
to us together with his other writings. It was doubtless this warmth 
of expression that made him many enemies. 



l8 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Paula was charged with squandering her children's patrimony 
she was indeed fast spending her substance on the poor and on good 
works. She arranged to make over a great part of her fortune to her 
children. She had come to loathe Rome, with its glittering paganism, 
its shallow and inadequate expression of Christianity. One can 
picture the comfortably-off Christian ladies being carried by their 
slaves to the tombs of the martyrs as a sort of fashionable devotion. 
Even the sermons of the stern men from the desert may have had 
a value as a society diversion ? Paula's day was very much like ours. 
At any rate Rome had become intolerable. In the solitudes alone 
could peace and union with God be found. 

Her great longing was to visit the Holy Land and if possible take 
her virgins with her, and her daughter Eustochium. The latter was 
now wearing the brown garment and veil of the consecrated women. 
From her other children she would have to separate herself. It was 
a terrible thought. The two youngest were still children. Paula 
faced it out. Her life was formed on heroic lines ; but she had a 
heart of flesh. " Have I a heart of iron ? " St. Jerome had cried, when 
faced with a sacrifice of human affections, " Am I made of stone, and 
was I suckled by a tigress ? " Paula could have said the same. But 
she held by her purpose. Reproaches were showered upon her by 
her pagan relatives. St. Jerome came in for his share from his 
fellow Christians. Amongst other things they brought charges against 
him of mutilating the Scriptures in his translations. They also 
attacked his moral character and Paula's. Jerome retaliated, 
scathing the vices of the age. Paula did her best to restrain the wrath 
of the fiery man of God that was to be her role for many a year to 
come. The death of Pope Damasus occurred about this time. Rome 
had become hateful indeed. In the desert alone would be found peace 
and opportunity for service. 

Jerome left Rome for the East in the August of 385. Paula completed 
her preparations and followed him soon after with Eustochium and 
some of her virgins and widows. A description of her departure has 
come down to us from St. Jerome's vivid pen. As the vessel that 
was to bear her away broke loose from its moorings Toxotius, her 
young son, stood on the shore with outstretched arms as though he 
would follow her. Her youngest daughter, Rufina, was there weeping 
silently. Paula's heart was torn in two. Paulina was happily 
married, but these two were still children. St. Jerome would have 
it that Paula's love for her children was greater than that of any 
other mother. Christianity strengthened rather than lessened the 
natural love. There were her friendships, too. Marcella had been 
pressed to accompany Paula on her journey, but the former's aged 
mother was still alive, and that constituted a tie in the eyes of the 



ST. PAULA 19 

Christian woman who would so readily have sacrificed everything. 
There were other friends whom she would never see again in all 
probability. Eustochium alone was at her mother's side. The 
two are never separated in Paula's story. 

Paula journeyed first to the Isle of Cyprus where she visited St. 
Epiphanius, her former guest. At Antioch she found St. Jerome 
awaiting her to be her guide on the pilgrimage to the Holy Land 
which she had undertaken to make before visiting the monasteries 
in the desert. 

The story of Paula's travels, her wanderings in the desert, her 
journeying midst many perils, her various visits to the Holy Places, 
would be too long to describe even in outline. One may make a 
picture of the caravan. Jerome and his companions riding on 
horses, Paula and hers on asses. Paula saw now with her bodily 
eyes the land into which she had made so many spiritual excursions, 
the land of the Old Testament and the New. She refused to lodge in 
the Pro- Consul's palace at Jerusalem, choosing a humble lodging near 
Calvary. The Central event of History was then removed by a space of 
less than four hundred years. It was as near to Paula as the Elizabethan 
times are to us. The new church erected by St. Helena had but 
recently arisen on the site of Calvary. The rediscovered holy Cross 
of our redemption was there to receive adoration. But it was the 
cave at Bethlehem that made its supreme appeal to the imagination 
of Paula. It was the Bethlehem of the Nativity. She saw there the 
manger in which Our Lord was laid, before which she was to spend 
so many hours in prayer and ecstasy. " Here," she cried, " I have 
found my rest ! " 

Paula decided that when her journey to the desert of Egypt was 
accomplished she would settle down with her community at Bethlehem. 

Near Mount Olivet there stood the monasteries governed by the 
pioneers, Rufinus and Melania. Paula and her companions visited 
these. The meeting between the two women must have been a 
memorable occasion, worthy of an artist's brush. It has been passed 
over by the biographer's pen for sad reasons to be explained later in 
Paula's story. 

Before settling at Bethlehem the travellers crossed the Nile and 
visited Alexandria, a city of immense intellectual activity. They 
were entertained by the Bishop and attended conferences on the 
Holy Scriptures at the great Christian School. After this they 
adventured into the desert in search of the monks and anchorites, 
the men of the solitude who lived for the things of Eternity alone. 
They journeyed, going at times without food or drink, encountering 
crocodiles with open jaws, foundering in quagmires. In wild and 
terrible deserts they guided themselves by the stars. Such was St. 



20 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Paula's pilgrimage. She was rewarded by being at length introduced 
to men of whom she cried in rapture, " these are not mortal men 
but angels ! " 

Alack ! Human nature was to betray itself later on, even in the 
Solitudes. 

The journey took the best part of a year. Paula then found herself 
once more in Bethlehem, free to develop her great scheme for founding 
a monastery for women near to the Church of the Nativity. She also 
set about providing a house for St. Jerome and his companions. 
During the building of the monasteries they found temporary quarters, 
and the new life shaped itself. On her return to Bethlehem Paula 
was greeted by the news of the death of her young daughter Rufina. 
The lesson of the anchorites had not dehumanized her. Paula wept 
for Rufina as she had wept for Blesilla. It broke another link with 
the world she had left. 

Peace permeated the life led by Paula and her companions. They 
cultivated their) garden, and walked out on the hillside singing 
psalms and drinking in the beauties of nature. Paula alluded to Rome 
as a dungeon. Not even the superintending of the building of her 
new convent came between her soul and God, As for St. Jerome, 
he was plunging more deeply than ever into the Holy Scriptures in 
the cave which he had made his cell. Paula and Eustochium 
persuaded him to read the entire Bible through with them, and incited 
him to embark on the commentaries and translations which might 
almost be called their united gift to the Church. St. Jerome was 
an indefatigable worker when once started, but he had the tempera- 
ment, apparently, which is given to magnify difficulties at the outset. 
The strong spirit of Paula was at grips with his despondency all through. 

It would seem that the solitude had given Paula and Jerome the 
peace which they sought. When Albina, Marcella's aged mother, 
died, the three, Jerome, Paula and Eustochium made a drive to get 
Marcella to come and join them. The letter written to her by Paula 
and Eustochium has come down to us. " Friendship does not know 
how to contain itself : impatience admits of no delay," they wrote. 
It was quite an impenitent impatience : " We conjure you to come to 
us, to give us back our dear Marcella, sweeter to us than any name on 
earth." Every argument is brought forward to induce Marcella to 
exchange Rome for the land where her friends had found their rest. 
Marcella is wooed by descriptions of the life in Bethlehem, challenged 
by trenchant comparisons. " Here all is simple and peaceful, and save 
for hymns and psalms nothing interrupts the silence. You hear the 
peasant, driving his plough, chanting the Alleluia : you see the 
reaper, binding up his sheaves, humming a psalm : the vinedresser, 
tending his vines, repeating to himself the songs of David." 



ST. PAULA SI 

Paula's letter ends delightfully : " Oh, when will the day come 
when a breathless courier will bring us the good news, * Marcella, 
our Marcella, has landed in Palestine. 3 Already we see ourselves 
rushing to you to throw ourselves in your arms.' 5 

St. Jerome also wrote a long letter in the same strain. But in 
spite of the united eloquence of the three, Marcella withstood the 
invitation. She remained in Rome ; and time was to prove that the 
escape offered to her from the persistent humanness of Human Nature 
was not as complete as had been represented. 

But for the time being all went well. Pilgrims flocked in immense 
numbers to Bethlehem. Paula's hospice became famous. By the end 
of three years, both monasteries, with their churches, had been 
completed. The description of them is interesting. Each building 
was surrounded by a high wall and guarded by a watch tower. The 
rule followed was that of the cenobites. Paula's community met at 
stated times in the chapel to sing the psalms and recite prayers. 
They were wakened by the Alleluia, and it summoned them to choir 
at the third, sixth and ninth hours, and in the watches of the night. 
The entire Psalter was sung daily, and each one had to learn it by 
heart. On Sundays the community went for the celebration of the 
Holy Mysteries to the church of the Nativity. They wore a habit 
of white wool and used no linen except for wiping their hands. 
Paula and Eustochium always undertook the meanest offices ; a 
stranger would have taken them for the humblest members of the 
community. 

St. Jerome wrote exultingly to Pammachius, Paula's son-in-law, 
" These daughters of the Scipios and the Gracchi, delicate women who 
at one time found silken dresses too weighty, who could not step on 
the muddy roads and only went out borne by slaves in a gilded litter, 
now wear a coarse habit, and having become hardened to toil, they 
may be seen lighting fires, cleaning lamps, sweeping, preparing 
vegetables, cooking and serving dinner and running hither and 
thither like slaves." 

During these peacefully ordered days we do not learn anything of 
Paula's intercourse with Melania and her community. They were 
not far away, and intercourse there must have been. But, alas ! 
there was destined to come about an estrangement between Jerome 
and Rufinus in which the two noble women were fated to be involved. 

From this point Paula's story becomes one of long-continued trial 
and the bitterest sorrow. The serpent had entered Eden. The 
holy men who had placed a desert between themselves and " the 
gaudy porticos of Rome " whilst renouncing everything else had 
carried, their human nature with them. Spiritual pride, with its 
attendant vices, reared its head where the sins of the flesh had been 



22 GREAT CATHOLICS 

crushed out of existence. A bitter controversy broke out concerning 
the teachings of Origen, the great Christian apologist. Origen's 
teaching was found by the Church to contain unsound philosophy 
leading to dangerous errors. St. Jerome, who was a great admirer 
of Origen's genius, accepted what was good and rejected the errors. 
Certain others however, and notably Rufinus, embraced the erroneous 
doctrine as a new and highly spiritual development of truth. They 
accused their opponents of grossly material views of the Godhead. 
Controversy raged in the very solitudes where men had fled to find 
unity with God and their fellow-men. Rufinus became St. Jerome's 
bitterest enemy and traducer. The Bishop of Jerusalem sided with 
the heretics, and bringing some trumped-up charge of insubordination 
against Jerome, forbade both his community and Paula's to enter the 
church of the Nativity. Thus Paula was deprived of that which made 
Bethlehem her " House of Bread." A condition of things that lasted 
for three years. 

For three years Paula's gentle strength was pitted against the 
impetuosity of Jerome " the wounded lion." She restrained him from 
entering into an open breach with the persecuting bishop who had 
deprived him of his sacerdotal rights. During that time she was 
subject to incredible insults, instigated, it was said, by Rufinus. The 
story is a long and intricate one. Fabiola, Paula's friend and fellow- 
worker, visited Bethlehem during these sad years. She also visited 
Melania's convent. The latter was in a cruel position. St. Jerome 
could not forgive her for her partizanship with Rufinus ; she herself 
could have had no wish to be in opposition to the friends who had 
followed in her footsteps. Fabiola's position was also full of difficulty. 

In the end it was Melania and Paula who contrived to patch up 
a peace between Jerome and Rufinus. It was not, alas, a lasting one. 
Before that was achieved there was the interpolation of a menace 
from the invading Huns who were said to be on their way to attack 
Jerusalem. Paula and her community seem actually to have had 
to flee for a time to Joppa to be ready to embark and make their 
escape if necessary. The danger was averted however. Fabiola 
returned to Rome, and later on Melania returned thither with Rufinus. 
It was Paula who was destined to remain in the place where she had 
found her rest a peace which was not that which the world calls 
by that name. 

St. Jerome, who had journeyed to Rome to face and refute his 
traducers 3 returned to Bethlehem. Once more " spreading his sails 
to the wind of the Holy Spirit " he took up his pen. He continued 
to write commentaries. " You will it and I must obey," were his 
words to Paula. His correspondence was colossal. All the world 
seemed to be coming to learn theology from him. In the well-known 



ST. PAULA 23 

picture he is represented in his cave with a tame lion lying by his side 
as he writes. Paula, who had tamed the lion in Jerome, does not 
appear in this picture, but she hovers, an invisible presence near his 
side, with Eustochium, who was to carry on her office after her death 
and coax from the semi-blind, tired old man, fresh works to add to 
the heritage of the Catholic Church. 

Eustochium was the only one of Paula's children to survive her. 
News came of Paulina's death. The mother wept, as she had wept 
for the others. Her son, Toxotius, was cut off in his prime. He left 
a little daughter, who was sent out to Paula and Eustochium and who 
became Paula the Younger, the delight of her grandmother's ever- 
human heart. Anxieties crowded in on her. She had come to the 
end of her wealth and had to borrow for the completion of her 
extension to the hospice she was indeed the mother of the harassed 
heads of religious houses ! The austerities that she practised hastened 
the end of her life. In the year 404, at the age of fifty-six, Paula 
breathed her last in the arms of Eustochium. Alleluias and psalms 
of joy greeted the passing of her great soul. The Church was too 
near the age of the martyrs to accustom itself to the Dirge. But the 
poor and the afflicted and Eustochium wept, and Jerome in his cell 
refused to be comforted. They laid Paula to rest in a cave near to 
the Manger. Four hundred years later her body was sent to Sens, in 
France. St. Paula in heaven would not have protested. She had 
learnt, even in this life, that a resting-place is not to be geographically 
defined. 

Paula's story does not end with her death. She lived on in her 
daughter Eustochium. It was Eustochium who gently urged St. 
Jerome to the completion of his gigantic work, the translation of the 
Bible from Hebrew into Latin, when his enemies were " still barking 
round him " ; she who prayed and urged him on whilst he struggled 
with his commentaries on Isaiah and Ezekiel with the news of the 
sack of Rome ringing in his ears. Eustochium, who received the 
exiles from Rome, fleeing from the barbarians, into her hospice. 
Marcella was not one of these, for she had gained the crown of martyr- 
dom in the act of protecting her foster-child, Principia, from the 
savagery of the invaders. Rome had justified its claim on Marcella. 

Eustochium witnessed \he destruction of the monasteries which 
her mother had built, by the Pelagian heretics. She saw them rebuilt. 
She had the happiness of seeing the monasteries on Mount Olivet 
once more flourishing under the rule of Melania the Younger, and 
happily united in friendship with her own. The wind calms down 
and the waters become smooth, and Eustochium goes forth to join 
her mother in the Land of the Living, after fifteen years of patient 
waiting. 



84 GREAT CATHOLICS 

There was one year more left for St. Jerome. He fell asleep In the 
year 420. Paula's grandchild, Eustochium's foster-child, Paula 
the Younger, was there to minister to his last needs. We know no 
more. The story has ended, for Jerome has laid down his pen. 



The writer of this article would acknowledge her 
indebtedness to the nuns of Talacre Abbey for their 
translation and adaptation of The Life of St, Paula by 
the Abbe F. Lagrange. 



REV. HUGH POPE, O.P., S.T.M. 



ST. AUGUSTINE 

Bishop of Hippo 



A.D. 



i 
THE LIFE OF ST. AUGUSTINE 

BROAD OUTLINES of the life of St. Augustine of Hippo are 
J[ familiar. Born A.D. 354 at Tagaste, at school at Madaura whence 
his delicate health compelled his removal for a time, passing to Carthage 
where his excesses distressed his saintly mother, St. Monica, he was 
yet the child of divine predilection and his conversion to the Faith 
and to a saintly life when thirty-three years of age is one of the 
greatest of Christian romances. 

Northern Africa had not forgotten him when he returned to begin 
his real life's work ; and while some recalled his youthful aberrations 
and made unfair capital out of them, others his life-long friend St. 
Paulinus of Nola for example hailed his elevation to the Episcopate 
as marking the dawn of a new era for the harassed Church of Africa. 
Valerius, then the aged Bishop of Hippo, realised the opportunity God 
had offered him and promptly consecrated him, though in so doing 
he unconsciously infringed the Canons of Nicaea decreeing that there 
should never be two Bishops in the same See at the same time. 

To appreciate the forty years that followed we have to form some 
idea of the state of Africa in general and of the African Church in 
particular. The Roman domination seems on the whole to have sat 
lightly on the subject peoples, and it is not easy to discover in African 
literature traces of discontent or rebellion during Augustine's lifetime. 
But the African races formed a motley crowd : they seem to have 
resembled the Athenians " ever employed in hearing or telling some 
new thing." Among the Christians heresy was rife, while the 
Manichaean philosophical speculations which had for nine years 
ensnared Augustine himself, were widespread. Schism was perhaps 
an even greater evil. For since Julian the Apostate, 361-363, the 
Donatists held most of the Catholic Sees, churches and property, and 

26 



ST. AUGUSTINE 27 

cruelly persecuted the Catholic remnant. Later on another heresy, 
Peiagianism, the worst and most long-lived of all, was to exercise 
its baneful influence on the much-enduring African Church. 

If we would form any just estimate of Augustine as the Bishop of his 
flock, as the controversialist and the letter-writer we must bear in 
mind that from the moment of his Ordination, and still more from 
the time of his Consecration, he lived for his people, for the flock 
entrusted to him that he might teach them the way to heaven. If he 
teaches them the profoundest theology it is only because in St. 
Jerome's words " rustic ignorance must not be mistaken for sanctity," 
for the Bishop was convinced that the more he could make his hearers 
think the more solid the foundation of their piety would be. It was 
the same with his immense controversial work. He was never set on 
refuting his adversary by bludgeoning him, but by winning him. 
There were times, it is true, when the tactics of his opponents compelled 
him, as P. Monceaux expresses it, to " hit, hit hard, keep on hitting " ; 
but as a rule his controversial methods were confined to preaching the 
truth, to propaganda and publicity ; with this end in view, he read 
everything his adversaries wrote, he set forth Catholic truth on every 
possible occasion, and he never shirked a conflict. 

But no one reading the Confessions or the earlier Letters can fail to 
realize that the life of a Bishop was the last that Augustine would 
have chosen for himself. For he was by nature the speculative thinker, 
the contemplative philosopher and theologian. Those early years 
after his conversion, when at Cassiciacum or later in his monastery 
at Tagaste, were his ideal. Here he was in his element. Reading, 
discussion, dictating, these filled his life. Had he been left to that life 
of leisure he would have taken rank as one of the world's profoundest 
thinkers. But it was not to be. To his intense dismay he was torn 
from his nest and made a Bishop ! How pathetic his laments that 
now he can no longer hope to know anything about his Bible laments 
repeated to the end, even when consecrating his successor, Heraclius. 
He had revelled in the classics, had been wont, as he himself tells us, 
to read half a book of Virgil a day, was steeped in his Horace and 
Cicero, and of course as a loyal African knew his Terence well. Yet 
all this was laid aside for the needs of his flock. Instead of those 
" profane " authors, Holy Scripture and the Christian writers occupied 
his time. His familiarity with these latter is amazing. He seems to 
have read almost everything St. Jerome had written, though they 
were contemporaries. When arguing with Julian on Original Sin he 
quotes freely from SS. Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Gregory 
of Nazianzen, Jerome, Irenaeus, Basil, Reticius, Olympius and Innocent ; 
these he styles " praeclarissimos episcopos eloquiorum divinorum 
tractatores," " praeclara Ecclesiae lumina." 



28 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Nor was Augustine's Episcopal work confined to the pulpit or to his 
desk. From the outset he was a public personage who ranked high 
in the councils of the Roman officials. Some of these where Christians, 
even saintly Christians. But the majority were pagans who, however, 
treated the Bishop with immense deference when he had occasion to 
appeal to them. For this he often had to do ; so much so that his 
enemies, and even some of his own flock, accused him of being a 
" tuft-hunter/' and the Bishop felt bound to point out that he only 
frequented the civic authorities in the interests of his flock. 



THE KEY TO HIS LIFE- 

Every well-ordered life and what is a Saint's life but a well-ordered 
one ? has its key, its master-thoughts. What were these in the life 
of Augustine, the restless spirit, once the slave of his passions, trying in 
vain to feed his soul on the husks of a false philosophical system, 
throwing himself at length on the bosom of Holy Mother Church, 
becoming a priest against his will, then a Bishop still more against 
his will and dying at last with the Penitential Psalms pinned to the 
wall by his bedside ? The key to this wonderful life will be found, 
we fancy, in what we may term the " passions " of his soul : Truth ; 
the Church which led him to that truth ; Holy Scripture which led 
him to that Church ; the Apostolic See of St. Peter and his successors 
the heads of that Church militant on earth ; and finally the possession 
of God hereafter, the goal of all his desires. 

(a) Truth through the Catholic Church 

Augustine's Confessions, or The Praises of God, penned about A.D. 400 
when he had been a Catholic some thirteen years and a Bishop for five 
years, tell only of his early struggles in his search after the Truth the 
ruling passion of his life. Those undying pages depict the harassed 
voyager who has at length come into harbour. For it was in the 
Catholic Church that Augustine had found "the pearl of great price ", 
that Trilth for which he had, all unknowing, sought all his life, even 
during those passionate years which he has described with such 
poignancy in his Confessions. For him that Church is simply the 
" Catholica " the adjective for the concrete, 1 " We must," he says, 

1 The term " Catholica " occurs 240 times in Augustine's writings : in De Baptismo 
contra Donatistas. 59 times. Contra Litteras Petition*, 20, in his Epistles, 35, in Sermons, 
40 times, cf. Leclercq, Diet, d'archeologie, 2631, note, s.v. Carthage. This use of the 
adjective alone died out in the seventh century but reappears in St. Bernard, Sermones 
in Canticum canticorum, Sermon Ixiv. 8, see Tertullian, De Prascriptionibus, 26. 



ST. AUGUSTINE 29 

" be in communion with that Christian Church which is * Catholic,' 
which too, is called the 6 Catholica 5 not only by its own members but 
its enemies too. For whether they like it or not, heretics and 
schismatics when talking with strangers, though not when talking 
among themselves mean by the ' Catholica ' nothing but the Catholic 
Church ; for they would be misunderstood if they failed to use a term 
which the whole world applies to her alone." 1 A good instance of this 
occurred when the Donatists had occasion to appeal to the Roman 
courts. For when the presiding magistrate asked if there were not 
some other Donatist Bishop present the Roman officials replied : 
" We acknowledge no Bishop save Aurelius the 6 Catholicus '." 2 
Aurelius being of course the Archbishop of Carthage. 

(b) "Securitos" 

In that Church, then, Augustine had found the " security " he had 
so long been seeking. Hence his love of the very words " securus " 
and " securitas " ; they appear again and again in his Sermons and 
letters, also in his controversial writings. All know the classic phrase : 
" Securus judicat Orbis terranim " since Wiseman drew Newman's 
attention to it, with world-shaking results. 3 But few know its context 
or that it is but the crystallization of a long-drawn-out argument for 
the Catholic Church and the " security " she alone can provide. 4 
Augustine's audience must often have smiled as the familiar word fell 
from his lips as he preached : "In security I rise superior to all else 
when He upholds me who is superior to all things, 355 " His promises 
make us ' secure/ for He predestined us before we came into existence, 3 ' 6 
" with what e security ' we sing in Christ ; for on that path there are 
no robbers," 7 " with what c security ' does not Christ's Passion provide 
us, what consolation, how it restores the weak and tempest-tossed 
soul ! " 8 Once more : " The Lord is thy staff ; on it a man leans 
securely, 5 for He will never give way (securus homo incumbit quia 
Ille non succumbit one of the many rhyming phrases which are 
impossible to translate) . Say, then, I am fi secure 3 ; love to be 
* secure * ; hope to be e secure ' ; for it is Holy Scripture that says it." 9 

(c) Eulogies on the Church * 

The debt he owes to the Church is one Augustine feels that he can 
never express. Were we to give even a small selection of the in- 

1 De Vera Religions^ 12, cf. De Utilitate credendi, 9, Contra Epistolam Fundamenti, 5. 
z Enarr. ii, 31 on Ps. xxi 

3 Dublin Review, Aug. 1839, also in Collected Essays, 1853, II, p. 224. 

4 Contra Epistolam Parmeniani, iii, 24. 6 Enarr. i, 2 on Ps. Ixi. 

8 Enarr. ii, 4 on Ps. Ixxxviii. 7 Enarr. i, 6 on Ps. Ixvi. 8 Enarr. i, 18 on Ps. liv. 
*Enarr. iii, 17 on Ps. xxxii ; cf. Mgr. P. Batiffol, Le Catkolicisme de S. Augustin, 
2 Vols., 1920. 



3 GREAT CATHOLICS 

numerable passages in which he eulogises the Church we should 
weary the reader. Some, however, we must give : on his lips the 
Church is always " pia Mater Ecclesia i?1 ; " let us love the Lord our 
God, let us love His Church ; God as Father, the Church as Mother " 2 ; 
" We are brethren because one Mother Church bore us ; you are my 
children, for in the Gospel I begot you. . . . Love, then, the Lord 
who loves you ; throng the Church your Mother who bore you . . . 
you will prove yourselves not ungrateful for all the blessings He has 
showered upon you if you offer Him the due service of your presence 
here in His Church. For no one can expect to find God a merciful 
Father if he has shown contempt for the Church his mother." 3 All 
are familiar with the famous declaration, " I myself would not believe 
the Gospels did not the authority of the Catholic Church lead me to 
do so " 4 ; but perhaps we are not so familiar with such even more 
compelling pronouncements as : " Do but recognize the Catholic 
Church, and therein you will find an end to all controversies " 5 ; 
" if the wife is her husband's glory, so is His Church Christ's glory " 6 ; 
" I profess the Catholic faith and I am confident that thereby I shall 
attain to certain knowledge " 7 ; "I belong to that Church the members 
of which are all those churches of whose foundation and establishment 
by the labours of the Apostles we read in Canonical Scripture." 8 
For Augustine " Veritas " and " Ecclesia Catholica " 9 were synonyms. 
When falsely accused of being a persecutor he solemnly takes an oath 
" by the Person of * the Body of Christ, 5 that is by the Church of the 
Living God which is the pillar and firm foundation of the Truth and 
which is spread throughout the entire world," that he has never in his 
life persecuted. 10 Hence his repeated exclamation ce O Catholica ! 
Pulchra inter hasreses ! " u " beautiful " because " here is a most 
solidly established truth : the Church has lasted and still lasts," 12 
:c that Church of God none shall ever blot out from the earth." 13 
There is almost a ring of triumph in the words : " We are members 
of that Church which, though spread throughout the world, is, by 
God's mercy, one mighty body under One mighty Head." 14 And how 
profound the remark that : " The marvels which take place in the 

1 De Baptismo contra Donatistas, vi, 4. 

2 Enarr. ii, 14 on Ps. xxxviii ; cf. Sermo ccxiii, 7 ; &c. 

* Sermo xcii ex Sermonibtis ab Angela Mai editis, cf. Miscellanea Agosliniana, 1930, i, 
P- 332. 

4 Contra Epistolam Fundament^ 5 ; the whole section should be read. 

5 Ad Donatistas, post Collationem, 24. 6 Sermo, cclxvi, 5. 

7 Contra Epistolam Fundamenti, 17. 8 Contra Cresconiwn, in, 39. 

9 Centra Litteras Petiliani, iii, 59. 10 Ibid, ii, 237. 

11 Sermon xii, 5 ; cclxxxv, 6 ; Sermon xvii, 3 ex codice Guelferbitano ; Contra Epistolam 
Parmeniani, ii, 28. 

12 De Baptismo contra Donatistas> vii, 9 ; cf. " Ecclesia mansit manet, ma.nebit," 
Contra Epistolam Parmeniani, iii, ii. 

Ep. xliii, 27. 14 Ep. cxlii, i. 



ST. AUGUSTINE 



Catholic Church are accepted precisely because they take place in 
the Catholic Church ; but the converse is not true, namely that the 
Catholic Church is to be accepted on the ground that such marvels 
do take place in her." 1 



in 

HOLY SCRIPTURE 

Through the Bible Augustine had been led to the Church. But it 
was only comparatively late in life that St. Augustine had taken up 
the study of Holy Scripture for which he had always felt a distaste 
till St. Ambrose set him on the right path. 2 Then those Scriptures 
became " castas deliciae rneae," 3 so much that we find him literally 
steeped in them by A.D. 394 when he wrote his De Sermone Domini in 
Monte. Yet we find him writing to Januarius c. A.D. 400 : "In ipsis 
sanctis Scripturis multa nesciam plura quam scian." 4 When preaching 
he always had the Bible in his hands : " What I am holding in my 
hands, namely the Bible which you see. . . ." 5 From those Scriptures 
we learn our faith, " for one who dwells in the City of God, that is 
the Church, believes the Holy Scriptures, the Old as well as the New 
Testament, what we call the Canonical Books ; from them is conceived 
that faith by which the just man liveth, whereby, too, we journey on 
our way unhesitatingly so long as c we are absent from the Lord ' " 
(2 Cor. v, 6.) 6 

But Holy Scripture does not stand alone : " the authority of our 
Scriptures," he says, " is confirmed by the agreement of the whole 
world, by succession from the Apostles and Bishops, and by Councils " 7 ; 
and while conceding that we are unable to adduce any arguments 
from Scripture on such a question as re-Baptism he adds, " yet we are 
holding to the true Scripture-teaching on the subject when we adhere 
to the teaching of the Universal Church whose authority is affirmed 
by Holy Scripture. Since, then, Holy Scripture cannot mislead us, 
anyone who is afraid of being misled on this obscure point should 
consult that same Church, for to her the Scriptures point without any 
ambiguity." 8 

The spirit in which Augustine studied his Bible may be gauged from 
the following among many similar passages : " Can anyone really 
understand Holy Scripture if he does not read it or listen to it with a 
devout mind ? If he does not acknowledge its supreme authority, 
nor dislike certain passages because they show up his own sinfulness, 

1 De Unitate, 50. * Confess, v, 24 ; vi, 5-8. 3 Ibid, xi, 3. 4 Ep. Iv, 38. 

6 Sermo xxxvii, I ; Tract, xxxv, 9 ; xl, i in Joam. 

6 De Civitate Dei, xix 5 18. 7 Contra Faustum, xiii, 5. 8 Contra Cresconium, i, 39. 



32 GREAT CATHOLICS 

but is pleased to find his sins corrected ; rejoicing, too, to find that they 
are not spared because being set right ? When certain statements in 
Scripture seem obscure or even ridiculous such a man does not 
straightway set out to prove them wrong, but prays for understanding 
of them, ever bearing in mind that it is his duty to revere and respect 
what is so authoritative." 1 He writes in the same strain to Maximinus : 
" If you really do pray, as you say you do, that you may become a 
disciple of Holy Scripture, then do not allow yourself to be distracted 
by questions which are merely profitless ; prefer a prudent silence to 
a torrent of idle words when you fail to discover an answer to some 
patent truth. 952 

IV 

THE APOSTOLIC SEE 

The Bible depends on the Church which alone can interpret it 
authoritatively, and alone can declare what are its contents. And the 
Church itself is built on the Apostolic See. 

Augustine constantly refers to the " Apostolic Sees " or those actually 
founded by the Apostles, and he insists on the authority attaching to 
them : " The kindly Ruler of our Faith has, both by largely-attended 
assemblages of the peoples of all nations and tribes, and by the Apostolic 
Sees, provided His Church with an authoritative citadel ; and through 
the labours of a few, but truly learned and spiritual-minded men. He has 
plentifully furnished her with an armoury of invincible arguments 
from reason. Schismatics, however, well aware that if their authority 
was to be weighed in the balance against Catholic authority, their own 
would be hopeless ;y discredited, strive to undermine by specious 
arguments and by insinuations which, so they claim, are based on 
reason that solidly established authority of the Church.' 53 " Try 
and realize, 59 he says elsewhere, " what this authority of the Catholic 
Church means ; for she is solidly established by, first of all, the 
Sees founded by the Apostles themselves, secondly by the series of 
Bishops who have followed one another in those same Sees and thirdly 
by the consent of so many nations/ 54 

Yet in the eyes of this African Bishop the " Apostolic See " par 
excellence is always that of Rome and the replies of Pope Innocent 
to the African Synods are those of the " Apostolica sedes et Romana " 5 ; 

1 Gf. Ep. cxliii, 7, De Genesi ad Lith. i, 37-41. 

2 Contra Maxminum, ii, 14. 3 Ep. cxviii, 32. 4 Contra Faustum, xi. 2. 

fi Contra julianum, i, 13. Hence Eugenius, Archbishop of Carthage, A.D. 481-505, 
said to the Vandals : "I will write and ask my fellow-Bishops to come ; they, and 
especially the Roman Church which is the Head of all the Churches, will be able 
to demonstrate to you the faith which we hold in common," Victor of Vita, 
De Persecution? Vandalica^ ii, 15. 



ST. AUGUSTINE 33 

for " in the Roman Church has always flourished the Primacy of the 
Apostolic See 531 , and " the teachings of even bad pastors (in it) are 
not really theirs so much as God's, for God established the teaching 
of Truth in the Chair of Unity" 2 . St. Augustine's conclusion is 
characteristic : " How, then, can we hesitate to cast ourselves into the 
bosom of that Church of Christ which, as the whole human race 
concedes, has, by the succession of Bishops in the Apostolic See, attained 
to such a pitch of authority? And this, remember 3 despite the 
yappings of heretics who have, however, been condemned partly by 
the judgement of the people themselves, partly by weighty Conciliar 
gatherings, partly owing to the awe inspired by miracles." 3 

In A.D. 416 the Bishops assembled at Carthage to discuss the case of 
Pelagius wrote to Pope Innocent saying : " We feel that the line of 
action we have taken for the salvation of many souls and to correct 
the obstinacy of certain people should be brought to your notice in 
order to secure the support of the Apostolic See for our modest 
decisions." 4 The Bishops assembled at Milevis at the same time and 
for the same purpose wrote to the same effect, adding, however, that 
" the authority of his Holiness is based on the authority of Holy 
Scripture." 5 These letters were followed by one from Aurelius, 
Augustine, Alypius, Evodius and Possidius urging Pope Innocent to 
add his authority to their condemnation of Pelagius ; for they are 
confident that once Pelagius realizes that his writings have been 
condemned " by the authority of the Catholic Bishops and more 
especially of Your Holiness whose authority will, we feel sure, weigh 
far more with him he will himself condemn those writings." 6 

In his reply Pope Innocent speaks of cc the various anxieties and 
preoccupations of the Roman Church and Apostolic See " ; the 
African Bishops have, he says, " quite fittingly consulted the Apostolic 
dignity, and in so doing have but adhered to the long-established 
practice which, as you and I know, has always been observed by the 
world . . . well aware that replies come from the Apostolic fountain- 
head to all such as, throughout the provinces, ask for them ; this 
more especially when it is question of the Faith, for I deem that all 
our Brethren in the Episcopate should on such a point have recourse to 
Peter alone." 7 

1 Ep. xliii, 7. 2 Ep. cv. 16. * De Utilitate credendi, 35. 

4 Ep, clxxv, 2 ; " modest " " mediocritatis nostrae ; " in Ep. cbcxvii, 19 the African 
Archbishop terms his authority a " rivulus " compared to the " largus fons " of the 
Pope's authority. 5 Ep. clxxvi, 5. 6 Ep. clxxvii, 15. 

7 Ep. clxxxii, 2. Innocent's words echo St. Irenaeus* famous dictum : " Ad hanc 
enim Ecclesiam propter potiorem principalitatem necesse est omnem convenire 
Ecclesiam, hoc est qui sunt undique fideles, in qua semper ab his qui sunt undique, 
conservata est a quae est ab Apostolis tradita," Adv. Haer, iii, 3. On the whole episode 
see Mgr. Batiffol in R^v. Biblique,]2a\. 1918, 



34 GREAT CATHOLICS 

On tliis, St. Augustine remarks : 

" What other answer could Pope Innocent have made to the African 
Councils except that teaching which the Apostolic and Roman See 
with all the other Churches had held ? ' 51 A little later came the 
famous declaration : " The findings of two Councils were sent to the 
Apostolic See ; thence came the rescripts ; Causa finita est, utinam 
aliquando finiatur error ! " 2 



v 
ST. PETER AND HIS SUCCESSORS 

The Church, then, was an organized body and its centre of 
authority was at Rome, and that authority was St. Peter's. That 
Apostle suffered in Rome and his body lies buried there. 3 The first of 
the Apostles, 4 he held the primacy among them. 5 His name was 
originally Simon : " Had he been from the beginning called Peter 
no one would have thought of the mystery of the { Petra ' ; Christ, 
then, would have him first called by another name so that from the 
change of his name the inner meaning of the mystery might be brought 
home to us " 6 ; " in his very name ' Peter * the Church is symbolized " 7 
To him were entrusted the keys ; for just as he had professed his faith 
in Christ as the spokesman of the rest, so too did he as an individual 
receive those keys, and thus personify Unity 8 of which Unity indeed 
Peter becomes the symbol, 9 nay more : Christ " would even make 
him one with Himself." 10 

There are, it is true, many passages in which St. Augustine seems to 
insist that Christ did not build His Church on Peter personally so much 
as on the faith he had just professed, even on Christ Himself " non 
supra Petrum quod tu es, sed supra petram quam confessus es." 11 
But in every one of those passages Augustine is dwelling on Peter's 
subsequent denial of Christ ; the lesson he is inculcating is that 
because Peter was to be so great he had to learn humility, 12 that 
" columna firmissima " had to fall, 13 therefore " Laudo Petrum, sed 
prius erubesco pro Petro J ' 14 ; it was only because of his threefold denial 
that he came to receive the threefold commission. 15 The final word 

1 Contra Julianum, i, 13. 2 Sermon cxxxi, 10. 3 Ep. xxxvi, 21, Sermo ccxcvi, 6. 

4 Sermo ccxcv, i, &c. 6 Enarr. i, i on Ps. vciii, Contra Juliomm i, 6. 

8 Tract, vii, 14, in Joann. 7 Sermo iv, 19 ; Ixxv, 1 1, &c. 

8 Sermo cxlix. $ ; De Agone, 32, &c. 

9 Sermo xtvi, 30 ; Ixxi, i j cclxx, 2 ; Tract, cxviii, 4 in Joann. 

10 Sermo xlvi, 30. u Sermo ccxliv, i ; cclxx, 2, &c. 

12 Sermo cclxxxvi, 2 ; ccxcv. 3. 

13 Tract, cxiii, 2 in Joann ; cf. " Hie amator, subito negator," Sermo ccxcv. 3* 

14 Sermo cclxxxvi, 2. Ep. cxlvii, 30, &c, 



ST. AUGUSTINE 55 

on the subject has been given us by Augustine himself who in his 
Retractations says, apropos of the lost Contra Epistolam Donati h&retid : 

" Somewhere (in that work) I said of the Apostle Peter that on hrni 3 
as on a rock, the Church was founded, an interpretation which is 
familiar to many owing to St, Ambrose's line s Hoc ipsa petra Ecclesiae 
canente, culpam diluit.' But I am aware that on many subsequent 
occasions I expounded the Lord's words 6 Thou art Peter and upon 
this rock I will build my Church ' as meaning that (it should be built) 
on Him whom Peter confessed when he said e Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God ' ; and thus Peter, being so called from the 
* Petra,' would personify the Church (personam Ecclesiae figuraret) 
which is built upon this rock and received the keys of the kingdom of 
heaven. For it was not said to him ' Thou art " petra ",' but ' Thou 
art " Petrus 'V Whereas the Rock was Christ whom Simon confessed 
as indeed the whole Church confesses Him and he was therefore 
called Peter. But the reader can choose which of these two opinions 
he thinks the more probable." 1 

Clearly all that Augustine means here is that the essential conditions 
for Simon's becoming the " rock " are (a) his faith in Christ's God- 
head and (b) that Christ the " Rock " should endow him with a 
share in that " rock-like " character. But this does not preclude 
nay it rather demands that the Church should be built on the person 
of Peter. For faith is a quality, and as Pelagius himself said in 
another context " a quality must be resident in some substance " 
" neque abseque re esse qualitas potest." 2 

So the Church was built on Peter owing to his faith ; and to Peter 
were entrusted the keys. " But Peter is dead and has left us ! Who, 
then, now looses or binds ? I dare to say that we too have those same 
keys." 3 Peter, then, lives on in his successors. Hence Augustine's 
reverence for the occupant of Peter's See. Hence he can say to Pope 
Innocent when urging his support against Pelagius : " Altius 
presides " 4 ; hence he can urge Pope Coelestine to the same course 
" by the memory of the Apostle Peter." 5 

" He who holds to Holy Mother Church is * secure ' ; no one will 
snatch from the Catholic Church." " In the c security ' afforded by 
the peace of that Church let a man do good work, and let him 
preserve in it to the end." " Unto the end," in that thought lay 
another secret of Augustine's life : his mind was ever fixed on that 
supreme goal. Without any exaggeration, his thoughts were ever 

1 Retract. I, xxi, i. 2 Quoted by St. Augustine, De Natura et Gratoa, 1 1. 

3 Contra duos Epistolas Petafii, i, 1-2. 

4 Sermo xvi, 2 ex Codice Gwlferbitano, Miscellanea Augustiniana, i. 

5 Ep, ccix, 8-9, cf. Ep. clxxxvi, 28-29. 



36 GREAT CATHOLICS 

on heaven, on that next world which, as he dwells on it in his Sermons, 
seems to have been as real to him as the African world in which he was 
living but for a space, that eternal goal which now is his " ubi jam 
quod sitivit internum gustat aeternum . . . securusque de reliqua " 
as the Office for his Feast expresses it. 

Few preachers can have more consistently spoken to their hearers 
about heaven and the need of preparing for it. " Brethren, I implore 
you, love God with me ! Hasten on the road with me by your faith ! 
Let us all yearn for that glorious Fatherland, yes, yearn for that, ever 
realizing that we are but pilgrims here." 1 That is the ending of but 
one sermon, and there were many like it. The Bishop's flock found his 
enthusiam so infectious that more than once they burst into applause 
when he had been speaking on the joys of the next world. 2 

1 Tract, xxxv, 9 in jfoann. 

3 Enarr* ii, 8 on Ps. xxvi, i, 3 1 on Ps. IxxiL 



G. ELLIOT ANSTRUTHER, K.S.G. 



HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER 



A.D. 1020 I08 

GAINST THE CHEQUERED political background of the eleventh 
century, the figure of Hildebrand, Pope St. Gregory the Seventh, 
stands out as that of one of the greatest reformative influences of the 
Middle Ages. While directed in the first place to churchmen and 
things ecclesiastical, since the abuses which he fought had entered 
into and affected the Church's life and government, Gregory's reforms, 
of their very nature, led to a cleaning up also of much in the secular 
field. Imperial encroachments on religious liberty were curbed. 
" So far and no farther " was a lesson which an emperor was made 
to learn, almost literally, upon his knees. Most important of all, 
election to the Papal office was placed upon a basis which thenceforth 
secured freedom from the will and dominance of lay powers. 

The following sketch is limited in length and character. There 
can obviously be little more in it than a relation of the chief events in 
Hildebrand's Hfe ; and here it is well to bear in mind that in con- 
sidering the man the emphasis must rest upon " Hildebrand " rather 
than upon " Gregory the Seventh. 5 ' It will be seen that the reforming 
spirit actuated by that heart and mind affected church history through- 
out the reigns of five pontiffs before Gregory himself was acclaimed. 
We may even question whether the reformer's lifework might not 
have been still more fruitful if he could have remained the friend and 
counsellor of Popes, instead of having to face difficulties, enmities, 
from powerful factions both within and without the Church as himself 
a successor of St. Peter. 

Soana, in Tuscany, was the birthplace of the future champion of 
the Church's liberty. There Hildebrand saw the light in the year 
1 020. Some historians have striven to claim high lineage for him ; 
it is more probable that he was the son of a Tuscan carpenter. Of his 
childhood and early life much is known, but much also is conjectural. 
As a boy he was attached to the Benedictine monastery on the Aventine 
in Rome, where St. Odilon of Cluny was among those from whom he 
imbibed religious knowledge. 

It was as a young monk in Rome that Hildebrand had his first taste 



HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER 39 

of the state of things against which all his principle, all his strength, 
was before long to be arrayed. Pope Gregory the Sixth, John Gratian, 
had appointed him his chaplain, and between master and servant in 
this respect there was a real affection. A prelate of upright life, the 
pontiff had none the less to confess before a synod held at Sutri that 
his acquisition of the papacy had been by methods laying him open to 
the charge of simony. Humbly and submissively he stripped himself 
of his pontifical robes and went into exile in Germany. Hildebrand 
faithfully followed him. The unfortunate Pope did not long survive 
his deposition : within two years he died. 

Whether Hildebrand spent some further time in Germany after 
Gregory's death, or whether he went to Gluny as a member of the 
community of that house, is a question in debate so far as historians 
are concerned. What is of more importance, for our present purpose, 
is the circumstance beyond dispute that in 1049 he met, at Besangon, 
the saintly Bruno, formerly Bishop of Toul, himself a monk, who in the 
previous year had been elected Pope, taking the title of Leo IX. From 
that meeting great results were to spring, since now Hildebrand began 
that personal and courageous assertion of principle by which he is 
famous in the annals of the Church. 

Leo's election had been by the personal authority of his cousin, the 
Emperor Henry III. On that ground Hildebrand ventured to 
reprove it, with such result that Leo, it has been said, threw off, for the 
time being, the symbols of his pontificate. Commanding the young 
reformer to go with him to Rome, he there received canonical election 
to the Chair of Peter at the hands of the Roman clergy. Thus Hilde- 
brand struck successfully his first blow against usurpation of church 
authority on the part of lay princes. 

Almost immediately afterwards the Pope bestowed upon his out- 
spoken critic signal marks of favour. He withdrew him from outside 
Benedictine jurisdiction (? at Cluny : the point is obscure), made 
him a Cardinal, and gave him the post of administrator of St. Paul's 
Outside the Walls. Also he leant graciously towards the younger 
man's opinions and advice concerning reformation of church discipline, 
a matter in which his own spirit was in the fullest accord. During 
the five years of his pontificate he never ceased to labour in the cause 
of reform. 

Leo IX*s reforms were directed, in the main, against the sale of 
benefices to unworthy clerics, and the violation of the law of celibacy. 
In concert with Hildebrand and others like-minded, he took steps 
for the formal condemnation of these abuses. Publication of the 
decrees was made from various councils, in particular that held in 
1049 at Reims. 

It was not all plain sailing, and at Reims the assembly was 



40 GREAT CATHOLICS 

vigorously opposed. The French Sovereign, Henry I, together with 
many of his licentious nobility, feared exposure at the hands of the 
Church. There were French bishops, too, who failed to do^ their 
duty. It may be that some of these prelates had obtained their sees 
unworthily and were only too ready to excuse their absence from the 
council by laying stress upon the action of the King. Leo was able 
to gather to his side only twenty bishops, but he had the presence and 
support of fifty Benedictine abbots. The desired end was secured. 
Canons were issued condemning evils, and several guilty prelates 
were deposed. In addition the Reims council vindicated officially 
the principle that elections to ecclesiastical offices were valid only 
with the consent of the clergy and people. The Church's authority 
was proclaimed inviolate. Well might the powers of intrigue and 
corruption view the outlook with consternation ! 

Leo IX died in 1054. Worthily he is honoured as a saint in the 
Roman martyrology. The death of this high-minded pontiff brought 
Hildebrand to the fore in a new and startlingly important role. Gladly 
would the Roman clergy have made him Pope, but that honour 
the young man declined ; whereupon he was commissioned to go to 
Germany and there to choose, from among the prelates of the Empire, 
a worthy head on which to set the tiara. The choice, when made, 
was to be approved by the Emperor a much more limited exercise 
of the secular power, be it noted, than that which not so much 
farther back had made or deposed pontiffs by the imperial will. 

The choice fell upon Gebhardt, Bishop of Eichstadt, who was 
crowned in Rome in 1055 as p P e Victor II. The Emperor had not 
been friendly to this elevation, but his objections, as well as those of 
the Pope-elect, who was Henry's friend, were overcome by Hildebrand. 

Victor II was swayed by the counsels of reform, and continued the 
campaign to this end begun under his predecessor. One of his first 
acts was to appoint Hildebrand to France as his legate ; in that 
capacity the latter assembled reformatory councils and did not 
hesitate to bring about the deposition- of simoniacal or otherwise 
unworthy prelates. 

It was in 1056, while the effects of Hildebrand's reforms were 
still causing excitement and consternation throughout a large portion 
of Western Christendom, that the Emperor, Henry III, died. His 
son and successor, Henry IV, was then a small boy, hardly six years 
old ; he was smaller still when, some two years previously, he had 
been recognized as king of the Germans. If only the spirit of 
illumination could have foretold what his character and attitude 
would be when he would assume, as a young man, the imperial office 
and responsibility ! History can surely hold few cases in which the 
saying " like father, like son " was more set at naught. 



HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER 41 

During Henry's childhood and youth, his mother, the Empress 
Agnes, acted as Regent ; but in 1070 when barely twenty years of age, 
he took the reins into his hands. He was a prince of combative and 
independent disposition, strongly imbued with the sense of imperial 
power, and unwilling to meet the new spirit within the Church by 
keeping his secular fingers out of the ecclesiastical pie. Hence arose 
the memorable and protracted duel, between the Empire and the 
Church, which was to bring out on rival sides the strong qualities 
of both Henry and Hildebrand. 

Pope Victor lived but a short time after the third Henry's death. 
To the last term of his activity he helped Hildebrand in the efforts 
for reform, and when he died matters were so well advanced in the 
right path that the clergy determined there should be no intervention 
by the imperial authority in the matter of his successor. In the case 
of Victor's own election, as we have seen, the Emperor was supposed 
to approve the choice, though the fact that on the contrary he objected 
strongly in no way prevented Hildebrand from securing the election 
of the nominee. Now, however, the Church's freedom of action 
was to be tested altogether apart from what might be the wishes of 
the Imperial Court. Henry IV being but a child of tender years, 
the fact of the regency strengthened the attitude taken up by the 
Roman clergy. Accordingly these hastened to elect the new Pope. 
Their choice fell upon Frederick of Lorraine, Abbot of Monte Cassino, 
who assumed on his election the title of Stephen X. 

Less than a year was the brief span of Stephen's pontifical life ; 
yet during that period he managed to extend still further the reform 
movement among the clergy. Hildebrand., naturally enough, he 
regarded with high favour, sending him on missions to France and 
Germany and showing him other signs of confidence. The Pope 
lived to see new and purer monastic houses rising to carry on, in Italy 
and elsewhere, the rule which previous corruptions had in some 
places disfigured. 

Nor was Hildebrand himself neglectful of his duties as administrator 
of St. Paul's. Into that abbey he introduced swift and rigorous and 
much-needed reforms. The initiative was his, also, which sent into 
the arena, armed with the title and authority of a cardinal-bishop, 
one of the greatest champions of the Church's liberty, St. Peter 
Damian. 

Stephen died in March, 1058, begging that there might be no 
appointment of a successor until Hildebrand' s return from the Court, 
whither he had gone as legate to the Empress-regent. 

It was hardly to be supposed that the forces of evil would submit 
calmly to a pontiff who by free choice had ascended the papal throne. 
If Stephen X encountered no active resistance on the part of the 



4% GREAT CATHOLICS 

Court and the Roman nobility, that fact may probably be attributed 
to the shortness of his reign. No sooner, however, was the Pope's 
death made known than the tyrannical house of Tusculum, nursing- 
mother of more than one indifferent Pope, roused itself for a further 
effort at usurpation. Troubling nothing as to the probable action 
of the Roman clergy, and in spite of the decree of the Reims Council, 
this faction elected, in the person of Benedict X, an antipope favourable 
to their ambitions. 

Much as he disliked imperial interference in Church matters, 
Hildebrand liked even less a state of things by which the pontiff 
would reign by the will of a corrupt aristocracy. It was a case of 
two evils, with imperialism as the lesser. Consequently his next 
step was one of diplomacy. He gathered to his aid the German 
nobility, with Agnes the regent at their head, and still further 
strengthened his position by the support of that section of the Roman 
party which was still pledged to orthodox election. 

The combined forces proved more than the rebellious barons could 
withstand. The antipope yielded his usurped throne and retired 
into obscurity. The power of Tusculum was broken for ever. With 
Hildebrand's approval, joined to the imperial consent, the Bishop of 
Florence, Gerard of Burgundy, became Pope Nicholas II. His election 
was thus the result of a compromise, but its validity was assured by 
the concurrence of the clergy. 

From the pontificate of Nicholas II dates one of the most important 
reforms ever introduced into the discipline of the Church. Through 
long previous ages, right up till the time of the council at Reims, the 
Popes depended for their election upon forces and circumstances 
which might work for good but often worked for ill. Elections were 
sometimes the result of political conspiracy, family corruption, the 
mandates of immoral emperors, or the fortune of war. Looseness of 
discipline resulted in the election of not a few unworthy pontiffs. This 
situation violated the original practice of papal election, a practice 
vested in the Roman clergy and people, to whom Hildebrand restored 
it by the action of the Reims council. 

It was determined now to utilize the reforming spirit born of the 
three previous pontificates in order still further to safeguard the 
liberty of the Church in electing her Popes. In April, 1059, a council 
assembled, in Rome, at which upwards of a hundred bishops attended. 
This assembly confirmed the condemnation previously directed against 
simony and the marriages of clergy. The council ordained also that 
the election of the Roman pontiff should in future rest with the 
cardinals, who, however, would respect the wishes of the emperor and 
would ask ratification of their choice from the Roman clergy and 
people. 



HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER 43 

Among the signatures to this decree Is that of " Hildebrandus, 
monachus et subdlaconus ", and the French historian Montalembert 
suggests that "it is not risking too much to impute to Mm the res- 
ponsibility " for the decree Itself. At a later period in history the 
power of election was made to rest absolutely and finally with the 
cardinals. Thus for upwards of eight centuries the pontifical throne 
has been protected by a method of election which although not in 
every case productive of an exalting Pope has at any rate contributed 
to a state of things much purer than that which preceded it. 

Between the imperial party, on whose side the simoniacal bishops 
and clergy were ranged, and the Church as represented by Pope 
Nicholas, Hildebrand, and the Roman conclave, there was now an 
open rupture, one so threatening that it became needful to secure 
military support in order to maintain the reformed system of Church 
government. For this, Hlldebrand looked to the Normans. It was 
at his suggestion that the Pope conferred the title of Duke of Apulia 
on the Norman chief, Robert Guiscard to give him his nickname, 
Robert " Wiseacre." Guiscard promised by oath to defend the free 
election of future pontiffs. Another lay-champion Invoked was the 
pious William de Montreuil, whose forces waged successful war in 
Southern Italy against simony and other evils. The energetic pontiff 
himself lived only long enough to see the beginning of these good 
results. He died in 1061, after a reign of little more than two 
years. 

Within a few months a successor had been chosen and consecrated, 
and this by free election on the part of the cardinals. Before the 
election took place, and agreeably to the decree of the Roman council, 
a report had been sent to the Court. Its bearer had not been received, 
so the cardinals proceeded to act, with the advice of Hildebrand and 
the Abbot of Monte Cassino. Their choice fell upon Anselm, Bishop 
of Lucca, member of an illustrious Milanese family and one whose 
election offered a guarantee for the liberty of the Church. When 
legate in Lombardy this prelate had zealously combated simony in 
that country. He was regarded as a man of resolute will and perfect 
courage, qualities which he was .not slow to demonstrate. He adopted 
on his election the title of Alexander II. 

It was not long before the opposition united in efforts for the 
new Pope's overthrow. Lombard bishops were among the disaffected, 
indisposed to acknowledge any save one of their own countrymen ; 
the elevation of the Milanese was therefore urged as excuse for an 
effort to depose him. The Lombards conspired to bring about the 
election of an antipope in Cadalous, Bishop of Parma, whom they 
proclaimed at Bale as Pope Honorius II, the Empress-regent approving. 

Although the antipope had the imperial favour, and gained also the 



44 GREAT CATHOLICS 

support both of Germany and of Constantinople, he was not able to 
withstand the lawful power of Alexander. The latter gathered to his 
side not only the influence of Hildebrand, who was now created 
Chancellor of the Church, but also the great houses of Cluny and Monte 
Cassino, and the strong arms of the Norman knights and soldiers. 

Right and might were in this manner combined in the Pope's 
forces, and although there was for a time a ding-dong struggle for 
supremacy on the part of Honorius and his supporting faction, with a 
vacillating standpoint on the side of the Romans, Alexander was 
finally recognized. Agnes the regent was deprived of the administra- 
tion of the Empire. A few years later she made her peace finally 
with the pontiff and she spent her last years in tranquil piety. At 
a council held at Augsburg in 1062, at which the young Henry IV 
was present, Hanno, the Archbishop of Cologne, declared that 
Alexander's claims were to be recognized as indisputable. 

Now indeed it became every day easier to estimate the altered state 
of religious life due to the efforts of Hildebrand and his friends. On 
all sides a holy enthusiasm was aroused against corrupt practices and 
lax discipline. Among those who set themselves to propagate this 
zeal the Benedictines were prominent. These men hastened to make 
new foundations and to bring the masses of the people nearer to God. 
Monasteries were gradually freed from harmful associations or were 
dissolved and replaced by others more firmly ordered. Into this work 
both the Pope and Hildebrand threw themselves with crusading 
ardour, helped by the labours of such men as St. Peter Damian, St. 
John Gualbertus, and St. Peter Igneus. In Tuscany a sustained 
campaign was carried on by the monks of the new order of Vallorn- 
brosa. Worldly prelates and congregations found themselves faced 
by a reforming spirit so determined, so active, that resistance was 
useless. 

Meanwhile, the councillors of the boy Emperor were trying by all 
possible means to sow disaffection and rebellion against the Holy 
See. Encroachments on the temporal power centred for the time 
being in Germany. Henry, acting as bidden, persecuted with rigour 
the people of Thuringia, attempting to extort church moneys unjustly, 
while forbidding any appeal to Rome. The Saxons were pillaged 
without ruth. On every side the cry of the people went up against 
the tyranny of Henry and his favourites. 

Pope Alexander heard with indignation of this abuse of kingly 
power. He excommunicated some of the councillors and summoned 
the Emperor to appear before him in answer to many charges. But 
the pontiff himself was not permitted to see the further unfolding of 
the ranged antagonism of Church and Empire. He died in 1073, 
after an eventful and meritorious reign of twelve years, during which 



HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER 45 

time the Independence of the Church had been steadily maintained 
and strengthened. 

Hardly were the funeral ceremonies of the dead Pope ended when 
the popular Roman voice clamoured for the election of Hildebrand to 
fill the papal throne. Cries of this desire had been raised at the funeral 
service itself. At that solemn function the Chancellor was presiding. 
Hastily mounting a pulpit, he sought to quell the unseasonable tumult ; 
but one of the cardinals present forestalled him and made an appeal 
for Hildebrand's election. The response was immediate. Cheers 
rang through the great church of the Lateran, and in the excess of their 
enthusiasm the people cried that St. Peter had elected Hildebrand 
as Pope. 

In spite of his protestations, his tears even, the pontiff-elect was 
crowned and enthroned. Thenceforth a new situation faced the 
opposing ranks and influences. They who had previously reckoned 
only with the monk, the sub-deacon, the Chancellor, now found 
themselves confronted, in Pope Gregory VII, with the strong arm of 
papal power. Hildebrand was Pope " Hildebrand ", a name to be 
interpreted whether in admiration, by his friends, as "a pure flame", 
or in hatred, by his enemies, as " the brand of Hell " ! 

An historic reign now began. Seeing that the new pope was himself 
a monk, it is not surprising that he sought auxiliaries of reform in the 
monasteries. From their abbots he drew his most trusted counsellors. 
He was determined, too, to protect the religious orders not only from 
the interference of lay-princes, but also from high-handed doings by 
the secular episcopate. The spirit of the cloister was strongly im- 
planted in his character : the word " monk " itself was hurled against 
him as a reproach. 

The influence of the papacy was cast strongly in favour of the 
monks as against seculars and laymen. When a quarrel arose between 
the monks of St. Remy at Reims and the Archbishop, Gregory defended 
the monks. On another occasion there was some difference between 
the monks of St. Vannes and Bishop Thierry of Verdun, leading to the 
religious being shown the street by that wrathful prelate. Here again 
Gregory's protecting hand was extended, and the banished monks 
found a new home at Dijon. Other instances might be cited in proof 
of the pope's strong and, as some think, excessive partiality towards 
the monastic houses, to which he certainly gave privileges and dignities 
far beyond anything accorded by his predecessors. 

It was not the case, however, that the pope depended only upon 
the monks for support in his policy. In Gregory's party were not a 
few zealous bishops who owed their Sees to the favour of laymen, 
while many of the laity themselves rallied to Gregory's side. But 
these together made only a small minority. Speaking broadly, it 



4 g GREAT CATHOLICS 

can be said that the regular clergy were with Gregory, while the 
seculars, for the most part, clung to the imperial party under Henry IV. 

In 1075 the pontiff issued his edict, under pain of excommunication, 
against the practice of investiture to sacred offices. To explain ade- 
quately the nature, origin, and growth of investitures would be to 
enter upon a subject fraught with many technicalities ; moreover, it 
would take us rather far afield from the biographical course. It may 
be said briefly that the practice meant that kings and emperors who 
wished to give bishoprics or other offices of dignity to favourites, worthy 
or otherwise, did so by sending a ring and a crozier in sign that the 
temporalities of a particular benefice had been bestowed upon the 
recipient. These symbols were then carried to the Metropolitan, who 
returned them as intimation that sacred office had been conferred 
upon their holder. 

As might be expected, such a system gave rise, in many cases, 
to grave abuse, and Gregory determined to put a stop to it. He was 
especially indignant that the two symbols, the crozier and the ring, 
had been deemed to typify temporal gifts ; the one he regarded as 
the sign of pastoral authority, the other as an emblem of the celestial 
mysteries. His prohibition struck a heavy blow at simony, and 
while it roused his foes to 'still more violent resistance to his authority, 
it stimulated in faithful clerics a stronger hope of victory for the 
Church as against the world. 

The pope's own words will best explain and justify his action with 
regard to investitures. Writing to the clergy and people of Aquilaea, 
Gregory declares : " There is an ancient and well-known law, 
sanctioned not by men, but by Christ our Lord and Saviour in the 
fulness of His wisdom, which says : c He that entereth in by the door 
is the shepherd of the sheep ' ; but if he c climbeth up another way, 
the same is a thief and a robber J (St. John x). For this reason, that 
which has long been neglected on account of sin that which had been, 
and still is, corrupted by a detestable custom we wish now to restore 
and to renew, for the honour of God and the salvation of Christendom, 
so that in every church the bishop charged to govern the people of 
God, ordained according to the Word of truth, may be neither thief 
nor robber, but worthy of the name and office of a shepherd. Such 
is our will, such our strong desire, and such shall be, by the mercy of 
God, as long as we live, the object of our unwearied efforts." 

This action towards investitures supplied the imperial party with 
further fuel for hostility, and matters swiftly approached a crisis 
between the pope and the emperor. Henry IV faced opposition 
from two quarters : the purer clergy and the oppressed peasantry of 
Thuringia and other places. The Saxon spirit was in rebellion 
against the tyranny of the Court, and it was easy to foresee on which 



HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER 47 

side the common people were likely to be ranged. More than once 
Gregory's legates had been sent from Rome to make stern representa- 
tions to Henry about both his morals and his government. As long 
as it seemed likely that the wars upon which he was engaged might 
prove disastrous, the emperor was ready with promises of reform ; 
but when, after a sharp campaign, Henry conquered the Saxons, 
he set the Holy See at defiance, refused to relinquish the practice of 
investiture, and openly declared his enmity to the papal cause. It 
was the old story : 

" When the devil was ill, the devil a saint would be ; 
But when the devil got well again, the devil a saint was he ! " 

The results were that the pope excommunicated several councillors 
and bishops of the empire, while Henry, for his part, multiplied 
scandalous promotions and recalled and restored to their benefices 
churchmen who had previously been deposed. 

The pope now cited Henry to appear before him to answer for 
his offences. Far from complying, the emperor called a council at 
Worms, early in 1076, at which he had sentence of deposition 
pronounced against Gregory, who retaliated by excommunicating 
Penry and in turn proclaiming him deposed. 

The events thus sketchily related followed upon an act of personal 
violence against the pontiff. While saying midnight Mass in St. Mary 
Major's at Christmas, 1075, Gregory was attacked by an armed band 
and was carried off to a fortified tower beyond the city walls. He was 
captive but a few hours. Learning of the outrage, the Roman 
populace stormed the place and conducted their pastor back in triumph 
to the church, where the Mass so rudely interrupted was resumed. 
Whether the emperor personally had any guilty knowledge of the 
previous night's attack has never been established : he is entitled to 
the benefit of the doubt. 

We pass to October, 1076. In that month the German princes 
met at Tribur. As a result of their meeting Henry was told that 
unless he made his peace with the pope, and received absolution, 
another king would be elected ; meanwhile the royal authority was 
in abeyance. In this uncertain state matters remained until the 
early part of 1077, when a new assembly, over which Gregory was to 
preside, was called at Augsburg to pronounce upon the charges 
against the king. 

Now, truly, the peccant emperor was in a coil. He had to act, 
and to act quickly. He had worldly wisdom enough to see that for 
the time being, at any rate, he was not a match for the powers against 
him. Humble pie is no pleasant meal ; but humble pie he must 
eat, or lose his throne. So there looms before us what was in 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



one respect the central Incident in the history of Pope Gregory's 
pontificate the episode of Ganossa. 

The castle of Ganossa, now in ruins, stands some fourteen miles 
from Reggio. It was a seat of Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, a 
woman devoted to the pope and the papal cause. There Gregory 
was making a stay, and to Canossa, in a seemingly penitent frame 
of mind, the fallen emperor followed him. From what ensued the 
expression "to go to Canossa " has come to bear the implications 
of a humiliation so deep that by comparison the ostracism of being 
" sent to Coventry " is but a pale ghost of suffering. 

Exactly what happened is not clear. For the sake of ^Gregory 
himself we may hope that there is no literal truth in the picture of 
the emperor standing at the gate hour after hour, day after day, in 
cold and misery, turning imploring eyes towards the lighted windows 
whence came no ray of assurance that the pope would see him. It 
seems unbelievable, apart from the implied cruelty, that the porta di 
penitenza, as the gateway was afterwards called, witnessed for three 
days the spectacle of a shivering suppliant. 

But though we may rule out the harrowing and incredible picture 
which some writers have painted, there remains the fact that for 
Henry the journey to Canossa, and the interview which at length was 
granted to him, was his life's bitterest pill. The meeting with ^the 
Pope took place on January 28th. All that was asked was promised 
in the way of obedience and reform. Too trustful, perhaps, of a 
disingenuous character, Gregory pardoned the suppliant, and for 
a time there was peace but that time was short. 

As to the wisdom of the papal attitude at Ganossa, by which the 
emperor was re-admitted to favour only after he had drained the cup 
of self-abasement to the dregs, judgment on that score can be left to 
others. But it may be said here that, with such a chafing character 
as Henry's, less humiliation might have brought a better sequel. 

The peace, as has been said, was short. Yielding to persuasion 
by the Lombards, Henry quickly thrust aside any thought of imple- 
menting the promises made at Canossa. He had hardly returned to 
Germany when intrigue and simony once more raised their ugly 
heads. The royal authority was resumed in Italy also. Episcopal 
favours were given with a lavish hand. Two papal legates, Anselm 
of Lucca and Gerard of Ostia, were imprisoned. In all this Canossa 
was soon forgotten or ranklingly remembered. 

Despairing now of all reform from Henry, the German princes, at 
the Diet of Forchheim, elected a new king. Their choice fell on 
Rodolph, Duke of Suabia. Between that monarch and Henry there 
ensued a bitter war which disturbed for three years the peace of the 
empire and tended also on one side, unwittingly to cramp the 



HILDEBRAND, POPE AND REFORMER 49 

energies of the Church. In this struggle Gregory held aloof, during 
that period, from political support to either side ; he was content 
to counsel efforts for peace. 

At length, however, in 1080, the Pope yielded to Saxon solicitations 
and intervened. Unable to get any reparation from Henry, he 
excommunicated and deposed that offender for the second time and 
declared himself on Rodolph's side. Again this action was met by 
a counter-deposition. An antipope was put forward in Guibert of 
Ravenna, who called himself Clement III a cleric not to be confused 
with the legitimate Pope of that title who reigned towards the close 
of the following century. Rodolph died in battle, Hermann of 
Luxemburg succeeding him as king, elected by the Catholic party. 
The pope's position was strengthened by the sworn allegiance of the 
Norman leader, Robert Guiscard. 

Adversity, we know, limits nicety as to bedfellows. In his ex- 
tremity Henry turned to the schismatic emperor of Constantinople. 
Their combined forces entered Italy and laid siege to Rome. For 
three years (1081-84) the struggle continued, until temporary victory 
fell to the allies. Henry entered the city in triumph and caused 
himself to be crowned there by the antipope. What of Gregory ? 
By Tiber's banks, in the Castle of St. Angelo, the pontiff was 
virtually a prisoner, while Rome was given up to his unscrupulous 
opponent. 

But help was at hand. Faithful to his oath of vassalage to the 
Holy See, Guiscard hastened to the Pope's defence. With thirty 
thousand Normans he came to Rome. Gregory was freed and Henry 
was forced to depart whence he had come. The Norman invasion 
had its sinister side, however, for Guiscard 's troops pillaged and laid 
waste some of the fairest spots in the city and carried numbers of the 
inhabitants into captivity. 

Little remains to tell of Hildebrand's life-story. Worn by the 
strain of continuous exertions, the Pope sought rest and peace at 
Monte Cassino. His spirit had always been that of the monk, his 
sympathies all for the religious life ; and now, for a while, he returned 
to the bosom of his Order. From Monte Cassino he went to Salerno, 
where on May 25th, 1085, he died, in his sixty-fifth year. Plaintively, 
in his "dying hours, he murmured the reflection : " I have loved 
justice and hated iniquity ; therefore I die in exile. J) 

" Therefore I die in exile." In these words there seems the 
confession from the great reformer that ultimately his work has been 
brought to naught. Hildebrand has in fact been regarded by many 
as one of the world's splendid failures, as a man who strove against 
forces and circumstances over-great for his strength and died with his 
mission unaccomplished. It is a superficial view. If St. Gregory VII 



5 GREAT CATHOLICS 

did not succeed entirely In destroying the cancer of corruption, at least 
he played mightily one man's part. He feared neither the imperial 
frown nor hostile armies. He secured the freedom of papal elections, 
a reform which by itself is worthy to be his monument. Hildebrand 
delivered the Church from the imperial yoke, waged war against 
simony, purified the religious houses, enforced the principle of clerical 
celibacy, and in all ways sought to restore to Christendom the primitive 
piety and purity which in apostolic times had signalized the Church's 
divine mission. 

Various have been the estimates of Hildebrand from those who have 
written about him. Among chroniclers adverse to his memory are 
the French authors Condorcet and Voltaire. The former roundly 
wrote him down a knave ; the latter remarked : " the Church counts 
him a saint and the sages count him a fool." If such a career is thus 
foolish in the eyes of Voltaire, who among us would wish to be wise ? 
To Sir James Stephen, on the other hand, Hildebrand's was the hand 
which " kindled the torch of reform and bore it aloft with clear and 
steady brilliancy to the gaze of the Christian world." From Paul 
Bernried comes a tribute touched with hyperbole but with that in 
it which the Catholic reader, from what has been here set down, is 
likely to endorse : 

" He endured perfidy and temptation, perils, insults, captivity 
and exile, for the love of God. By the grace of that same God, and 
by the aid of the apostles kings, tyrants, dukes, princes, all the 
jailors of human souls, all the ravenous wolves, all the ministers of 
Antichrist . . . were vanquished by this invincible athlete." 

Hildebrand lies buried in the church of St. Matthew at Salerno. 
He was beatified by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584, and in 1728 Benedict 
XIII proclaimed his canonization. 



ERNEST OLDMEADOW 

ST. ANTONY OF PADUA 

Q 

A.D. 119^-1232 



Tin|EADERS OF FICTION often come across a short story which, despite 
wide variations of authorship, of material and of handling, is 
essentially the same story. Rudyard Kipling was only one of its many 
artificers. In its commonest form, it has for prelude a few lines which 
picture a group of worldly men absorbing whisky-and-soda in some 
such place as a golf-pavilion. They believe themselves to be hard- 
boiled, no-nonsense materialists. By-and-by, one of them narrates 
a more or less grisly tale of c: the supernatural." When he has 
finished, an awed hush arrests the sizzling of siphons, the striking of 
matches ; and one of the party is sure to bring out the lines : 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

It is a piquant fact that the writers and the most admiring readers 
of these Horatio- tales have been, like Kipling himself, persons with a 
contempt for Catholicism. What they despise as gross and silly 
superstition in Catholic men and women no less intelligent than 
themselves, they accept and respect when it conies from the pens of 
" rationalists " with whose general intellectual position it is not 
compatible. 

But at one point or rather in one person, the person of Paduan 
Antony Catholics and countless non-Catholics find common ground. 
" I don't hold with Catholics, but I do believe in St. Antony " is a 
common saying among Protestants. Catholics are always being asked 
by Protestants to say where is the nearest statue of St. Antony " with 
his money-box for the poor," so that their gratitude for some undoubted 
favour may be expressed. Indeed the writer of these lines has met 
not only non-Catholics but even anti-Catholics who, when they are 
at their wits' end over a lost key, " ask St. Antony for it " and get it. 
" I must admit that he isn't small-minded," was the unconsciously 
droll remark of one anti-Papist on finding that this good-natured 
Saint does not restrict his beneficence to those who fully share his 
theology. 



ST. ANTONY OF PADUA . 55 

Not in a polemical, point-scoring spirit but for their good, we ought 
to reason frankly with these paradoxical persons who in one breath 
denounce Catholic superstition and in the next beg St. Antony's aid. 
It is they, not we, who are toying with superstition. As the evidence 
for certain sequels, when St. Antony has been invoked, is too plentiful 
to be pooh-poohed as nonsensical self-delusion, two alternatives 
present themselves for choice. Either there is a Wonder-worker 
(whom his clients identify with the Saint of Padua) or there is the 
Magic from which clean souls recoil. The Superior Person will smile 
at this dilemma and will refuse either horn ; but we must insist on it. 
If the name of a long-defunct Portuguese, intentively pronounced, 
often very, very often every day induces certain results, although 
that Portuguese, instead of being puissantly alive in the presence of 
Almighty God, is as dead as a nail, then the magicians are right and 
the fashionable crystal-gazers of London and Paris are useful members 
of society. As De Maistre said, " Close the churches and you re-open 
the wizard's caves." Catholic Antonianism, with its whole context 
of doctrine on the Communion of Saints and the Church Triumphant, 
is intellectually and morally respectable ; but the Antonianism which 
mumbles the Paduan name like an African negro's incantation is not. 



Although the Restitutor Perditorum has a clientele which overflows 
the One True Fold by the way, many " Orthodox " Easterns, whose 
forefathers separated from the Roman unity two hundred years before 
Antony was born, revere and invoke him he must not be treated 
as if he does little more than find the keys of suit-cases and trunks. 
The Paduan was a man whose life-work was many-sided ; and on 
every side splendid. 

Born in 1195, Antony sojourned in this world only six and thirty 
years. Thus his earthly life was not much longer than his Divine 
Master's. But it is not true that, like his Lord, he was born in a 
stable. Although few of the many cruising travellers who disembark 
at Lisbon on their voyage to Madeira are taken to see it, the Antonian 
pilgrim may still visit the very room where St. Antony was born. 
It is one of the few structures which survived Lisbon's great earth- 
quake. To-day it seems a strait and humble place ; but spacious 
building had not begun in Lisbon in the twelfth century. Even the 
cathedral had a stinted ground-plan. Moreover, we have con- 
temporary evidence that Antony did not spring from humble stock. 
A biographer who set to work within a year of the Saint's death had 
it from the Bishop of Lisbon and other first-hand witnesses that the 
young Fernando, who afterwards changed his name to Antonio, 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



came of a noble and powerful family. (The claim that he was a 
descendant of Godefroi de Bouillon was not heard until the eve of 
the Protestant Reformation and is absurd. Antonio was pure 
Portuguese.) 

Antony of Padua is a Saint who, unlike the poets, was made, not 
born. One of the wrong notions which hold back many of us from 
essaying the path of sanctity is the notion that a Saint can't help being 
one and that his sainthood is congenital, like his tallness or shortness, 
his black hair or brown. It is true that some natures have a stronger 
bent than others towards religious reverence ; but, as it is a bent 
which brings its peculiar and strong temptations, it spells no advantage. 
A Sinner becomes a Saint not through being Heaven's pampered 
darling but through bearing his cross daily and through wholly 
merging his own will in the will of God. 

At the age of fifteen, young Fernando decided that he could not 
preserve his purity of mind and body amidst the hard-pressing 
temptations of everyday life. He became an Augustinian a Canon 
of Saint Cross. St. Augustine did not found an Order of St. Augustine 
as St. Benedict, St. Francis and St. Dominic founded the Benedictines, 
the Franciscans, the Dominicans. None the less, the Augustinian 
Rule of Saint Cross was based on the great Bishop of Hippo's teachings 
and the Doctor of Doctors himself was held in reverence by the 
Canons of Holy Cross, St. Augustine's Confessions must have confirmed 
the belief of Fernando that his retreat into a pious house had been 
wise. But St. Vincent's Priory, just outside (fora) Lisbon, was not 
sufficiently remote from the disturbing world. Friends and relatives 
came thither too often for the earnest student who was one day to be 
an honoured theologian and teacher. Therefore he obtained a 
transfer to an older and more renowned priory of his Order Santa 
Cruz at Goimbra. 

To-day, a young Portuguese who leaves Lisbon for Coimbra is 
like a young Englishman leaving London for Oxford ; but, seven 
hundred years ago, Coimbra was certainly not " in the provinces." 
It was the capital of Portugal, in every way greater than Lisbon ; 
and its splendour was largely ecclesiastical. When Antony first 
beheld the city on the Mondego, the building now known as the Old 
Cathedral was of new-cut limestone, fresh from the chisels of French- 
trained masons. But the great Catholic glories of Coimbra were 
spiritual. Already Santa Cruz had its Saint, Prior Theotonio. This 
holy man had walked and talked with some of the older Canons who 
were still alive when young Fernando -arrived from Lisbon ; and the 
English Pope Adrian IV (Breakspeare) had forged one of the many 
links which bind our country to Portugal by according to Santa Cruz 
signal privileges. 



ST. ANTONY OF PADUA 



55 



Fernando remained ten years with the Canons two years in 
Lisbon, eight in Goimbra. When he left Portugal for ever, he had 
spent under its gentle skies more than two-thirds of his allotted years 
on earth. In eleven more years some say only ten his life's work 
was to be done. It is important to grasp these time-factors in order 
to understand that although we speak of Antony of Padua (his death- 
place) our Saint was Antony of Lisbon, who spent thrice as much 
time in Portugal as in Italy, and only a year or two, all told, in Padua. 



in 

Many persons now living remember the time when even educated 
Britons reckoned St. Antony's century as part of " the Dark Ages. 3 ' 
When the spread of the Gothic Revival drew attention strongly to the 
unsurpassed cathedrals and other churches of that century, they 
somewhat modified their harsh verdict. The thirteenth century, they 
said, was a Bright Age for architecture but a Dark Age for Science 
and Religion. Fuller popular knowledge concerning the Universities 
and concerning the intellectual life of which St. Thomas Aquinas was 
the chief ornament, have made anti-Catholics less sweeping in their 
condemnation of the Medieval Church's attitude to Education ; yet 
the notion still remains that She was no .Kindly Mother to Her children 
but a harsh schoolmistress, rapping their knuckles or giving their 
backs the rod in a spirit of tyranny. 

The truth is that nowhere and never in history has a great institution 
shown more amenability than did the Catholic Church in the thirteenth 
century. If this were a study of St. Francis instead of St. Francis's 
disciple and coadjutor St. Antony, striking facts could be adduced, 
showing how not only Bishops but Cardinals and even Popes gave 
kindly hearing to the Little Poor Man of Assisi and helped him to 
realise his ideals. But our business is with Antony ; and to him 
also the greatest personages in the Church gave sympathy and 
understanding. 

The Canons of Santa Cruz, in their rochets of fine linen, lived 
piously but not meanly in rich and busy Coimbra. Theirs was a 
solid monastery with a worthy church and a library. 1 They were 
not subject to the Bishop. In short, they were an autonomous com- 
munity of such high prestige that their rule forbade any Canon to 
exchange his status for that of a mere monk. Yet their spirituality 
was so sensitive that they set the rule aside when Fernando was 
divinely moved to become a Franciscan. 

" To become a Franciscan " would have been regarded by less 

1 The Manueline buildings which have made Santa Cruz architecturally famous 
were not raised until 300 years after Antony's death. 



j6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

holy men as a humiliation. At that time (1220) the Franciscans had 
not truly become an Order. Only ten years had passed since the 
first little band of Franciscans (literally only twelve disciples) had 
obtained the blessing of Pope Innocent III. It is true that, during 
these ten years, thousands of earnest men had joined the movement ; 
but it was an unorganized throng of clerics and laics,, celibates and 
married men, young and old, high and low. Moreover, It was 
already at sixes and sevens, because its founder had been for two 
years in the Near East, trying to convert the infidels, and his lieutenants 
had got things into a sad mess. As there were no vows and no school 
of novices, many enthusiasts had come In only to go out again. Indeed 
many saintly men looked upon the whole thing as a mere flash in 
the pan. 

What made the humiliation of giving up one of their best subjects 
more bitter to the Canons of Santa Cruz was the fact that this Inchoate 
Franciscanism, in all Its crudity, was at their very door. That 
" distance lends enchantment to the view " and that " familiarity 
breeds contempt " are true proverbs. If Coimbra had known nothing 
of the Friars Minor except as far-off, picturesque mendicant evangelists, 
It would have been easier to let Fernando join them. But Coimbra 
already had its own poor little Franciscan house. It was a place 
without dignity, and its inmates were illiterate. So wretched was the 
state of these ragged starvelings that they came often as beggars to 
Santa Cruz, craving the crumbs which fell from the Canons' table. 
Indeed, it was through his duties as almoner that Fernando came to 
know them. Of Franciscan glory as well as Franciscan poverty and 
humility he was already aware ; because the Heir-apparent to the 
Portuguese throne, Dom Pedro, had lately given to Santa Cruz a 
golden reliquary containing the bones of the first Franciscan martyrs 
of Morocco. 

Not Franciscanism but missionary zeal a zeal fully willing to 
accept a savage death for the Gospel drew Fernando to the Friars 
in the first instance. If some of them had already gone to preach 
and die in Africa, why could not he, Canon Fernando, do the same ? 
Indeed, it is on record that he made a bargain along these lines. He 
would turn Friar, he said, on condition that he was sent to Morocco. 
The humble Franciscans of Coimbra took him at his word ; and the 
very next day they came to stately Santa Cruz carrying the sack-cloth 
and the rope-girdle which were henceforth to be his garb. Meanwhile 
Fernando had persuaded the reluctant Prior and Canons not to oppose 
his missionary effort ; and thus took place the drab little investiture 
of which Portugal has been proud ever since. 

A truly Dark Age would have forced up poisonous fungi of pride ; 
but from the Age of St. Antony an age warmed and quickened by 



ST. ANTONY OF PADUA 57 

the light of Faith sprang sweet flowers of simplicity and humility. 
One of the thirteenth century's bequests to posterity was those jioretti 
" little flowers " of St. Francis in which St. Antony is not the meanest 
or the least fragrant bloom. 

IV 

Their poor friary near Coimbra had been named by the few 
Franciscans there after St. Antony of Egypt, and Antony was the new 
name which they gave to their neophyte from the goodly courts of 
Santa Cruz. 

In the prime of his manhood. Brother Antony took shipping for 
Morocco. To ordinary voyagers the pains and perils of the sea are 
made tolerable by thoughts of happy days in the desired haven. For 
the young friar there was a different and, to him, a still more comforting 
hope. Could he but land safely, proclaim the Gospel faithfully, and 
seal the testimony with his life's blood, he would be content. But 
martyrdom at Moslem hands was not his destiny. He disembarked 
in Africa only to find himself a strengthless invalid. Fever seized 
him and held him until he was forced to decide upon a return to 
Portugal for recuperation. Not that his project was renounced. He 
was more set upon it than ever. Health and strength were to be 
retrieved for Christ's and the infidels' sake. 

When the master of the ship which was to carry the sufferer home 
found himself being steadily blown eastward instead of northward, 
no doubt he cried out against the contrary winds ; but they were 
contrary only to human convenience. They were fulfilling God's 
Will towards one of the greatest of His Saints. The vessel was driven 
to Sicily ; and never again did Fernando of Lisbon behold Portugal. 

At Messina, a consolation was given to him. In that port, he fell 
in with some Friars who broke to him the great news that Brother 
Francis was home again from the East and was about to hold a Chapter 
at Assisi. They themselves were bound thither. Antony joined them, 
or some similar band. 

It was spring-time. From Messina to Assisi was a hundred leagues. 
There would be much discourse between the brethren on the way. 
But the one-time Augustinian Canon does not appear to have told 
the humbler wayfarers that he was a scholar and a priest. They 
arrived at the meeting-place of the Chapter, where some thousands 
of the Friars Minor were gathered together. There Antony, humblest 
of the humble, first beheld Brother Francis. Little did he foresee 
that he was to become one of the Poverello's most beloved and trusted 
colleagues so trusted that Francis would one day call Antony " my 
Bishop " and that he would preach in the Eternal City itself with 
the Supreme Pontiff and a bevy of Cardinals among his hearers. 



58 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Antony's first sermons, delivered in the Romagna (in north-eastern 
Italy) were against the so-called Cathari, whose heresies were so 
grievous that the teachings of the sixteenth-century Protestants are 
mild in comparison. They had no baptism, no Mass and, except 
in a weird sense of their own, no priesthood. Many of them held a 
dualism which made Satan almost a god in the temporal sphere. It 
was when the Cathars ridiculed his preaching on the river bank at 
Rimini that Antony turned away from them and called out " Oh, ye 
little fishes, I have a message for you from Christ." 

Catholic painters have loved to depict this miracle. From the 
pure Tuscan of the Fioretti they learned how the fish " all held their 
heads out of the water and all attentively faced St. Antony, in great 
peace and tameness and order ; so that in front were the smallest 
fishes and after them the middle-sized and behind, in the deepest 
water, the largest fishes." As for the sermon, the disciple Antony 
certainly based it upon the discourse of his master Francis to the birds ; 
but Arthur Christopher Benson did the disciple an injustice when 
he described the sermon to the fishes as " a pompous and heavy- 
handed parody, suggesting a full grown man trying to gambol like a 
child." 1 

That the sermon to the fishes was not necessarily an arbitrary 
attempt to graft the bird-sermon of St. Francis upon the Antonian 
legend is proved by what we know of Antony's character. 2 He had a 
great love of Nature. While he preached, he looked upward ; and 
his very last weeks on earth were mostly spent in a little tabernacle 
which had been built for him at his earnest request in the leafy heart 
of a giant chestnut-tree. There, amidst the rustling of foliage and the 
songs of birds, he toiled at sacred studies as his earliest biographer 
says " like a bee in a hive." 

Antony's sainthood, however, came out in other things besides 
apostolic preaching in crowded cities and solitary searching of Holy 
Scripture in lonely forests. For example, it was he who persuaded 
Padua to pass a humane bankruptcy-law, under which a debtor who 
had assigned his property to his creditors could not be immured and 
kept (as had been the harsh practice) in gaol. The museum of Padua 
still preserves the original document. 

This brief paper cannot tell Antony's full life-story. But it must be 
related that St. Francis, who was not himself a priest, made use of the 

1 Long before the Catholic Revival in the nineteenth century Antony's Sermon 
to/the Fishes was known to English Protestants. A delightful translation was published 
by Addison, after his travels in Italy. It is printed as an Appendix to this chapter. 

2 The Portuguese are proverbially kind to animals. When some well-meaning 
Britons wanted to lecture the public of Oporto against cruelty, the Portuguese simply 
could not understand it. At Portuguese bull-fights the bull is not killed and there 
is none of the slaughter of old horses which so long disgraced Spain. 



ST. ANTONY OF PADUA 59 

ex-Canon's learning and allowed him to teach theology. Unhappily 
not even the smallest fragment of his lectures has survived. Nor do 
we indubitably possess any of those sermons which had so much 
drawing-power that the ladies of Padua would leave their beds before 
daybreak on cold mornings and would go by torchlight to church to 
hear them, while the congregation was swollen by thieves, usurers 
and notorious libertines. 

Of the ten years or so which Antony lived outside Portugal, two at 
least seem to have been spent in France. To the French years belong 
some of the most picturesque Antonian miracle-stories, such as the 
stopping of the rain over the heads of an open-air audience and the 
replenishment of the wine-barrel after a poor woman had forgotten to 
turn off the tap. Some say that France was also the scene of that 
apparition of the Infant Jesus which is represented in popular statues 
of the Saint. And this brings us to the question of miracles said to 
have been wrought by Antony during his lifetime. Recent writers 
reject these ante-mortem miracles, on the ground that they are hardly 
mentioned in the earliest Lives of the Saint. 

Although, as his concluding paragraphs will show, it would suit 
the present writer's argument to rest the fame of Antony the Wonder- 
worker almost solely upon his post-mortem miracles (as indeed Pope 
Gregory IX did when he canonized Antony) we must not indecently 
hurry to join the sceptics or minimizers. The Saint's first panegyrists 
did not profess to write as exhaustive biographers. Some of them, 
indeed, essayed no more than brief memoirs for liturgical use ; and they 
followed the Church in not dwelling on the earlier wonders. 1 



There is presumptive evidence for some Antonian ante-mortem 
miracles at least. The phenomenal fame of Antony, still a young 
foreigner at the time of his death, can hardly be explained by his 
eloquence and benevolence alone. When the boys and girls of Padua 
on June 13, 1231, rushed through the streets crying, "The Saint is 
dead, St. Antony is dead," the whole city was moved. Indeed, for 

1 An instance of excessive scepticism towards these wonders in Mr. Ernest 
Gilliat-Smith's St. Anthony of Padua (London, 1926), in many respects a good and 
useful book. After stating that the earliest account of the Sermon to the Fishes is 
in, the Florentine Legend (c. 1275, or 44 years after the Saint's decease) he adds : 
" Note this, the miraculous element enters into it hardly at all. 5 * Yet, as Mr. Gilliat- 
Smith's own excerpt shows, the Florentine Legend explicitly says that the fishes 
" came at Antony's call, and remained with their heads out of the water until he had 
finished speaking to them and had given them his blessing and then they went away." 
Surely there is enough of " the miraculous element " here for anybody. Can it be 
that Mr. Gilliat-Smith has kept company with those whose fish-stories are so tall as 
to dwarf even St. Antony's ? 



So GREAT CATHOLICS 

several days, the Paduans could talk of nothing else ; and a dispute 
as to his place of burial even led to a short and sharp little civil war. 

Less than a year (May 30, 1232) after his decease St. Antony was 
added to the Calendar of Saints by the Pope (Ugolino) who had known 
and revered him in the flesh. But let it be carefully noted that 
Gregory IX did not act on mere impulse. His commissioners visited 
Padua and held an investigation of the most rigorous kind. They 
rejected every wonder-story which did not come unscathed out of 
their critical crucibles. In the end, they accepted as indisputable 
forty-six miracles, of which no less than forty-five were wrought 
post-mortem. 

Since that year of 1232, Antonian miracles have become as numerous 
as leaves in Valiombrosa. There is no speech nor language in which 
their fame is not heard. It would be no exaggeration to say that 
the forty-six have grown to forty-six thousand and more. If all 
these had been written down and scrutinized, it would be found that 
the deponents are not visionaries or persons obsessed with the super- 
natural. Nor are they mainly those full-time church-folk who are 
known by the clumsy name " religious." They include hard-headed 
men of science and of business by the scores of thousands, as well as 
equally sane and practical working women. Literate and illiterate, 
old and young, earnest and careless, can alike testify to the efficacy 
of St. Antony's intercession. 

Although " lost things " are prominently mentioned in the Friar 
Julian of Speyer's famous Responsory Si quaeris miracula and are the 
best known materia of the Saint's wonder-working, St. Antony of Padua 
has, throughout seven centuries and more, proved himself a Thauma- 
turge in countless other ways. Not only as a mission-preacher in his 
own day but as the celestial ally of evangelists and Christian apologists 
ever since he has deserved his name " Hammer of Heretics." Not 
only for the bankrupts of Padua and the forgetful Proven$ale was he 
a Father of the Poor but also for thousands past numbering who have 
invoked him in their misery. And the same is true of his other 
glorious titles Consoler of the Afflicted, Medicine of the Sick, Hope 
of the Despairing, Tranquillizer of Factions, Deliverer of Captives, 
Trumpeter of Truth. 

So now we are brought round again to the thesis which was adum- 
brated at the outset of this paper ; namely, that St. Antony of Padua 
is not only precious to us as a friend-at-court in highest Heaven but 
has an incalculable evidential value for Catholic apologetics. Unless 
millions of witnesses even within a few years of his death Veneti, 
Lombard^ Sclavi, Aquilei, Theutonici, Hungari were flocking to his tomb 
have been fools or liars, the testimony to the continuous existence, in 
a higher state, of the mortal born near Lisbon Cathedral in the year 



ST. ANTONY OF PADUA 61 

1195 and dead at Padua in 1231 is too multitudinous and massive to 
be brushed aside. And, if it cannot be brushed aside, reasonable men 
must face its implications. Far-fetched attempts to explain it on the 
lines of that ignoble and mis-called " Spiritualism " with which our 
noble as well as holy Mother the Church sternly forbids us to toy, are 
incompatible with the rich history of Antonian miracles. Those 
miracles have always been miracles of celestial compassion, having 
nothing whatever in common with morbid and irreverent attempts to 
pull aside a curtain which God Himself has lowered and to pry into 
mysteries which mock the Peeping Toms with nothing more useful and 
uplifting than alleged materialisations of the clown Grimaldi or 
" Raymond's " supra-mundane cigarettes. 

The Catholic explanation of Antony the Catholic is as simple as it is 
lofty and inspiring. The Incarnate God in Whose love Antony lived 
and died promised that because He lives, we shall live also, and that 
those who do His Father's will shall be one with Him, " even as He 
and the Father are one." That " Christ is risen " is among the best 
authenticated facts of history. Not only risen but ascended, He sits 
at the right hand of God. With Him in beatitude eternal are those 
" Friends of God," His Saints ; and part (if we may use a most finite 
word) of their happiness is expressed in the promise of another Wonder- 
worker, " The Little Flower," of Lisieux, who said, " I will spend my 
Heaven doing good upon earth." 



ADDISON'S VERSION OF ANTONY'S SERMON TO THE 

FISHES 

Although the infinite power of God, my dearly beloved fish, discovers 
itself in all the works of His creation, as in the Heavens, the Sun, 
the Moon, the Stars, in man or in the other perfect creatures ; never- 
theless the goodness of the divine majesty shines out in you more 
eminently. For, notwithstanding, you are imprisoned in the deep 
abyss of waters, tossed among billows, thrown up and down by tempests, 
deaf to hearing, dumb to speech, and terrible to behold, the divine 
greatness shews itself in you after a most wonderful manner. In you 
are seen the mighty mysteries of an infinite goodness. The holy 
Scripture has always made use of you as the types and shadows of 
some profound sacrament. 

Do you think that without a mystery, the first present that God 
Almighty made to man was of you, O ye fishes ? Do you think 
that without a mystery, among all creatures which were appointed 
for sacrifices, you only were excepted, O ye fishes ? Do you think there 



& GREAT CATHOLICS 

was nothing meant by our Saviour Christ that, next to the pascal Iamb, 
he took so much pleasure in the food of you, O ye fishes ? Do you 
think it was by mere chance that when the Redeemer of the world 
was to pay tribute to Caesar, he thought fit to find it in the mouth of 
a fish ? These are all of them so many mysteries and sacraments 
that oblige you, in a more particular manner, to the praises of your 
Creator. 

It is from God 5 my beloved fish that you have received being, life, 
motion and sense. It is He that has given you, in compliance with 
your natural indications, the whole world of waters for your habitation. 
It is He that has furnished it with lodgings, chambers, caverns, grottoes, 
and such magnificent retirements as are not to be met with in the 
seats of kings or in the palaces of princes. You have the water for your 
dwelling, a clear transparent element, brighter than crystal : you can 
see from its deepest bottom everything that passes on its surface : 
you have the eyes of a Lynx or of an Argus : you are guided by a secret 
and unerring principle, delighting in everything that may be beneficial 
to you and avoiding everything that may be hurtful : you are carried 
on by a hidden instinct to preserve yourselves and to propagate your 
species ; you obey, in all your actions, works and motions, the dictates 
and suggestions of nature without the least repugnancy or contradiction. 

The colds of winter and the heats of summer are equally incapable 
of molesting you. A serene or a clouded sky are indifferent to you. 
Let the earth abound in fruits or be cursed with scarcity it has no 
influence on your welfare. You live secure in rains or thunders, 
lightnings and earthquakes : you have no concern in the blossoms of 
spring or the glowings of summer, in the fruits of autumn or in the 
frosts of winter. You are not solicitous about hours or days, months 
or years. 

In that dreadful majesty, in that wonderful power, in that amazing 
providence did God Almighty distinguish you among all the species 
of creatures that perished in the universal deluge ! You only were 
insensible of the mischief that had laid waste the whole world. 

All this ought to inspire you with gratitude and praise toward the 
divine majesty that has done so great things for you. And since you 
cannot employ your tongues in the praises of your benefactor and are 
not provided with words to express your gratitude : make at least 
some sign of reverence ; bow yourselves at His name ; give some show of 
gratitude according to the best of your capacities ; express your thanks 
in the most becoming manner that you are able. 



THE REV. W. E. ORCHARD, D.D. 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 



A.D. 13471380 

IT is SOMEWHAT strange that St. Catherine of Siena has not had a 
wider appeal in our age, considering what an. attraction St. Francis 
has recently exercised, and that in circles far removed from anything 
that could be called Catholic. Although the interest in St. Francis 
has been fostered by emphasizing what was romantic and humani- 
tarian in his temperament and concern, nevertheless there is much in 
this attachment to him, however one-sided it may be, which is to be 
welcomed ; for it may prove an introduction to that which is far 
deeper in him, his profound personal religion and its Catholic setting, 
since these are the sources both of his simplicity and of his strength. 

It is therefore highly desirable that St. Catherine also should become 
better known, for there is perhaps even more in her activities and her 
teaching which might make a special appeal to our generation and 
prove a means for drawing it, at least nearer to understanding the 
Catholic Church, and why it is what it is and ever must be. It is 
remarkable and promising therefore that our saint appealed to Swin- 
burne, of all unlikely souls ; and not only because of her striving for 
peace ; for his appreciation of her hidden life of prayer reveals an 
unexpected sympathy and even insight. This is so strikingly displayed 
in his poem on " Siena " that some lines from it can be quoted, quite 
suitably, it is hoped, in order to illustrate the following essay to do some- 
thing to popularise her memory and extend her still vital influence. 

While there is much in St. Catherine's career and character which 
should naturally interest our age, there is also much that must challenge 
it ; but which might then lead it deeper. St. Catherine should make 
a special appeal to our age, first of all because she was a woman. For 
ours is the age which has had to bow to women's demands for a public 
career and political equality with men ; though it should then appear 
all the more remarkable that she took the commanding place that 
she did, acting almost as the unofficial ambassadress of peace to 
Europe, and being the most powerful figure of her generation, yet 
without having to claim or strive for anything. And all this was 
before the Renascence had come, which gave to a few women great 

64 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 65 

influence, not always for good, and if to a few also in literature, never 
so powerful a place as St. Catherine attained, yet without having any 
learning at all. In the second place, she took an active and effective 
part in the politics of her times, and she was an intense lover and 
advocate of peace. This activity was however inspired by her 
attaining heights of contemplation, from which she could see so clearly 
and descend to act so swiftly and successfully. She had prepared 
herself for all this by a novitiate of silent seclusion and ascetic discipline ; 
and it was to a hidden life of mystical adoration that she turned at the 
end, when everything external seemed to have failed and further 
activity was blocked by the collapse of her overstrained physical frame. 
The comparative neglect of this, one of the most remarkable women 
that ever lived, considering what she was and wrought, and how 
closely she touched the most vital and pressing concerns of our own 
age, may be partly due to the complexity of the times in which she lived. 
For although she cut like a sword through its tangled web or rather, 
since she had so little faith in the sword, more like a flash of summer 
lightning, piercing the heavy clouds and illuminating the dark 
landscape the disturbed and confused state of her world wants to be 
studied somewhat closely if the significance of her actions is to be under- 
stood, as well as the clarity of her wisdom and the courage of her 
character rightly appraised. For this better understanding of her, we 
do not as yet possess anything like the number of popular biographies 
and varied studies which so many have attempted in order to make 
St. Francis live again for our inspiration and example. We have 
Edmund Gardner's magnificent study of the Saint ; but while its literary 
flavour is of the finest and his spiritual insight altogether worthy of the 
subject, the telling outlines of her life are almost lost for the ordinary 
reader in the richness of the material dealt with, as well as by the high 
scholarship that is brought to its discovery and treatment. Miss Alice 
Curtayne's life is much shorter and simpler, while no less attractive 
in the force and beauty of its treatment, and should do much to bring 
the Saint's example and encouragement to the notice of a wider public. 
But there is nothing between these and the excellent, though somewhat 
brief and therefore necessarily bare, outline of her life in the Catholic 
Truth Society's twopenny tract. What is still needed is something 
specially designed to bring out the application of St. Catherine's life 
and teaching to our modern problems and perplexities. Moreover 
such a treatment, written specially in view of the needs of our age, 
would make a very powerful advocacy for the power as well as the truth 
of the Catholic Faith. This, not only because her saints are always 
the Church's best apologists ; but this saint's particular contribution 
would perhaps help to dispel the disappointment so many feel when 
confronted with the all too human elements of the Church's vast 



66 GREAT CATHOLICS 

organisation, and -the often terribly complicated issues its officials have 
to face in this modern world of ours. And while it would point to the 
necessity of digging down deep to the substratum of faith, to the wells 
of devotion, and to the rich resources of prayer, if anything is to be 
effected, especially at this stage of the world's history, it would also show 
how reverence for an essential office and centre of unity such as the 
Papacy was divinely instituted and commissioned to serve, can be 
combined with a frank criticism as well as a commanding appeal to 
the person who may be its actual representative ; a combination it 
would be a great gain to recover. 

There are, however, it must be admitted, certain obstacles to be 
overcome before a wide and popular understanding of the Saint, as 
well as a devout attachment to her memory, can be looked for. There 
are elements in her type of temperament, as well as in her mode of 
action, which must remain only as a rebuke to our own age and its 
mentality. There are, first, her almost incredible austerities and sheerly 
miraculous abstinences. There are her visions and their often trance- 
like effects upon mind and body, both far removed from modern 
experiences, and beyond even what psychological research into similar 
though quite different states may seem to have illuminated. On the 
other hand it has to be realised that these were an absolutely necessary 
preparation for her divine vocation, as well as for her ability to cut 
through conventions without at the same time endangering her influence 
on her own generation, or clouding the purity of her character for 
posterity, by suspicion and calumny. For although these actually 
arose at the time, they were soon found false, and fell off her unstainable 
purity, or rather were consumed like smuts and smoke, pitch or charcoal, 
in the flaming fire of her love. 

Such was the strength of this woman's personality that thing about 
which we talk so much, without either defining or exemplifying what 
we mean. In her it was obviously derived from her absolute dedica- 
tion, summoned as it was by divine revelation, and enforced by 
supernatural grace ; so that she did not> as we seem doomed to do, 
simply organize opposition parties, in order to accomplish reforms or 
resist wrong, or, more often, only gather meetings together in order to 
pass ineffectual resolutions of protest. She rather went straight to the 
fount of the evil, whether by her personal presence, or by her letters, 
which were almost as arresting ; and even then, not so much to 
condemn the evil, however unmistakeable and reprehensible, but to 
appeal to the good buried in souls that might have seemed to others 
beyond hope of understanding or response. She did not advocate 
reforms therefore : she started them ; she did not agitate until her 
womanhood had been granted political power or had been acknow- 
ledged to possess public sagacity ; she seized the one and displayed 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 6> 

the other. Where others might have been strangled by conventions, 
dismayed by the dangers, or merely irritated by resistance, she launched 
herself, with the Gospel on her lips and sanctity flashing from her soul, 
full at the heart of the trouble, whether enshrined in false values or 
embedded in weakened wills. But before she could have carried 
anything through, or produced any effect, there had to be those years 
of silence, and her long vigils of prayer ; all softness of body had to be 
conquered, and all cloudiness of mind cleared away. The one had to 
be attained by the discipline and hardening of every sense, and the other 
by long dwelling in that " secret cell of self-knowledge " which she built 
for herself in her mind : a sphere where all things are crystal-clear, 
beyond any possibility of self-deception, the innermost secret of other 
hearts is reflected, and self-consciousness is lost in the consciousness 
of God r at once transcendent and near, Dread Sovereign Majesty, and 
yet the Loving Bridegroom of the soul. 

Even to those \vho have cherished some dream of attaining that 
holiness without which, after all, not only can no man see the Lord, 
but there is no hope of inward peace or real outward power, St. 
Catherine presents a double challenge, whether of hope or warning. 
Her sanctity was won, not only through asceticism and prayer, in which 
the more immediate hindrances in the self were brought into subjection, 
but also against constant hindrances without ; whether found in 
disappointing characters, and misunderstanding minds, and these, not 
only among worldly souls, but among those who ought to have been in 
verity, as they were by vocation, religious. Turbulence and temper, 
vanity and violence, characterized the ordinary social life of the time ; 
while in the Church there was corruption even among the hierarchy, 
unworthy examples in the priesthood, secular or religious, timidity and 
mediocrity everywhere. Her earliest foes were those of her own 
household ; her tormentors and traducers often those of the " household 
of faith. 53 With our Saint there was, therefore, no gliding into 
sanctity in an atmosphere of uninterrupted quiet, whether in the home 
or in the sanctuary ; everywhere there was chatter and clatter, 
confusion and disturbance. Everything had to be not only heroically 
attempted but heroically endured. The lesson she has left to aspirants 
after sanctity, who should not be any fewer in our days, for they are 
as much needed, but are perhaps too easily discouraged is that sanctity 
is most called for when everything is adverse, and is generally only 
achieved when everything seems contrary. 

Even then St. Catherine's life and achievements contain a lesson hard 
enough to our coarse valuations and measurement by outward success. 
For the things she actually sought to bring about either altogether 
failed, or, when they succeeded, only seemed to bring worse evils in 
their train. The secret of a success which lies hidden in failure has 



68 GREAT CATHOLICS 

to be learned both in appraising and in following her. For out of all 
her magnificent efforts, and even most startling achievements, there 
was found nothing of solid and permanent gain but this : the sancti- 
fication of her own glorious soul and its saving influence on others. 
Even her wonderful letters, for all the practical effect they had would 
seem like writing on sand, which the cruel storms of evil or the lazy waves 
of compromise would have wiped out, were it not for their spiritual 
power and beauty which remain. In addition we have her greatest 
literary bequest, which still lives to fertilize souls with high thoughts 
and holy contemplations, the mystical treatise known as " the 
Dialogue," dictated by her swiftly in a state of ecstasy as fast as the 
astonished scribes could take it down. 

St. Catherine ought to attract our age, but she is bound to rebuke 
the modern mind ; nevertheless she might show us how to save both 
at present so perplexed and cast down. It is with some such hope 
that this brief outline of her life is here set forth. It may move some to 
read the larger works and original sources, and encourage some writer 
better qualified to bring out the significance of her life and set it forth 
in such force and beauty as shall attract the wider attention it deserves. 

It was in a steep side street of proud and turbulent Siena, a still 
medieval and crowded city, that, about the middle of the fourteenth 
century, there was born to the Benincasa family a child who, in her 
swift short life, was to make such a mark upon her country's -history and 
an even more indelible mark upon the Church's memory by its well- 
merited canonization of her sanctity. One can still stand and look 

" Up the sheer street : 

And the house midway hanging see 
That saw Saint Catherine bodily, 
Felt on its floors her sweet feet move, 
And the live light of fiery love 
Burn from her beautiful strange face. 

It was a busy and bustling household into which our Saint was born ; 
the father a well-to-do craftsman and merchant, the mother of some- 
what better social inheritance, giving birth thus to her twenty-fifth 
child, and this time twins ; though the sister twin soon died, as had 
twelve others of this numerous family beforehand. These are facts 
which might well awaken varied reflections in the minds of those 
who are concerned about infant mortality, obsessed about the limitation 
of births, or wondering about God's ways in sending souls into this 
world. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that here was a soul 
marked out with special graces from earliest days. For beside her 
christened name of Catherine, the family called her Euphrosyne, the 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 69 

name also given by botanists to that little meadow flower known to 
our countryside as Eyebright. We might well remember her by it, 
for though it is so humbly small, yet when looked at carefully, it is seen 
to be as unusual in form as it is beautiful in colour. Such was she as a 
child ; gifted not only with light brown hair which the Sienese girls 
so much admired that they bleached their more common black locks to 
obtain it, but with a beauty (however soon marred by smallpox) that 
must have caused the attention which was soon fastened on her, and 
have contributed to the extraordinary effect which merely to look 
upon her had all her life and that upon everyone, however 
reluctant they may have been to desire her presence or believe in her 
power. But far more certain than beauty of face must have been the 
grace that diffused itself around her, and the light that shone from her 
soul ; for that was obvious and arresting from an early age. 

The growing child had soon begun to make prayer the chief among 
her concerns ; going up the stairs of her lofty house, she was 
accustomed to make each step part of a rosary. As early as at six years 
of age there occurred the first of that series of visions that was to lift 
her eyes to heaven and draw her so near to Christ, though making 
it all the clearer to her what was crying out to be put right in the 
world and in the Church. Coming home from a visit one day, above 
the Dominican Church near her home, with which her religious life 
was so much connected, and where at last her head was to be enshrined 
as its most precious relic, she saw a vision of Christ, accompanied by 
saints and angels, smiling upon her and giving her the priestly blessing. 
It may be difficult in any given case to decide what objective reality 
such visions rest upon, but it is impossible in St. Catherine's case, at 
any rate, to explain them away. It is allowable to hold that such visions 
owe something to the recipient's own mind, stored, as hers may well 
have been, with images remembered from the pictures on the walls 
or in the windows of the Churches ; but all that may only provide 
furnishing or translation of what was an immediate touch of God upon 
the soul, calling it to high commission and sealing it with sanctity. 
Anyhow nothing for Catherine could be quite the same again, and she 
now set herself to seek for its meaning and to prepare herself for what 
it entailed. 

The preoccupation that now began to hold her mind, and almost 
blinded her eyes to ordinary things, was soon noticed by her somewhat 
fussy and managing mother, and various distractions were invented 
to disentangle her mind's attention, or improve her health, for one or 
the other was naturally suspected to be not quite normal. She began 
to dream of being a nun, a missionary, or a martyr ; and in order to 
stamp as final her resolution to renounce all ideas of marriage, which 
was thought of for her, as was usual in those days, very early, at her 



70 GRFAT CATHOLICS 

confessor's advice she cut off all her lovely-coloured hair. Now 
ensued a tussle of wills ; and not only with her mother's, for the whole 
family strove to break hers to follow theirs. All privacy was denied 
her ; the family servant was sent away, and she was made to take her 
place and wait upon them all ; and her days were made weary with 
drudgery. With her swift power of extracting the best from the 
worst, Catherine set herself to look upon her father as Christ, her 
mother as the Virgin, and her brothers and sisters as the twelve 
Apostles ; and thus she served them with interior devotion. For the 
loss of any place in which to pray alone, she reverted to that " secret 
cell of self-knowledge ", as she called it. It was soon obvious that 
whatever hindrances and humiliations were heaped upon her, she 
was winning the victory ; and after her father had seen a vision of a 
snow-white dove hovering over her, when he caught her at prayer 
in her brother's room, he demanded that the persecution should cease, 
and a room of her own be given her. With this privilege, always so 
precious to a young girl, but welcomed by her for deeper reasons, she 
set herself to live like an anchoress, reducing food and sleep to an 
inhuman minimum, and going out only to her Communions at St. 
Dominic's close by. 

" For years through, sweetest of the saints, 

In quiet without cease she wrought, 
Till cries of men and fierce complaints 

From outward moved her maiden thought." 

Very soon there now began that other marked phenomenon of her 
mystical life, the trance-like condition which the reception of the 
Sacrament so often induced. It is not surprising that these happenings 
attracted attention and wakened suspicion. The cruel test of piercing 
her foot with a knife showed however that she was really beyond 
sensible feeling. Yet- these were no mere stupors, as was afterwards 
apparent ; for in these frequent attacks of insensibility there was 
no blank unconsciousness, but rather such a consciousness of God's 
presence and the pressure of spiritual power, that everything of sense 
was cut off, and the body left almost as if the soul had departed from 
it. Unlike the common effects of false mysticism, these happenings 
only Increased her desire to know what God had already revealed by 
His spoken word, and she also used her years of retirement to learn 
to read the Scriptures. How she did this is so unknown, that it is 
believed it was miraculously acquired ; for she seemed to be able to 
gather the sense when she did not even know the letters or how to spell 
the words. She must also have learned to write, though most of her 
voluminous correspondence was dictated, and sometimes at the rate 
of three letters at once to different secretaries. 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 77 

One of these raptures took an unusual form, and has been represented 
in famous pictures, one by Luini, familiar to many from reproductions, 
as well as one by David which is in our National Gallery ; though no 
doubt she would think they did little justice to what her inner eye saw 
of glory and beauty. This was however a vision of her espousals as 
" the bride of the Kingdom of heaven. 55 The ring of gold, with its 
pearls and diamonds, that sealed the ceremony, she declared that she 
could always afterward see shining on her finger. Lest anyone should 
dismiss this as an extravagant conception of her relationship to Christ, 
it might be remembered that all nuns wear a wedding ring in token 
of their dedication to Christ alone ; and since, in these days, a sensual 
basis is suspected for even the highest religious experiences, it might 
be recalled that Christ Himself, when speaking to His Apostles, called 
Himself the " Bridegroom. 5 ' Indeed every human soul is unpartnered, 
and must at last become desolate, unless it is attached to Christ by 
supernatural love ; while the joy of heaven that all must attain, or 
remain in the outer darkness, is symbolized in the Apocalypse as the 
Marriage Supper of the Lamb. There is a secret here not easily 
attained ; yet if any soul does not know it, what else it does is of little 
value. In mystical theory the spiritual marriage, is generally placed 
as the highest experience of the souFs converse with its Redeemer ; 
but it is then expected to be fruitful in works, and in the begetting of 
spiritual children ; that is, in the conversion of souls. So it soon was 
in the case of St. Catherine. For this vision marked the end of her 
life of seclusion and sent her forth to minister what she had gained 
and impart what she had learned. 

" Then in her sacred saving hands 
She took the sorrows of the lands. 
With maiden palms she lifted up 
The sick time 5 s blood-embittered cup. 
And in her virgin garment furled 
The faint limbs of a wounded world. 
Clothed with calm love and clear desire, 
She went forth in her souls attire, 
A missive fire." 

At first she set herself to minister to those who had not only the 
greatest physical but also the greatest spiritual need, working in the 
hospitals and taking her place in tending the sick, even penetrating 
into the very lazar-houses, then so plentiful, and often places of moral 
as well as of physical corruption. One disagreeable character there 
she tenderly nursed, only to be repaid with, curses and abuse ; and 
before she could win her love and bring her to a pious frame of mind, 
Catherine had herself contracted from her some symptom of the 



72 GREAT CATHOLICS 

dreaded plague. On the old woman's death, however, she was consoled 
not only by bringing her to penitence at last, but because the dreaded 
marks disappeared, leaving behind only a luminosity where the leprous 
spot had been before. It was her discernment of the soul's need, and 
her power of speaking to its condition, that began soon to earn for her 
a new fame ; and all kinds of persons now came to see her and sought 
her guidance. Among these came priests and theologians, hermits 
and religious, as well as lay folk of every walk and station ; and 
sometimes with suspicion, or malicious intent. But with all of them 
it was soon enough to see her face, and to hear her heavenly con- 
versation, perfectly orthodox and humble, but decorated with strange 
beauty and alive with spiritual fire. Those who had been helped 
then brought others, and especially those who needed to be converted 
from blasphemous talk and evil living and generally, despite reluctance 
or bravado, they left changed, not only in their opinion about her, 
but about everything else ; for to all she commended love and 
forgiveness, holiness and humility. 

It is not surprising that some persons began to get envious and 
some to suspect pride and even worse disorders to be at work. Sermons 
were preached publicly against her and her cult for it was fast 
becoming nothing else. She was delated to the heads of her Order, 
for she had earlier become a Dominican tertiary, and at length 
summoned to its General Chapter. Whatever accusations were made 
against her, they were easily answered by the willing witness of those 
who had known her intimately from her earliest days, and this, together 
with the testimony of her own simple and radiant spirit secured her 
complete acquittal. A special confessor was appointed for her, 
everything ending, therefore, in the recognition of her sincerity and 
soundness, and with the practical approbation of her character and 
work. 

It is a mark of her extending and deepening influence that there 
now gathered round her a band of those who were dependent upon 
her inspiration, and devoted to her service : a Fellowship, consisting 
of old and young, men and women, priests and laymen, poets and 
politicians, some of them rescued from lives of laziness and vice, many 
from merely worldly concerns, and others from the feuds and fighting, 
which were equally trivial, to purposeful living and the pursuit of 
holiness. Some of these, doubtless the once gay and frivolous, who had 
now become her known friends and slaves, were called after in the 
streets, Caterinati ; but that was a name fast becoming a mark of honour 
and dignity. Both priests, and laymen who could do so, took down 
her conversation, and offered their services to write the numerous 
letters which began the next stage of her ever-widening apostolate. 

Catherine's way and success in dealing with individual souls, 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 73 

whatever their need and distress, was so remarkable and beautiful, that 
it must be illustrated by one example 5 which can fortunately be told 
in her own vivid and moving words. A certain Niccolo di Toldl, 
a Perugian, had been condemned to death simply for speaking 
slightingly of the Sienese government. All attempts at reprieve were 
sternly rejected, mainly because Siena and Perugia were then at war, 
and the young man's death was looked upon as a kind of reprisal ; 
or rather as an outlet for the hate and vengeance which always spring 
up at such times all too easily everywhere, but hardly anywhere more 
fiercely than in Italy at that time. The poor fellow was naturally raving 
at the injustice that was going to deprive him of life, when so young and 
for so small a crime, and he had therefore repulsed all attempts on the 
part of the local priests to prepare him for death. So Catherine 
undertook the difficult task. Writing to her director after all was 
over she says : "I went to visit him of whom you know, whereby he 
received such great comfort and consolation that he confessed, and 
prepared himself right well ; and he made me promise by the love of 
God that, when the time of execution came, I would be with him ; and 
so I promised and did. Then in the morning, before the bell tolled, I 
went to him, and he was very glad. I took him to hear Mass, and he 
received Holy Communion, which he had never received since the 
first. His will was attuned and subject to the will of God, and there 
only remained a fear of not being brave at the last moment. He 
said, e Stay with me and do not leave me, and I die content.' He laid 
his head upon my breast, and I said, e Be comforted, my sweet brother ; 
for we shall soon come to the nuptials. You shall go there bathed in 
the Blood of the Son of God, with the sweet name of Jesus ; and I 
will wait for you at the place of execution.' His heart then lost all 
fear, and his face was transformed from sadness to joy. I waited for 
him therefore at the place of execution with continual prayer, and in 
the presence of Mary, and of Catherine, Virgin and Martyr. I 
besought and implored Mary for this grace : that he might have 
light and peace of heart at the last moment, and that I might see 
him return to God. Then he came like a meek lamb, and, seeing me, 
he laughed, and asked me to make the sign of the Cross over him. 
I did so, and said, ' Up to the nuptials, my sweet brother ! for soon you 
shall be in everlasting life.' He knelt down with great meekness ; 
and I stretched out his neck, and bent over him, reminding him of the 
Blood of the Lamb. His. lips said nought save Jesus and Catherine. 
And so saying, I received his head into my hands." She goes on to 
declare that she then had a vision of God receiving his soul, and that 
he turned back and looked at her " like a spouse who has reached the 
threshold of her new home, who looks round and bows to those who 
accompanied her, showing her gratitude by that sign. Then did my 



74 GREAT CATHOLICS 

soul repose in peace and quietness, in such fragrance of blood, that I 
could not bear to have removed from my garments the blood that had 
fallen on them. Wretched and miserable that I am, I will say no 
more ; I remained on earth with the greatest envy." 

Comment is needless on this tragic story, thus transformed into 
such heavenly beauty ; but there are points in it which are illuminated 
by events that went before. It should be noted, however, that those 
nuptials which had been granted to herself in vision, are here shown to 
be the destiny of every cleansed soul ; and her insight into the meaning 
of the Precious Blood and its efficacy, which enabled her to overcome 
any natural repugnance to this most unnatural blood-shedding, had 
been strengthened and sealed by another mystical experience just 
previously granted. 

One morning after Mass, her director, who was making his thanks- 
giving, noticed her gaze fixed on a crucifix painted on the wall. She 
knelt upright, flung out her arms, and, remaining thus for a while, 
then sank back on the floor as one dead. She whispered to her 
confessor, who hurried to her aid, that she had received the stigmata, 
and believed that she was dying. The suffering from this experience 
continued several days ; but she eventually recovered and, fearing 
publication of this dreadful favour, she had prayed at the time that 
the marks should be hidden. They never were actually visible, though 
the pain was felt by her, and sometimes acutely, to the end of her life. 
All this is in the realm of high mystical experience, and yet, surely 
not beyond comprehension or even sharing ; for those who would 
come at the last to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb will have to 
have had some life-and-death contact with the Cross, or will only be 
cast out for not having on a wedding garment. 

Catherine now began to be called upon to intervene and arbitrate 
in the feuds, whether between families or cities, which were a constant 
plague of that violent age. 

Across the might of men that strove 
It shone, and over heads of kings ; 
And molten in red flames of love 
Were swords and many monstrous things : 
And shields were lowered and snapt were spears, 
And sweeter-tuned the clamorous years : 
And faith came back and peace, that were 
Fled . . . 

Her one message to all was that of refusing to judge and being willing 
to forgive ; and such was her grace and power that she was generally 
wonderfully successful. This both invited and impelled her to try her 
skill as an ambassadress of peace upon the greater conflicts that were 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 75 

distressing the world. To understand the need and scale of what she 
now attempted, it must be realized how deep was the confusion and 
violence of social life at that time. Not only were the Republics of the 
time governed by a series of factions, but within the same country, city 
was set against city, the nations were at war with one another, and 
Christendom was still harassed and threatened by conquests and 
onsets of Islam. 

One of the most obvious needs therefore and it seemed to her it 
might also be the clearest and simplest way out of the many local 
feuds and international strifes was to get the irrepressible fighting 
spirit of the age enlisted upon an adventure that would rid Europe of 
a dire peril and bring unity at home. The Pope had proclaimed 
one more crusade against the Saracens, and Catherine lent all her 
powers to make it a success by trying to secure the adherence of active 
support of factions now at war with one another, as well as of persons 
who might thus redeem their lives from futility and vice. So she began 
to dictate a series of letters to notable and notorious people, in which 
the simplicity of her own mind and her power over others are reflected. 
She tried to appeal to such filibusters as Sir John Hawkwood, an 
Englishman, willing to sell his services to any one who would buy 
them ; not only calling him "dearest brother" but, recognizing the 
nature of the man she had to deal with, beseeching him, since he 
delighted so much in war and fighting, at least to fight for something 
just and noble, which he now had the chance of doing if he would 
take the sword under the sign of the crusader's cross. She even 
tried her powers of persuasion on the ill-famed Queen of Naples. 
In both cases she received the promise of support. Catherine may 
have shared the romantic conception of war, on which the Crusades 
themselves were going to inflict such a fatal blow ; and she seems to 
have hoped it would somehow make salvation accessible to the 
Saracens. Anyhow the crusade never even got started ; and from 
what we know of other attempts, it is perhaps as well. She soon 
learned to lean more on the cross as the weapon that can prove effective 
without the sword and to trust for the deep healing of the world's 
wounds to those wounds of love that can be suffered in union with 
Christ Crucified. 

But a fundamental weakness in the whole situation, she discerned, 
as did many others, to lie in the residence, or rather the exile of 
the Papacy at Avignon. This Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 
as it came to be called, had been brought about partly because of the 
intolerable strife in Rome, and the indignities and hindrances which 
surrounded any Pope who tried to govern either city or Church from 
the Vatican. So under Clement V the Papal Court had removed to 
Avignon, and the Papal States were left to be ruled by Legates, who 



j6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

soon also became Frenchmen. This exile of the Papacy from 'Rome 
had gradually come to be looked upon as almost part of the natural 
order of things ; but in Catherine's time the need for the Pope's return 
to his own city had been made evident by the rebellion of the Papal 
States against the mismanagement and tyranny of the French Legates ; 
while some hope of its fulfilment had been aroused by the fact that 
Urban V had actually returned for a while to Rome. But he could 
stand neither its climate nor its quarrels, and although another great 
saint and seer, St. Bridget, had endeavoured to dissuade him, he 
returned to Avignon, where he soon died. It was the new Pope, 
Gregory XI, that St. Catherine now urged to attempt more bravely, 
and therefore with the promise of more permanence, to return to the 
holy city. This she advocated first by letters, and then in person. It 
must be remembered that when Catherine undertook this amazing task 
she was a woman of under thirty. She had already written to the 
Abbot of Mamoutier on the subject. He was an altogether unworthy 
person, but he was the Pope's nephew and it is evident that she hoped 
her advice would penetrate to the Pope's ears ; for in her letter to him 
she says : "To reform the whole you must destroy right down to the 
foundations. I beg of you, even if you have to die for it, to tell the 
Holy Father to remedy all this iniquity, and when the time comes to 
make ministers and cardinals, not to make them for flattery, nor for 
money, nor for simony. But with all your power implore him to look 
for virtue and good repute in the man, not considering whether he is 
noble or plebeian ; for it is virtue that makes a man noble and pleasing 
to God." Afterward she wrote direct to the Pope himself. The tone 
of this letter has been described as staggering. But what is most 
worthy of notice about it is the combination of respect for the Papal 
office with her bold words of reproof and advice to its then holder ; 
and yet, even these uttered, not with contempt or scolding, but with 
love and hope. For she urges upon the Pope that he should gather 
only good men around him, and that he should also deal gently with 
those that had revolted against his rule. Only her form of address 
can be quoted here : " babbo mio" she writes, " sweet Christ on 
earth " ; but these will serve to bring out the combination of strong 
belief in his august office with her loving concern for him, whom she 
dares to counsel to find a remedy for all things in crushing self-love 
and loving God alone. 

Soon however there came an opportunity for appealing to the Pope 
in person ; and she could hardly have been ignorant by this time 
what her powers were, if she could only be brought face to face with 
anyone. The cities of the Papal States had revolted against the rule 
of the Legates, had formed themselves into a league of resistance, and 
the important and powerful city of Florence had now joined the 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 77 

rebels. Although Catherine realised the abuses that gave every excuse 
for their revolt, she believed that rebellion was no remedy, especially 
when it was against the head of the Church. So she writes first to 
the authorities at Florence counselling submission, even to the interdict 
that had been imposed, and then to the Pope, advocating reconcilia- 
tion : " O my sweet, most holy babbo, I can see no other means for 
you to have back your little sheep, who like rebels have strayed from 
the fold of holy Church. Wherefore I pray you in the name of 
Christ Crucified, and I would have you do this mercy for me, conquer 
their malice with your benignity. 5 ' 

The consequence of this correspondence was that Catherine was first 
invited to Florence, and sent thence as its official ambassador to 
Avignon. It must have been a strange meeting, when the Pope and 
the Saint faced' one another ; and not perhaps without a sense of 
strain on either side. For Gregory had already had experience of 
how this woman could write ; and he had reason almost to fear her 
personal presence. She also must have trembled, if not for herself, 
yet for the success of her mission ; for she was concerned for three 
things : peace with Florence, the Pope's return to Rome, and the 
organization of the crusade. Anyhow her spirit must have been 
deeply disturbed at Avignon ; the Cardinals all against her, the 
women, of whom there were many, and by no means all of un- 
blemished character; curious and contemptuous ; and in addition to 
these sinister influences she had to fight with all her strength to put 
resolution into the Pope himself. It was a further distress for her that 
while she was there the Florentines arrived, but only to repudiate 
her position as their ambassador, and her advice in the negotiations. 
Nevertheless she so far won that, despite every device to dissuade him, 
including warnings from a reputed holy man that he would only be 
killed if he went, the Pope set out at last for Rome. Their respective 
return paths crossed at Genoa, and there is a story that he there 
visited her, no doubt seeking fresh courage, but not courageous enough 
to come, save secretly and disguised. But she knew him at once, and 
knelt for his blessing. Anyhowo the outcome of that visit was that 
he went on his way, though slowly and apprehensively, to Rome. 

Her victory seemed remarkable and complete. It proved to be short- 
lived, indeed entirely deceptive. An outbreak of plague put an end to 
all further thoughts of the crusade ; and she had to bend herself once 
again to nursing the sick, by her prayers saving many of her friends 
who fell before it. But no sooner had this trial passed than a far worse 
was upon her. The Pope died in Rome, and another had to be 
elected. This election took place amidst the greatest confusion. Now 
that the Romans had got back their Pope, they were determined to 
have a Roman as Pope. A Neapolitan was elected, but in fear 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



of the rioting populace, the cardinals actually dressed up a Roman, 
Tebaldeschi, and despite his maddened protests, showed him to the 
people as Pope. The real elected, who took the name of Urban VI, 
was however enthroned and crowned. It was expected from all that 
was known of him that the new Pope would be a reformer, and so he 
proved ; but he began to carry out his reforms, not with firmness so 
much as with intolerable and domineering rudeness. The French 
cardinals were in the majority, and the Pope fatally delayed in 
redressing the balance. Fierce quarrels between them and the Pope 
led to their departure from Rome in a body ; to their open repudiation 
of the Pope's authority; and finally to their declaration that the 
election of Urban had been invalidated by fear. Even the Italian 
cardinals, outraged by the Pope's brusque ways, deserted him, and went 
over to the opposition. The terrible upshot of all this was that a 
French cardinal,' Robert of Geneva, who was chosen by the rest partly 
because he had promised to take them all back to Avignon, was 
elected as Pope, taking the name of Clement VII. Catherine was 
desolate with distress and shame. She immediately sided with Urban 
as the rightful Pope, and promised him not only her support, but that 
she would come to his side, if he asked for her. But immediately 
things grew worse. The rival Pope established his position by creating 
fresh cardinals ; and sides began to be taken, not only between nation 
and nation, but between city and city, Order and Order, and even 
between members of the same family. The actual circumstances of 
Urban's election began to get confused in report and record, and 
despite Catherine's confidence and exhortations, good and holy men 
began to take the opposite side. Moreover, Urban soon showed 
himself anything but capable, buttressing his disputed position by 
outrageous brutality, instead of using the force and dignity which 
were needed if Christendom was to be won to his side. Bulls of 
excommunication began to flow from both sides ; and the only crusade 
the Pope was now concerned about was a crusade against his rival. 
Even Catherine's own followers began to falter, and if not to prove 
faithless, prove unequal to the burden of endurance or wise action. 
Her own director and friend, being sent on a mission to France to 
win it over to the right cause, failed even to get as far, and had to 
endure Catherine's reproaches, however much allowance she made 
for the difficulties that had daunted him. 

Meantime, at the Pope's request, Catherine had gone to Rome ; 
but she had gone only to die. Some premonition of this may have 
moved her, before she left home, to dictate her great mystical treatise, 
the Dialogue, so rich with profound theological thought and spiritual 
insight. We can here take from it nothing but a few extracts showing 
her wonderful way of reconciling the two great commandments, the 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 79 

love of God and of our neighbour, which she showed can be fulfilled 
only by loving our neighbour as God loves us. She records Christ 
as speaking to her thus : " I require of you that you love Me with 
that love wherewith I love you. This you cannot do to Me, because 
I have loved you without being loved. All love that you bear Me 
you owe Me as a debt, and not as a free gift, because you are bound 
to give it Me ; and I love you freely, not in duty bound. You cannot 
then, render to Me the love that I require of you ; and therefore I 
have set you in the midst of others, in order that you may do to them 
what you cannot do to Me; that is, love them freely and without 
reserve, and without expecting any return from it ; and then I consider 
done to Me whatever you do to them. So this love must be flawless, 
and you must love them with the love wherewith you love Me. For 
there is no love of Me without love of man, and no love of man 
without love of Me ; for the one love cannot be separated from the 
other." 

Arrived at Rome Catherine found the cause of Urban going from 
bad to worse, his methods and manners only contributing to the 
defections from him. The confusion and her perplexities deepened 
hour by hour, and she wrote again to the Pope a letter in which 
there still mingles with her customary courtesy, both boldness and 
humility : " Pardon my presumption, most Holy Father, that I have 
ventured to write confidently to you, constrained by the Divine 
Goodness. I should have come instead of writing, but did not want 
to weary you by coming so often. Have patience with me ; for I 
shall never cease from urging you by prayer, and by word of mouth or 
letter, as long as I live, until I see in you and in Holy Church what I 
desire, for which I know you desire, much more than I, to give your 
life." And again, and now for the last time : " Pardon me, for love 
makes me say what perhaps need not be said. For I know that you 
must know the nature of your Roman children, that they are led and 
bound more by gentleness than by force or by harsh words ; and you 
know also how necessary it is for you and Holy Church to preserve this 
people obedient and reverent towards your Holiness, because here is 
the head and beginning of our Faith. I beseech you humbly to 
strive prudently, always to promise only what you can completely 
perform, so that there follow no shame or confusion. Pardon me, 
sweetest and holiest Father for saying this to you." As she finished 
this letter she fell unconscious. It would seem to have been a stroke ; 
but it was just as probably something due rather to the overwhelming 
effect of her mystical intercourse ; for she herself, when able to write 
to her confessor about these seizures says : "I could not move my 
tongue or any other member, no more than a dead body. I therefore 
left the body as it was ; and my intellect remained fixed in the abyss 



So GREAT CATHOLICS 

of the Trinity. My memory was full of the needs of Holy Church and 
of all Christian people. I cried out in God's sight and confidently 
demanded divine aid, offering Him my desires and constraining Him 
by the Blood of the Lamb and all sufferings borne." 

She was now left to face the failure of her plans and hopes ; and 
she could only turn to prayer. The prolonged vigil on which she 
now entered was to be her last great spiritual conflict and adventure ; 
its victory as hidden as the fight was fierce. 

"... she turned 
Back to her daily way divine. 
And fed her faith with silent things. 
And lived her life with curbed white wings, 
And mixed herself with heaven and died. 

For every day was now alike, spent in an agony of intercession. 
Her own words again are the best way of letting us know what was 
going on in her soul. She writes to her confessor : " God imposed 
this obedience on me, that during this holy season of Lent I should 
offer up the desires of all my family, and have Mass celebrated solely 
with this intention, for Holy Church ; and that I should myself hear 
Mass every morning at dawn. By this and other means, which I 
cannot relate, my life is consumed, I doing in this way what the 
glorious martyrs did with their blood. I pray the Divine Goodness 
soon to let me behold the redemption of His people. When it is the 
hour of Terce, I rise from Mass, and you would see a dead woman 
going to St. Peter's. I enter anew to labour in the little bark of 
Holy Church. I remain there praying until nearly the hour of 
Vespers ; and I would fain not leave the place, neither day nor night, 
until I see this people pacified and reconciled with the Father. My 
body remains without food, even without a drop of water ; and with 
such sweet physical torments as I have never before endured ; so that 
my life is hanging by a thread." So it was. Lent ended for her with 
another seizure, which now paralysed her from the waist downwards. 
She was carried to her lodging, never to leave it again ; but a month 
spent in agony both of body and soul went by before release came. 
Her friends and followers were gathered round her, distressed at her 
wasted frame and still more by her spiritual sufferings. It was no 
easy passing for her ; and her last words, were " Blood, Blood, 
Blood ! " 

If we may take upon ourselves to interpret this pain-racked, but 
profoundly penetrating apostrophe, it meant that she saw in vision, 
what she had long held by faith, that the blood of this world's sins, 
its murders and its feuds, its wars and wounds, can be cleansed only 
by the Blood of Christ, and only then as Christians, entering into the 



ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 8l 

fellowship of His sufferings, and being crucified with Him, are willing 
to shed their blood for love of Him, rather than shed the blood of their 
neighbours or even of their enemies, whom they should love, even as 
He loved us ; as he did when we were sinners, indeed. His enemies. 
They buried her body in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and there 
the visitor gazing at the beauty of that Gothic Church, the only one 
in Rome, and looking perhaps first on Michelangelo's " Naked Christ," 
and then on the tomb of Fra Angelico, may be astonished to discover 
that the body, which can be seen lying exposed under the High Altar, 
is hers. This is even that Church's greatest treasure ; and he will 
be a strangely unmoved soul who does not kneel to ask her prayers 
for our world, once more again so much like that of her own time, 
needing just such an intercessor of peace as she was and realizing 
afresh how nothing but the Blood of Christ can cleanse and turn back 
the tide of this world's bloodshed, until it cries no more like that of 
Abel for vengeance from the ground, the nations as well as individuals 
shall have learned the strength there is in love, and the peace that comes 
from forgiveness. 



W. J. O'DONOVAN, M.D., O.B.E. 



THOMAS LINACRE 



A.D. circa 146015-24 

THE MATERIAL FOR a Life of Linacre, whose name is a household 
word in medicine, is hard to find. 

There is a good account of him in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

In the Roll of the Royal College of Physicians an abbreviated account 
of his life appears. It covers ten pages in a volume of 520 pages by 
William Monk, published in 1878. 

His life had a great attraction for Sir William Osier who, among 
modern medical men, had in the writer's student days a reputation 
that extended wherever English was spoken, and whose textbook of 
medicine was the foundation on which tens of thousands of doctors 
built their life's work. William Osier wrote a Life of Thomas Linacre 
and read it as the Linacre Lecture at St. John's College, Cambridge in 
1908. This is a small illustrated volume of 64 pages. 

Sir George Newman, Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health, 
gave a Linacre Lecture in Cambridge in 1928. His lecture was 
privately printed and it dealt with the " Influence of Linacre on 
English Medicine/ 5 giving a few biographical details. 

Linacre's Life was also published by the Catholic Truth Society 
of London in 1912. Under the heading of Catholic Men of Science, 
The Life of Thomas Linacre^ Scholar, Physician and Priest was written 
by J. P. Pye, M.D., D.Sc., Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at 
University College, Galway. This sixteen-page pamphlet was sold for 
a penny. 

Dr. Payne was entrusted with the Life that appears in the Dictionary 
of National Biography, but the standard work to which all refer is 
" The Life of Thomas Linacre , Doctor in Medicine , Physician to King 
Henry VII, the Tutor and Friend of Sir Thomas More, and the Founder 
of the College of Physicians in London, with Memoirs of his Con- 
temporaries, and of the rise and progress of learning, more particularly 
of the Schools from the ninth to the sixteenth century inclusive," 
by John Noble Johnson, M.D. This work was first published, in 1 835, 
by Edward Lumley. 

Dr. Johnson complains that the results of searching for materials 

82 



THOMAS LINACRE 83 

for his text of biography do not correspond with the difficulties which 
attend the search. 

In a copy of this book in the RadclifTe Library, Oxford, is a 
manuscript note on the fly-leaf, " As this book did not sell I destroyed 
all but a few for presents only. Ed Lumley." In a bookseller's 
catalogue of the time it is described as " Octavo, boards, uncut, 
scarce, 6s." 

The registers of the Archbishop of Canterbury, preserved in the 
library at Lambeth, contain only two trivial notices with regard to 
Linacre. There are a few biographical documents in the Bodleian 
Library. 

In the index of the Roll of the Royal College of Physicians for the 
year 1*937, a list of the Harveian orators since 1894 * s set out on P a es 
230-231. William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the 
blood, was a lecturer on anatomy and surgery at this College. He 
gave it during his life-time his patrimonial estate at Burwash in Kent, 
then valued at 56 a year. The purpose of his gift, indented on the 
26th June, 1656, was to provide a small collation at the monthly 
meetings of the Censors of the Royal College of Physicians, and also 
that there might once a year be a general Feast kept within the said 
College " for all the Fellows that shall please to corne." 

In this index the name of Linacre, the founder of the College, does 
not appear. In the Calendar of October 1937, it is noted that Thomas 
Linacre died in 1524, and the list of the Presidents of the College from 
its incorporation is headed by " Thomas Linacre, M.D., Padua et 
Oxon.," elected 1518. This is in marked contrast with the references 
to Harvey who is commemorated by a special yearly lectureship. 

The shortest books of reference will tell us that Thomas Linacre 
lived from about 1460 till 1524 ; that he was physician to Henry VIII 
and that a Charter of Incorporation was granted to the College of 
Physicians in London through his influence on September 23rd, 1518. 

Perhaps the most critical honour has been done to the memory of 
Thomas Linacre by Sir George Newman, in his Linacre Lecture. He 
tells us that he was first the pre-eminent restorer of Greek scholarship 
in England ; that he was the friend and teacher of Sir Thomas More, 
and that it was due to Linacre's inspiration that his book is almost a 
textbook of preventive medicine ; and that to him we owe our 
conception of the splendour and amplitude and the high purpose of 
the science and art of medicine. ec His personality comes down to 
us across four hundred years with an aroma and a virility alike creative, 
winsome and enduring.' 5 

Linacre was born in Canterbury, probably in 1460. He was 
educated first at the Priory School under William of Selling. He then 
went to Oxford ; no one has discovered which was his college ; where 



84 GREAT CATHOLICS 

he lived or how he lived there is not known. In 1484 he became a 
Fellow of All Souls. 

In 1488 Henry VII sent Prior Selling on a mission to the Pope in 
Rome and he chose his late pupil to accompany him. There are 
records of his stay at Bologna and at Florence, where he studied under 
Poliziano at the Court of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The future Pope 
Leo X was a fellow-student with him under this tutor, and another 
of his teachers was the world-famous Greek scholar Demetrius 
Chalcondyles. 

In Florence at that time were Michael Angelo and Pico della 
Mirandola. Later in Rome, where he studied in the Vatican libraries, 
Linacre became a firm friend of Hermolaus Barbarus. It would 
almost seem that Linacre modelled his life on this extraordinary man, 
who appears to have made him a life- time student, turned his interests 
towards medicine and made him a confirmed admirer of Aristotle. 

It was under this genius that Linacre began to undertake the 
collation of manuscripts. Here in the Vatican he studied the scripts 
of Galen's medical works which he later published, and he became 
known to the local Vatican population as one of the calligraphy or 
transcribers of the early Greek manuscripts. 

Linacre then went to Venice, where he occupied himself at the 
printing establishment of Aldus and he edited and corrected proofs 
of the editio princeps of the Aldine Aristotle. There is a superb edition 
of this work, printed on vellum, Linacre's own private copy with his 
autograph, in the library of New College, Oxford. 

Next he went to Padua, where he obtained the degree of doctor of 
medicine with more than the usual " applause." 

It seems pretty certain that Linacre spent six or seven years in 
Italy before returning to Oxford to teach Greek and practise medicine. 
St. Thomas More was his pupil and here he became a life-long friend 
of Erasmus, who wrote, " What can be more acute, more perfect or 
more refined than the judgment of Linacre ? " 

Sir William Osier, the greatest of modern physicians, used to say 
that a Physician may have the science of Harvey and the art of 
Sydenharn and yet there may be lacking in him those finer qualities 
of heart and hand which count for so much in life. <s Many of 
the greatest physicians," said Osier, " have influenced the profession 
less by their special work than by exemplifying those graces of life 
and refinements of heart which make up character. These have 
been the leaven that raised our profession above the level of business. 
Of such as these Linacre was one." In Harvey Cushing's Life of 
Sir William Osier y 1925, Volume II, page 232, is a pretty conceit ,in 
which the great Professor is photographed leaning against the mantel- 
piece above which are pictures of Linacre, Harvey and Sydenham. 



THOMAS LINAGRE 85 

There have been physicians, especially in England, well known for 
their attainments as classical scholars, but, since Linacre, there has 
not come to a member of the medical profession a distinction in the 
field of classical studies comparable to Osier's election to the Presidency 
of the British Classical Association in 1919. 

Osier claimed and publicly said that he could never pick up a 
textbook on the subject of Greek " without a regret that the quickening 
spirit of Greece and Rome should have been for generations killed 
by the letter with which alone these works are concerned. It has 
been a great comfort to know that neither c Pindar nor JJschylus had 
the faintest conception of these matters and that neither knew what 
was meant by an adverb or preposition or the rules of moods and 
tenses 3 (Gomperz). And to find out who invented parts of speech 
and to be able to curse Protagoras by his Gods has been a source of 
inexpressible relief. But even with these feelings of hostility I find it 
impossible to pick up this larger work of Linacre without the thrill 
that stirs one at the recognition of successful effort of years of persistent 
application. No teacher had had such distinguished pupils 
Prince Arthur, the Princess Mary, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus, 
the greatest scholar of the age." 

Linacre's Paduan degree of Doctor was confirmed to him at home 
by an act of incorporation soon after his arrival at Oxford, and it is 
probable that this was followed by a similar act at Cambridge, since 
he subsequently founded there a lectureship corresponding to a 
foundation he had given to Oxford, one at Merton and one at St. 
John's. 

Early in the century he became teacher and physician to Prince 
Arthur. Soon afterwards he began to occupy the important post of 
domestic physician to King Henry VII, and in due course he became 
physician to King Henry VIII. Among his patients were the Lord 
High Treasurer, Sir Reginald Bray, Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of 
York, Cardinal Priest of St. Cecilia, and William Warham, Archbishop 
of Canterbury. Truly the Lord Dawson of his age; 

About the year 1509 he began to receive preferments in the Church. 
He was Rector of Mersham in Kent and in the same year he had a 
prebendary stall in Wells Cathedral ; in 1510 he was Vicar of Hawk- 
hurst in Kent, and in 1517 Canon and Prebendary of St. Stephen's 
Westminster. He had a prebend of South Newbold, York, in 1518, 
was Rector of Holworthy in Devon in the same year and Precentor 
of York in 1519. He was indebted for this last appointment to 
Cardinal Wolsey, to whom at this time he dedicated his translation 
of Galen On the Use of the Pulse. In 15120 he was Rector of Wigan 
in Lancashire and was made Rector of Freshwater in the Isle of 
Wight on August 8th, 1520. In this year he was ordained a priest. 



86 GREAT CATHOLICS 

During his ecclesiastical career his medical practice continued. Why 
all these preferments were accepted and why they were so quickly 
resigned has not been elucidated, but it is probable that the expense 
of institution exceeded the profits which were derived from them 
during the period of possession. 

He continued his professional work as Court Physician and at the 
same time assiduously continued his translations. The most note- 
worthy of his medical translations was Galen's De Sanitate Tuenda, 
which he dedicated to Henry VIII. There is a beautiful copy of this 
in the British Museum with an illuminated title-page. A manuscript 
almost as famous, dedicated to Cardinal Wolsey, was the Methodus 
Medendi published in Paris by Mathew in 1519. There is in the 
Bodleian Library a very fine copy of his third translation of Galen's 
De Temperamentis, which was one of the first books in England with 
Greek type. A. J. Leland's list of his translations is as follows : 

Proclus . . De Sphaera, 1499. 
Galen .. De Sanitate Tuenda, 1517 
,5 . . Methodus Medendi, 1519 
. . De Temperamentis, 1521 
55 . . De Naturalibus Functionibus, 1523 
. . De pulsuum usu, 1523 

55 . . De Symptomatibus, lib. iv ; De Symptomatum 
Differentis, lib. i ; et De Causis, lib. iii, 
1528. 

Linacre took his share with Grocyn and Latimer in Hermolao 
Barbaro's plan to translate the entire works of Aristotle into Latin. 
This design executed in part was never completed owing to the 
separation of the parties and a difficulty of intercourse and of a com- 
parison of the allotted portions with each other. Linacre was in 
London, Grocyn in Maidstone and Latimer at Saintbury in Gloucester. 
Erasmus and Sir Thomas More testify that Linacre completed his share 
but it seems lost for ever. 

More famous still on the Continent was Linacre's reputation as a 
grammarian. True Colet did not accept the Grammar he prepared 
for the boys of St. Paul's School, but his second attempt, called 
Rudimenta Grammatices, dedicated to Princess Mary, became for two 
generations the mental nurture of French boys. Browning described 
in verse his studies and his painful death from stone of the bladder. 

" Back to his book then ; deeper drooped his head ; 
Calculus racked him." 

His most famous grammatical work, De Emendata Structura Latini 



THOMAS LINACRE 8? 

Sermonis, was published in 1524, two months after his death. Con- 
cerning this Philip Melanchthon said " Here is offered a book of a 
most learned man, Linacre . . . and so to me indeed no more perfect 
writing of this character seems to be extant. " 

At Padua in 1467 there were thirty-five teachers in the Medical 
Faculty. It is therefore inescapable to conclude that it was there 
that Linacre conceived the idea of founding lectureships in England. 
Only eight days before he died a Diploma Regium was issued and 
provision was made for the two lecturers at Oxford and one at 
Cambridge previously referred to. The fame of many a Linacre 
lecturer is still to seek, but this founder's name is still indissolubly 
associated with that most important foundation, the Royal College 
of Physicians of London. Linacre left his library to this College, 
which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. 

The Medical Act of 1511 provided that no one should practise as a 
physician or surgeon in London or within seven miles of it except with a 
licence from the Bishop of London or the Dean of St. Paul's, with 
the aid of competent doctors of physic as assessors ; and it was Linacre's 
zeal for the advancement of medicine that led him to obtain by Royal 
Letters Patent a Charter from King Henry VIII made out to himself 
and five other physicians for the foundation of a College of Physicians 
of London, for the regulation of the practice of physic in London 
and for seven miles around, and for the punishment of offenders. 
Four years afterwards these privileges and responsibilities were 
confirmed by -statute and extended to the whole country. 

The establishment of this College was due to Linacre's munificence, 
and its first meetings were held in his own house situated in Night 
Rider Street, which from the time of Linacre until 1860 remained in 
the possession of his College, when it was taken over by Act of Parlia- 
ment in order to provide a site for His Majesty's Court of Probate. 

Within a century this College had built for itself a comprehensive 
institution for scientific advancement comprising anatomical and 
special lectureships, a physic garden, a museum, a library and the 
publication of the London Pharmacopoeia for the standardization of 
drugs. In this most potent germ, conceived in the mind of Linacre, 
lay all the developments of modern medicine, the British Pharmacopoeia 
and the world-famous British Medical Schools. 

Linacre's portrait may be found at Windsor Castle and there is a 
sketch in the British Museum copied in 1600 from some picture which 
cannot now be traced. A bust of Linacre in bronze, by Sir Henry 
Cheere is in the library of All Souls' College, Oxford. 

He was buried in Old St. Paul's Cathedral in a spot which he 
himself selected and expressly specified in his Will. For many years 
no tombstone marked his resting place, but in 1557 Dr. Caius, then 



88 GREAT CATHOLICS 

President of his College, erected in gratitude a monument to the 
founder at his private cost, with the following inscription : 

u Thomas Lynacrus, Regis Henrici VIII Medicus. Vir et Graece 
at Latine, atque in re medica longe eruditissimus : Multos aetate 
sua languentes, et qui jam animam desponderat, vitae restituit ; 
Multa Galena opera in Latinam linguam, mira et singulari facundia 
vertit : Egregium opus de emendata structura Latini sermonis, 
amicorum rogatu, paulo ante mortem edidit. Medicinae studios 
Oxoniae publicas lectiones duas, Cantabrigiae unam, in perpetuum 
stabilivit. In hac urbe Collegium Medicorum fieri sua industria 
curavit, cujus et Praesidens proximus electus est. Fraudes dolosque 
mire perosus ; fidus amicus ; omnibus ordinibus juxta clarus ; 
aliquot annos antequam obierat Presbyter factus, Plenus annis, 
ex hac vita migravit, multum desideratus, Anno Domini 1524, die 
20 Octobris. 

Vivit post funera virtus. 

THOMAS LYNACRO clarissimo Medico 
JOHANNES CAIUS posuit, anno 1557 

I do not think we can close this memoir of Linacre, who was among 
the earliest of his countrymen to be influenced by the " New Learning " 
and to whose labours England stands strongly indebted for the know- 
ledge of the finest language of antiquity, and to whom medicine owes its 
right to rank among the liberal arts, without reprinting his Will, to 
be found in the Registry of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. 
Bodfield 21, fol. xxxvi : 

" Testament of Thomas Lynacre, Doctor in Medicine. 

" In the name of God, Amen. The xixth day of Juyn, in the yere 
of our Lord god a thousand fyve hundred and xxiiij, and the xvj 
yere of the reigne of Kyng Henry, Henry the Eight, I, Thomas 
Lynacre, doctour of phesike, being hoel of mynde.and in good 
memory, lawde and praysing be vnto almighty god, make, ordeyn, 
and dispoase this my present testament and last will, Westniynster. 
Item, I bequeth to Thomas Lynacre, my brother, xl s . Item, I 
bequeth t6 my two neses, Agnes and Margaret, eche of them a bedde, 
with all things to it complete, after the discrecions of myn executours, 
so that Margaret shalhave the better. Item, I bequeth Mr. William 
Dancaster a fether bed and two Irishe blanketts, with a bolster. 
Item, I bequeth to John Plumtre these boks, Palax, Thuchiddes, 
w* that that foloweth, Theodor and Apolones, Libanius 
Declamacions, Theocrita with the Coment, Pynderus with the 
Coment, the Coment vpon Omer. Item, I woll that my funeralls 
and burying shall be doon in moderat maner, after the discrecions 
of myn executours. Item, I bequeth to Richard, my sef unt, a blak 
gowne of iij s a yarde and xl a in money, for the good service that he 
hath doon to me. Item, I bequeth to eche of John Appulby and 



THOMAS LINAGRE <%? 

Edward Tagge, my serunts, a blak gowne a pece of lij 8 a yarde and 
vj s viij d a pece ; and I woll that ail my serunts and housholde have 
mete and drynke for a moneth next after ' my decesse. Item, I 
bequeth to my cosyn Robert Wright of Chester, a doblet cloth of 
blak satyn, beyng in the keping of my sister Alice. Item, I bequeth 
to Richard Wright a black gowne and xx 8 in money. Item, I 
bequeth to Elizabeth, my mayde sef unt, a blak gowne and hir wages 
after the rate of xxvj 8 viij d by yere. The residue of all my goodes, 
whatsoever they be after that my detts be paide, in manner and 
fourme following ; that is to witt, ffirst I bequeth and recomende 
my soule vnto Almighty, &c., and my body to be buried within the 
Cathedrall Churche of Saint Poule, of London, before the rode of 
North dore there, bitwene the longe forme and the wall directly 
over agaynst the said rode. And I bequeth for my buriall there 
to be had suche convenient sume of money as shalbe thought by the 
discrecions of myn executours. Item, I bequeth to the high awter 
of Saint Benet, where. I am a pisfien, for my tithes forgotten in 
discharge of my soule and conscience, xiij s iiij a . Item, I bequeth 
to the high awter of Saint Stephyns, in Walbroke, for my ^ tithes 
there forgotten in discharge of rny soule and conscience, vi s viij d . 
Item, I woil that such due detts as I owe of right or of conscience 
to any maner psone or persones shall be well and truely contented 
and paid. Item, I woll that Alice, rny suster, shall yerely during 
hir lyfe have the londes to be bought for my lectour at Cambridge, 
syse pounds sterlinge to be paid to hir halfe yerely. And I woll that 
Joane, my suster, shalhave during hir lyfe fyve pounds sterlinge 
of the landes to be bought for the said lector, in like maner and 
fourme to be paide, or ells the said suhies to be yerely xceyyed of 
the profits of my lands in Kent or in London, after the discrecions of 
my Lorde of London, Sir Thomas More, Knyghte, and Maister 
John Stokesley, Prebendary of Saint Stevyns at my funerall charges 
doon, and these legacies and bequets expressed in this my present 
testament and last Wille fulfilled and perfourmed, I woll shalbe 
solde by myn executours ; and the money comyng of the sale of the 
same to be applyed for and towards the pformauns and fulfilling of 
this my present testament and last Wille. And of this my present 
testament and last Will I make and ordeyn my Lord Cuthbert, 
Bisshop of London, Sir Thomas More, Knyght, and Maister John 
Stokesley, Prebendary of St. Stevyne at Westminster, myn 
executours, desiring and requiring them to substitute and make 
som honest proctour vnder them, to take the labours aboute the 
pforming of this my testament ; and the same proctour to be 
rewarded for his diligence in that behalfe w parte of my goodes, 
after the discrecions of my said executours. These witness Maister 
William Dancaster, Clerk, William Latymer, Clerk, John Wylford, 
Notary, Richard Hardyng, John Appulby. 

There are points of great interest in this last testament. Sir John 



go GREAT CATHOLICS 

Cheke, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge gave 
currency to the suggestion that Linacre was unorthodox, the story was 
intrinsically improbable and received no credence, the wording and 
dispositions of the will are wholly Catholic. We may note, sadly, that 
Colet receives no parting gift. This is a curious incident in so quiet 
tempered a life. Linacre was hurt that Colet could not use his Latin 
Grammar for the young beginners in St. Paul's School ; there was no 
quarrel and no reconciliation, both were men with forceful characters : 
both men have left memories treasured from England's Catholic past. 



FELIX HOPE 



LE CHEVALIER DE BAYARD 



A.D. 1474-1 23 

IF EVER A man was a hero to his valet, that man was the famous 
Chevalier, sans peur et sans reproche, whose death marked the passing 
of the age of chivalry, and whose " right joyous, merry and enter- 
taining history 5S was written by his " Lord Serviteur." Tradition 
confirmed by the researches of M. J. Roman in his well-known edition 
of Le Loyal Serviteur's history, and more recently by M . G. Letonnelier, 
Archiviste de ITstere at Grenoble, in his Etude Critique (1926) has 
always pointed to Jacques de Mailles as the author of this work, which 
was published in 1527, about three years after Bayard's death. Mailles 
had been a secretary of the great Chevalier and an archer in his com- 
pany on some of his campaigns. He was a native, like Bayard, of that 
picturesque province of Dauphine. 

To be fearless and without reproach in the eyes of his contem- 
poraries was far from implying ascetic abstinence from the pleasures 
of the senses. But if Bayard was no saint, his knightly deeds and 
character had become a legend already during his lifetime. The 
" Loyal Serviteur," whoever he was, did not create it. But he 
enshrined it in a work of art which, thanks to his genius for narrative 
and his obvious sincerity, coupled with great felicity in selecting 
incidents and phrases, reached a very high pitch of excellence. It 
lives on its own merits, and has immortalized the name and character 
of the gentil Seigneur it portrays. The author, indeed, was a creative 
as well as a selective artist. When he was short of facts he invented 
them. But his fictions are nearly always probable, and always in 
harmony with the character he describes. Modern criticism has 
done much to correct the blind acceptance of all the incidents 
recorded on what had long been regarded as the unimpeachable 
testimony of so intimate an acquaintance of the very gentle and 
perfect knight. But it ' has not invalidated the legend of Bayard. 
There are other sources by which that can be checked, such as 
contempora-ry correspondence and writers, like the pedantic 
Symphorien Champier and the chronicler Aymar du Rivail, both 
relatives of the Chevalier, as well as Claude Expilly and Brantome, 

92 



LE GHEVALlEU DE BAYARD 93 

and the greater historians of the age, from Gommines to Guicciardini. 
From them all, when collated and corrected by the latest historical 
criticism, as has been done by Dr. Samuel Shellabarger (1928), 
emerge unaltered in all essentials the character and actions of the 
Bayard whom the Loyal Serviteur so lovingly depicted. A story 
may have to be discarded here, a picturesque incident there, a 
scene or a date altered, and a qualification added, but the portrait 
is authentic. 

It is good in these days, when so many of our childhood heroes 
have been taken off their pedestals and roughly handled by modern 
historians, to find one of the dearest emerging from, the searching 
test of present-day criticism on an even higher pedestal than he 
formerly occupied. 

The Chevalier Bayard is still a name to conjure with. When 
all is said and done, he was truly a knight sans peur et sans reproche, 
a perfect flower of chivalry in that twilight period before the rising 
tide of the Renaissance had made a mockery of the faith, the 
self-sacrifice, the courage and loyalty of knighthood. And if there 
is in his life some faint suggestion of Don Quixote, fighting bravely 
in a world that has passed him by, one is not inclined to smile, 
for this man won his battle and made the world he lived in seem a 
poor thing by comparison. 

Dr. Shellabarger's book is* one of those rare histories which 
gather together all the threads of a subject and leave no loose 
ends for future historians to pick up. Except, perhaps, from an 
interpretative point of view, and barring future discoveries, he 
has said the last word on Bayard. These are points of controversy, 
but they are perennial, where one man's guess is as good as 
another's. 

It happens to be a subject in which the sources are not too 
unwieldly or conuicting. Bayard had his Boswell -Jacques de 
Mailles, the loyal servant who, if he sometimes was more like our 
own Parson Weems than the biographer of Johnson, was still 
accurate enough for all practical purposes. Without him, as Dr. 
Shellabarger points out, Bayard would have been as shadowy a 
figure as many another illustrious homme d'armes of his period brave 
men all, great soldiers and perfect gentlemen ; but their figures 
are shrouded in the mists of four centuries. Only one stands out 
clearly, a man of flesh and blood, and, at the same time, a legendary 
hero. 

Many men have achieved a place in history by living before 
their time, but Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard, has gained his 
fame by living after ais. It would be difficult to find a character in 
history whose tangible accomplishments bear so little relation to 



94 GREAT CATHOLICS 

his celebrity. Born in 1474, in a valley in Dauphine, and isolated 
from the significant movements of his time, he inherited the ideals 
and traditions of chivalry and of medievalism. It is as the last 
great champion of medieval chivalry that the renown of Bayard 
has come down to posterity. 

The best modern and scholarly account of Bayard was published 
in 1828 by Terrebasse, but since that time new manuscripts have 
been discovered and many monographs have been published. The 
book of Dr. Shellabarger is an excellent example of graceful and 
valuable scholarship. It is well documented, yet it possesses very 
considerable literary merit. In its pages we find a deep under- 
standing and appreciation of the Middle Ages. The author presents 
a spirited and convincing defence of certain phases of medieval life. 
His book is not only a life of Bayard, but a history of the momentous 
period in which Bayard lived, and the author has caught its colour 
and spirit and drama, with much of the grace and gusto with which 
the Loyal Servant first wrote. 

In an age of artful and frequently cultivated condottieri, when 
battles often resembled an elaborate game of chess between treacherous 
mercenaries where nobody much was hurt, it was quite natural 
that the defenders of declining chivalry should make the best of 
a really fighting soldier like Bayard. The Italian mercenaries 
practised war as a profession, and were chiefly terrible to rich and 
defenceless citizens ; so long as they obtained good pay and booty 
they were not on the look-out for hard knocks. Bayard on the 
other hand, was one of those singular persons who love fighting 
for fighting's sake. What is admirable about him is that he really 
was chivalrous ; he possessed all the rare virtues of his profession 
and none of its vices. If we may believe the stories of him, he 
was just, liberal to a fault, a kindly man to the weak and helpless, 
sincerely pious, and at the same time a most dashing soldier. It 
is a little difficult to estimate Bayard's military attainments, especially 
since warfare was then so different ; but he appears to have excelled 
as a tactical rather than a strategical commander. Even in tactical 
warfare he seems to have preferred the skirmish and the brilliant 
cavalry raid tactics to action on a large scale. His admirers tell us 
that the jealousy of great men at Court prevented the King from 
granting Bayard the higher commands which should have been 
his. But it is significant that the " Loyal Serviteur " himself tells 
an anecdote to the effect that Louis XII offered Bayard the command 
of a thousand foot, but that the captain preferred to take half that 
number. 

Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard Chevalier, as he proudly 
designated himself, was born at a time when the vocation of a 



LE CHEVALIER DE BAYARD 95 

soldier was generally regarded as the most honourable of professions. 
War was then the one great opportunity of profit and honour for 
a youth whose earliest manhood, as Gargantua explained to 
Pantagruel, was the moment when he must begin to learn la 
chevalerie et les armes. From the Castle of Bayard in the Dauphine 
young Pierre was sent for his schooling to the household of the 
Duke of Savoy. As a page at that court, and in the train of the 
Duke on his constant journeyings and petty wars, he acquired that 
restless love of action and danger which was to make him for the 
rest of his life, as Brantome puts it, " ever seek out periL" There, 
too, in the sports of the pages and the tilting-yard he developed 
his horsemanship and his natural gifts as an athlete. On the death 
of the Duke of Savoy he entered the household of the King's 
favourite, the Count of Ligny, and ere long, as a man of arms in 
his company, set forth with the army of Charles VIII to the conquest 
of the kingdom of Naples, For the most part the ensuing campaigns 
in Italy were ideally suited to one of Bayard's temperament. Under 
Gonsalvo, the great Spanish captain, and Nemours, the French 
general, war was conducted largely according to the tradition of 
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A series of petty sieges and 
isolated skirmishes gave openings to the individual eager to display 
his personal skill and courage. Bayard seized his opportunity. 
He was foremost on the bridge at Garigliano, last in the retreat to 
Gaeto. It was characteristic of a century when the use of artillery 
in the field was only in its infancy, when the introduction of the 
musket and the arquebus was deplored as giving an advantage to the 
cowardly, and when Pescara's successful use of them was denounced 
as destructive of all good order of battle and the science of war, 
that the prowess of the individual knight still commanded the 
admiration of the armies. The reputations of the most gallant 
gentlemen of France were known to all. Before long his name, 
Pierre Bayard, was added to the list of such heroes as Le Sieur 
d'Urfe, Louis d'Ars, Yves d'Alegre, La Riviere, La Chesnaye, 
Mont dragon, and Bonnivet, names which ring throughout the pages 
of chroniclers like so many battle-cries. Homeric combats were 
still the order of the day, and when ten thousand onlookers assembled 
on the walls of Trani to behold eleven champions of France engage 
eleven knights of Spain, Bayard distinguished himself above all by 
his feats of coolness, courage and skill. 

The age was one of violent contrasts and strangest contradictions. 
Professor Cartellieri writes : 

Wild orgies of immorality and gluttony were followed by 
spontaneous acts of penitence ; exultant hymns in praise of the rose- 



$6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

garlanded Goddess of Love by stammering prayers to the gracious 
image of the Virgin ; untamed and boundless arrogance and 
aggression by acts of the deepest humility and contrition. Unbridled 
passions were conqealed beneath a rigid ceremonial . . . noble 
chivalry based on honour was stained with cowardly violence 
against the weak. While a rigid code of rules controlled the jousts 
and tourneys, we find an utter failure of knightly ideals in battle . . . 
It was an age of fiery enthusiasm and weary nonchalance ; of 
senseless waste on the one hand, and grinding poverty on the other ; 
of childish naivete and sophistical cunning ; of noisy and flamboyant 
achievement contrasted with a simple and genuine striving after 
beauty which trembled in the presence of the wonders of creation, 

Knights were cast in heroic mould, and personal bravery knew 
no limits. At Agincourt King Charles was counselled not to accept 
the aid of the Paris craftsmen, for then the French army would be 
three times as strong as the English ; and that would contravene 
the principles of knightly honour. Hand in hand with " the glowing 
impulse for renown " went love. " An esquire or knight without 
his lady love was unthinkable, " and Professor Cartellieri cites the 
case of " the foolish young Jehaim de Saintre " who blushingly and 
tearfully confessed that his mother and sister were his love. But 
this passion for women was too often only a means and motive to 
degrade her. One of the most interesting women of this epoch 
was Christine de Pisan, the first Frenchwoman to defend her sex's 
rights. In the story of woman's long fight for her rightful place 
honoured remembrance is her due. In jubilant verse she greeted 
La Pucelle, and, perhaps happily for her, did not live to see the 
shameful end of the maid. 

Nor, indeed, was it at all probable that the legend of Bayard, 
which had sprung up during his own lifetime, not only among his 
own comrades-in-arms, but also among his Spanish, Italian, Swiss 
and English foemen, could be without -substantial foundations. When 
Francois I had won his spurs at Marignano it was the Chevalier 
whom he chose to knight him on the field of battle. For his grim, 
momentous defence of Mezieres against the imperial troops he 
was hailed as a national hero, the saviour of his country. It is 
usually stated that he was inadequately rewarded ; but the promotion 
and distinction conferred upon him by Francois I were sufficiently 
munificent. Pope Julius II sought to entice him into the Papal 
service, but unsuccessfully. He was the perfect type of the happy 
warrior, the dashing individualistic French soldier, to whom blows 
were dearer than ducats, and to whom honour was more than life. 
To serve God and the King, to have at t the enemy, and to relieve 
those in distress this was for him the end and glory of existence. 



LE CHEVALIER DE BAYARD 97 

From Fornuovo to Marignano and from Ravenna to Pavia his military 
career embraced all those campaigns in which French soldiers under 
three successive kings crossed the Alps and descended upon Italy, 
seeking fortune, fame, and adventure, and finding, so many of them, 
death in the lovely and fatal land they ruined. For thirty years 
the name of Bayard occurs in practically all the principal battles 
of the period. Everywhere he appears as the typical representative 
of a dying ideal, of medieval chivalry in the land of the Renaissance, 
as a knight of the tourney and the charge in an era which witnessed 
the birth of modern warfare. It is upon depicting him in this aspect 
of a great heroic figure, typical of a passing age, that " Le Loyal 
Serviteur " has lavished all his art, and rightly insists upon this as his 
true significance. 

Why should this man, who played no important part in the history 
of his time, who performed no commanding achievement, who was 
not one of the great nobility, be a household name for succeeding 
generations ? How did he become, in Dr. Shellabarger's apt phrase, 
" one of history's most distinguished gentlemen ? " The author poses 
the question himself on the first page of his biography, and when he 
is through one realizes the answer, though it seems as hard to define 
as ever. Dr. Shellabarger's explanation, in his final chapter, is as 
follows : 

Not only a personality of his times, not only a Frenchman, not 
only a soldier even, indeed, but secondarily these ; he becomes 
representative of universal issues of that faith, to be sure, of which 
chivalry was a manifestation, and which, though neglected, can never 
die ; of medievalism, with its verile emphasis on loyalty and sub- 
mission ; but primarily, and to us more immediately, of reverent 
manhood ; faithful to its heritage of few but clear ideals, whose 
dignity is duty and whose honour, steadfastness. He represents 
the generations of obscure men, who are gentlemen by virtue of 
holding fast what the race has bequeathed for guidance in conduct 
and character, by virtue of discipline and self-control, of constancy 
and helpfulness. These are the important men, these conservatives. 
They insure progress by upholding continuity. They form the 
vertebra of any national life. And of such, we repeat, Bayard 
becomes an almost legendary example. 

Pierre Terrail lived the life of a gentleman of his day 
(" gentleman " in the true sense of the word, meaning nobleman, 
aristocrat). His creed was the simple one of duty to sovereign, 
the service of honour (honneur acquene) t and the responsibility of 
nobleness (noblesse oblige}. 

He was born in 1474 at Bayard, thirty miles north of Grenoble. 
Though he could neither read nor write, he was thoroughly educated 



g8 GREAT CATHOLICS 

in the more important accomplishments of riding 5 hunting, hawking, 
jousting, swordsmanship, and proper social behaviour. 

At the age of twelve he entered the household of Duke Charles I 
of Savoy as page, and six years later took service with the Count of 
Ligny, the King's favourite, as man-at-arms. Under de Ligny's 
lieutenant, Louis d'Ars, he went on that amazing expedition of 
Charles VIII to Italy which was to revolutionize Europe. It was the 
first of many such campaigns which were to cost France so dearly in 
life and treasure, but which were to give Bayard so many opportunities 
for glory. 

The high-lights are few. He first gained international fame by his 
duel to the death in January, 1503, with Don Alonzo de Soto- Mayor, 
a Spanish knight. In 1512 he fought brilliantly under Gaston de 
Foix, one of the most vivid figures in the military annals of chivalry, 
if not of all time. After the bloody victory of Marignano, it was Bayard 
who had the honour of knighting King Francis I, his sovereign. In a 
critical emergency, when the fate of France hung in the balance, 
Bayard held Mezieres, the key to France, against the Spanish forces. 

From an obscure man-at-arms he had risen to Captain-in- Chief 
with a hundred lances of his own, a position usually accorded only 
to princes of royal blood. He was over in the front rank when an 
attack was launched ; and it was he who was always entrusted 
with the rearguard in retreat. Though often sick and weak from 
wounds, he was always where fighting was thickest, and he died a 
soldier's death, mourned by all the soldiery of Europe : " Tell the 
King " he said, " that I die happy in his service, and sword in hand, 
as I have always wished. And I have no regret in dying, except 
that I lose the means of serving him any more." 

Adrien de Croy, one of the enemy knights, wrote to the Emperor : 
Cf A beautiful death, and, sire, although Lord Bayard was the servant 
of your enemy, still it is a pity of his death ; for he was a gentle 
knight, beloved by all, and who lived as nobly as did ever man of his 
estate." 

To anyone whose childhood memory has left nothing but the dim 
figure of a knight who was " without fear and without reproach," his 
biography is recommended as a means of getting better acquainted 
with the age idealised by Scott and Kenelm Digby. " What Bayard 
was," to quote Dr. Shellabarger's last sentence, " he is now more 
completely than during life a rare expression of that valour, chivalry 
and devotion which marks the gentleman of every age." 

One might vainly ransack the pages of authentic history to find 
another character so completely of a piece as that of Pierre du Terrail, 
Chevalier de Bayard, who has descended to posterity embalmed 
in the immortal phrase of his loyal servant, a biographer worthy of 



LE CHEVALIER DE BAYARD 99 

his subject. From the moment when he first emerges from obscurity 
at the battle of Fornovo to the moment when, twenty-nine years later, 
a chance shot ended his heroic life at an all-too-early age, there is no 
word or act recorded of him which is not consonant with that splendid 
eulogy. 

Yet the upholder of the old tradition was himself to be a leader 
of the new army. When Louis XII, preparing, as a member of the 
League of Cambrai, to march against Venice, began to organize 
the French infantry, he chose Bayard, among other famous captains 
of horse, to command it, and to lend to the new force the prestige 
of their names. In this second Italian campaign Bayard served under 
a soldier of real military genius, Gaston de Foix. It was a campaign 
in which the value of the new arms, artillery and infantry, was 
triumphantly demonstrated. Ravenna, the first great modern battle, 
sealed the fate of that chivalry at which the first blow had been struck 
at Crecy, when the English yeomen shot down the knights of France. 
Gaston de Foix himself died at Ravenna in the hour of victory, 
charging a troop of Spaniards, as in the rays of the setting sun of 
chivalry. Bayard lived on in its afterglow, to be taken prisoner 
at the Battle of the Spurs, and to be killed by a bullet before 
Pavia. 

Naturally, the " Lord Serviteur " tells us less of Bayard's more 
important attainments than of his spectacular feats, while he abounds 
on the theme of his hero's private virtues. Thus we learn " Comment 
le bon chevalier sans paour et sans reprouche y durant le siege de Padoue, fat 
une course aveque ses compaignons, ou Us acquist gros honneur" and numerous 
feats of the same kind. The Loyal Serviteur also relates several 
anecdotes of Bayard's chivalrous kindness to poor girls and women, 
and indeed claims that he provided marriage dowries in nearly a 
hundred cases. The manner in which Bayard received his death 
wound is well told : 

En ces entrefaictes, le bon chevalier, asseure comme s'il eust este 
en sa maison, faisoit marcher les gens d'armes, et se retiroit le beau 
pas, tousjours le visage droit aux ennemys, et Fespee au poing, leur 
donnoit plus de craincte que ung cent d'autres ; mais comme 
Dieu le voulut permettre, fut tire ung coup de hacquebouze dont 
la pierre le vint frapper au travers des rains, et luy rompit tout le 
gros os de 1'eschine. Quand il sentit le coup, se print a crier : "Jesus " 
et pius dist : " Helas ! mon Dieu, je suis mort." Si print son espee 
par la poignee et baisa la croisee en signe do coiis, et en disant 
tout hault : " Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam 
tuam," devint incontient tout blesme, comme failly d'esperits, 
et cuyda tumber ; mais il eut encores le cueur de prendre 1'arson 
de la selle, et demoura en estant jusques a ce que ung jeune 



WO GREAT CATHOLICS 

gentilhomme, son maistre d'hostel, luy ayda a descendre et mist 
soubz ung arbre. 

Thus died in the year 1523 and buried at Grenoble Pierre de 
Bayard, leaving behind him universal regret and the fame of a most 
valiant and most perfect knight. And if legend has embellished 
his figure somewhat more than critical scepticism will accept, who 
will complain ? 



LAURENCE W. MEYNELL 



ST. THOMAS MORE 



A.D. 1478-1 

No ONE WHO delights in quick, brilliant conversation of the sort 
that Beaumont described at the Mermaid Tavern where it 
seemed as if men would " put their whole wit in a jest," can do 
otherwise than lament that he was not one of the guests, in 1499, at 
Sir William Say's house in London, when the chief honours were 
carried off by a young lawyer from one of the Inns of Chancery and a 
distinguished foreign visitor. 

It is clear that introductions in those days were no better carried 
out than they are to-day, for halfway through the meal the foreigner, 
delighted at finding such ready inventive wit in a country which he 
had visited with some apprehension, fearing it would prove as 
depressing as its notorious climate, leaned across to the young man 
who was giving as good as he got in the verbal duel, and said in the 
tongue which was then the universal speech of cultured men : " Aut 
tu es Moms aut nullus " ("If you are not Thomas More, you're 
nobody "). To which the young Englishman, pardonable pride 
mingling with a certain amount of reverence in his singularly attractive 
voice, made answer " And if you aren't Erasmus, you're the Devil 
himself" (" Aut tu es Erasmus, aut Diabolus "). 

They were both right. Sir William Say had got lions at his table 
that day. What the rest of the company was doesn't matter much 
now ; any host would be well content to have under his roof the 
foremost scholar in Europe, the leading light of the Renaissance ; and 
the young man who was rapidly establishing a reputation as the 
wittiest talker in London. 

Thomas More at that time was twenty- two years old. He had been 
born in a house in Milk Street, one of the crooked, narrow, noisy, 
insanitary streets of old London, in 1478. It was a significant date, 
for in that same year in the neighbouring city of Westminster, which you 
reached by taking a muddy road along the strand of the river (the same 
road which is now called The Strand), a man called Gaxton had set 
up a new-fangled device for printing books. Thomas More and books 
went well together. 

JOS 



ST. THOMAS MORE 103 

More's father was a lawyer and a successful one ; he subsequently 
became a Judge of Common Pleas and a Justice of the King's Bench. 
He was good stock to breed from ; shrewd, careful in money matters, 
conservative and industrious ; he didn't come from Yorkshire, but he 
might very well have done so. 

Young Thomas More was born into a troubled England (perhaps 
that is true of every child in every age) ; but things were mending, 
and when the battle of Bosworth Field ended the reign of terror of 
Richard III in 1485, John More, the father, began to look round for a 
school for his eight-year-old son. 

There was not such a vast, nor such a readily accessible store of 
knowledge in those days ; and such boys as went to school did so earlier 
and were expected to work harder. 

Of the present famous schools only Winchester and Eton were in 
existence, and they were considered comparatively small beer. Thomas 
was sent to St. Anthony's School in Threadneedle Street, under 
Nicholas Holt, which was probably the best place in London. 

Here practically the only subject of instruction, and certainly the 
only medium for imparting information, was Latin. This is a signi- 
ficant fact, and what lies behind it does a good deal to explain More's 
life. What it signified was that there was then in existence a thing 
called Christendom with common ideals, a common basis and a common 
language ; a real, tangible, entity that men believed in, considered 
permanent, and thought worth fighting for. That thing has since 
disappeared ; and the League of Nations has hitherto proved an 
ineffectual substitute. 

At the age of thirteen More entered the household of Archbishop 
(later Cardinal) Morton, the Lord Chancellor of England and one of 
the most powerful men in the Kingdom. 

Morton had a pretty shrewd admixture of worldly wisdom with his 
Christianity, and he was notoriously a good judge of men. Young 
More must have seen a good deal of *' great life " in that manor house 
at Lambeth, and caught whispers from the conversation there of many 
men who mattered. The old Archbishop liked the boy, and said of 
him : " This child here waiting at table, whosoever will live to see it, 
shall prove a marvellous man." It was young More's facility for 
extempore wit that was most noticeable ; William Roper says that 
" though he was young of years, yet would he at Christmastide suddenly 
sometimes step in among the players and, never studying for the matter, 
make a part of his own there presently among them, which made the 
onlookers more sport than all the players beside." 

His rather dour old father probably thought the Archbishop's house, 
with its full meed of praise and fine words, rather a dangerous forcing- 
house for his boy, and in 1492 Thomas was sent to Oxford, to that 



W4 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Canterbury College which was afterwards absorbed Into Wolsey's 
Christ Church. 

It was a tremendous time in Europe, was the end of the fifteenth 
century ; and tremendous for a reason which probably could only 
be appreciated to its full at a university. 

The monasteries, which had more than nobly served their turn as 
the great preservers and distributors of traditional knowledge when 
all Europe was barbarian and dark, were waning. Their reputation 
was impugned ; their power imperilled. The long and bitter^ civil 
wars of England had cost the country dear in the loss of men which it 
could ill afford to lose, younger sons of the great houses which had 
always been the traditional patrons of learning. On the Universities 
themselves the paralysing hand of the over-subtle schoolmen still 
lay heavy. 

But all England : universities, aristocracy and Church, showed 
signs of imminent change ; and the change was coming from what 
has caused nearly every change in the structure of the body politic, 
a shifting of power from one part to another. 

And this shifting of power, if it did not entirely spring from it, was 
at any rate largely influenced by yet another thing the Renaissance, 
the New Learning, which like many " new " things in the world was an 
old thing rediscovered. 

It is always difficult to recapture the temper of a past time ; and 
now, when the wheel has gone full circle, and the only word of Greek 
which most people know is Kinema, it is hard to believe that men 
literally shook with delight, and cheerfully endured every sort of hard- 
ship merely to be allowed the privilege of being taught to speak the same 
language as Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle and Plato. 

There were giants in these days : Grocyn, Linacre, Latimer and 
Colet, these are names even now to conjure with. Then they must 
have seemed like gods, as they came drunk with the new thing which 
was like wine in all men's throats ; white-hot from having tasted it 
at its source. 

More knew them all ; quicksilver will go to its kind, and his mind 
leaped with theirs. But of them all John Colet, who afterwards 
founded St. Paul's School, influenced him most. Colet was aesthetic 
and burningly sincere ; and when More made the older man director 
of his spiritual life he put himself in good hands. 

All this newfangled and fanatical nonsense must have seemed strange 
to Thomas's father, who had probably never even heard of Picco 
della Mirandola ; and he must have thought that in moving his son 
from Morton's household to Oxford he had only shifted him from the 
frying-pan into the fire. At any rate in 1494 he took Thomas away 
from Oxford, and told him to settle down to something of some practical 



ST. THOMAS MORE JOJ 

use ; so the young man entered New Inn, and later Lincoln's Inn, 
for the study of law. 

Probably it was the best thing that could have happened to him ; 
the closeness and logical severity of a legal training gave rigidity to an 
intellect which in all conscience was fluid enough by nature. And, 
no doubt greatly to his father's surprise, Thomas showed that whatever 
else he might have picked up at Oxford he had certainly absorbed a 
passionate fidelity for the old religion. 

This co-existence in one intellect of an eagerness for the New 
Humanism, and a rigid devotion to the traditional and ritualistic 
religion has puzzled many people. For the matter of that the 4gtL 
proposition of the first Book of Euclid has, at one time or another, 
puzzled many people ; but it is not insoluble for all that. A great 
deal depends on the point of view. I remember looking with a non- 
Catholic friend at the criss-cross iron grille from behind which members 
of the Carmelite order are occasionally permitted to see visitors. My 
friend was horrified. "But it's terrible," he said, "being shut in by bars, 
like that." Whereat the nun behind the grille got as near angry as 
a Carmelite may do. " You stupid man/' she admonished him, 
" these bars don't shut us in ; they shut the world out'' A lot depends 
on the point of view. More thought that inside the Church was 
safety, not only for the souls of men, but for the social structure by which 
they lived ; and outside the Church, anarchy and danger to these 
things. He wanted reformation as much as any man ; but his idea 
of it could not conceivably embrace any question of doctrinal change. 

It was whilst he was studying for the bar that he met Erasmus at 
Sir William Say's house. Erasmus was a thing common then (though 
getting rarer) ; to-day, almost non-existent ; a European. There 
was much in the two men that was similar, they were both quick- 
witted ; both were lively, often to the point of verbal absurdity ; both 
liked to laugh at silly things and were eager for new. Erasmus had 
a positive genius for making friends ; he made them everywhere he 
went, amongst every sort of person ; but it is to be doubted whether 
he liked anybody better than he did More. " I love the man so much " 
he once wrote, " that I would jump about in a dance if he told me to." 

Contact with the mercurial Erasmus naturally increased More's 
already strong bent towards the rising tide of classicism, which 
exasperated his father still further ; so that some sort of difference 
arose between them, which was settled, amicably enough, by More 
leaving his father's house and taking lodgings, with Lily, 1 near the 
Charterhouse. It was whilst he was lodging here that he gave his 

1 That Lily who had been to Greece ; made a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem ; had 
Grocyn for a godfather ; and was later made by Colet the first headmaster of St. Paul's 
School 



w6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

remarkable series of addresses on St. Augustine's de Civitate Dei at the 
Church of Saint Lawrence in the Old Jewry. 

It was touch and go, at this time, whether he should enter the 
service of that City of God more fully or not. He was strongly inclined 
to become a Franciscan friar ; and for the four years that he lodged 
by the Charterhouse he observed as far as he could the discipline of 
the Carthusians ; but by 1504 he had definitely decided to remain 
in the world ; and he promptly set about the most important individual 
act a man of the world does he got himself a wife. 

He married, early in 1505, Jane, the elder daughter of a Mr. John 
Colt who lived in Essex. The story, as told by Roper, is that More 
really liked the second daughter best ; but, not liking to cast any slur 
on the elder girl,'" he, of a certain pity, framed his fancy toward her, 
and soon after married her," 

Be this as it may, Jane made him a very good wife and they had 
six happy years together in Bucklersbury, near Wallbrook, where she 
bore him the four children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily and John, who 
grew up to be the things that he loved best in all the wide world. 

More had been called to the Bar in 1501 and he was rapidly making 
a reputation, and no doubt a rising income, as a barrister of exceptional 
promise. Some time after being married he entered Parliament, and 
in 1508 he made his first journey to the continent, when he visited 
the Universities of Paris and Louvain, and, like the good Englishman 
he was, found nothing there superior in any way to what could be 
found at Oxford, or even Cambridge. 

In 1509 the crafty, mean, suspicious and unpopular Henry VII died, 
and all England rejoiced at the accession of his son. In these days, 
when Monarchs are the devoted and untiring servants of their people, 
it is not easy to realize how much then even the common man was 
dependent upon the individual temper and characteristics of his king. 
The new Henry had all the many virtues of the Tudors, and he added 
to them a tremendous zest for every form of living, and such an 
enthusiasm for music, literature and the New Humanism generally 
that it was confidently thought a golden age for learning had dawned 
in England. Erasmus came back to England post-haste and went to 
stay with More at Bucklersbury. It was on this visit that he wrote 
the Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae] which put him in the front rank 
of popular writers. 

More had time to laugh with his friend, he always had time for that, 
but he was a busy man ; in 1510 he was made Under-Sheriff of 
London ; and at this period of his life he was making and that without 
corruption a rare circumstance in those days an annual income 
equivalent to something like 6,000 to-day. 

In the following year his wife died and More wrote her epitaph : 



ST. THOMAS MORE 107 

" Dear Jane lies here, the little wife of Thomas More/' only a gentle 
spirit, I think, would have put in that word " little ". His eldest child 
was then only five, and he had three younger ; an awkward problem 
for a busy man. He solved it in a very few months by marrying again, 
another little woman by name Alice Middleton. Alice had many 
excellent qualities, but she was short-tempered and sharp-tongued, 
and didn't see much sense in all the joking and leg-pulling and verbal 
acrobatics that More loved to indulge in with his friends. When 
someone asked him why he chose little women for wives he answered 
" if wives are necessary evils, is it not wise to choose the smallest 
evil ? " A disarming reply. Whatever his friends may have thought 
about Alice, and she was not popular with them, no man ever loved his 
home life more, or got more pleasure out of it than did More. 

In the year 1515 the current of More's life began to set in a definite 
direction when he was asked to go with four other men on his first 
diplomatic mission abroad. No great matter was at stake, only the 
arrangement of a Trading Agreement between this country and the 
Netherlands, and More does not seem to have enjoyed it much ; in any 
case he hated being away from home, being encumbered with the old- 
fashioned superstition that, after his duty to God, a man's most 
immediate business should be with his own wife and family. The trip 
is important in his, life, however, because on it he began the composition 
of his book Utopia. 

Utopia was originally written in Latin, More's natural medium of 
expression, but it was translated before long and became, and has 
since remained, one of the books most widely read by young spirits. 
There is a great deal in it which is sheer nonsense, being based on the 
assumption that in this imaginary, far-off state there existed a human 
nature devoid of selfishness, innocent of greed, incapable of envy, 
and unmoved by anger. Given the universal existence of such qualities 
it would not be difficult to build the Ideal State anywhere, even in 
Russia. Unfortunately human nature is not cast in that saintly mould, 
and all systems of reform based on the supposition that it is, will be 
short lived. But More's Utopia is valuable because it pointed out many 
of the crying evils of his day and laughed at them, and the greatest 
purgative of all is laughter. If all armies were compelled to dress in 
striped pantaloons and to wear fools' caps and carry rattles recruiting 
and war would slump badly. 

In any case Utopia is, and always has been, good reading ; and if 
we take it more seriously than its light-hearted author meant us to, 
that is our fault and not his. 

Henry VIII, in many ways the greatest of the Tudors, had one 
Tudor virtue in excelsis, that of being able to recognize talent when he 
saw it. More's ability, of which he must already have been aware 



IO S GREAT CATHOLICS 

by hearsay, was brought sharply to his notice when in the Star 
Chamber a case of Pope v. the King was brilliantly argued, with complete 
success for the Papal side, by young Thomas More. It was a foretaste 
(though neither man knew it) of things to come. Thomas More 
believed in a lot of things in his life, but in none more implicitly than 
in the importance to Western Culture of the Catholic Church ; and 
the vital necessity, to that Church, of preserving its fabric and teaching 

intact. 

Henry was not going to have so able a man against him ; and in an 
astonishingly short space of time More was made a King's Counsellor 
and a Judge in the Court of Poor Men's Causes (as it was then called). 
This extension of his sphere of life brought him into contact with a 
very remarkable man with whom he was to be associated for some 
years to come ; a man sharper, cleverer, more cunning than he was ; 
his undoubted superior in diplomatic strategy, and just as undoubtedly 
his inferior in moral worth the great Wolsey, already Archbishop of 
York and Cardinal, and soon to be made a Papal Legate a latere. 

To know Wolsey, the great Minister, was but a preliminary step to 
getting to know his great Master, the King. 

It is always difficult to capture the prevailing temper of days gone 
by ; we are apt to apply our own backgrounds and beliefs, forgetting 
that a man at forty may have the same eyes which served him as a 
youth of fourteen, but that they see different things. If we are to read 
More's life aright we must remember that though many men in his 
day grumbled at the principle of an absolute monarchy, none dis- 
believed in it. The King was a person apart ; individually he might 
have almost every fault imaginable (which Henry did not) ; but he had 
been touched by the finger of the hand of God and Divine Right was 
in him. About such a theory it will suffice now to say that if it is foolish 
to believe in the Divine Right of one man, it is many million times more 
foolish to believe in the divine right of the whole mass of men, the 
Proletariat, lumped together. 

More respected the King ; found his company entertaining ; liked 
him ; but he never failed to stand up to him where a moral issue was 
involved, owing allegiance, as he did, to a King from whom earthly 
Princes drew their limited power. Nor, even when the King's favour 
was at its height and when the great royal mountain of a man walked 
with More by hours together in that little country garden at Chelsea, 
his arm about his favourite's neck, was More deceived. 

" If my head should win him a castle in France," he reminded 
Roper, " it should not fail to go." 

Being pressed into the King's service (Erasmus said that his friend 
was " dragged " to Court, emphasizing the word ; and More himself 
said that he was as uncomfortable there " as a bad rider in the saddle ") 



ST. THOMAS MORE log 

left little time for literature ; but in 1518, when the Court moved to 
Abingdon to escape the epidemics of London, More found occasion 
and time to compose his celebrated Letter to the Fathers of the University 
of Oxford, his finest piece of Latin prose and a most telling stroke for 
the New Learning against the diehards. 

Wolsey at this time was one of the most powerful men in Europe. 
His capacity for political intrigue was enormous and his flair for it 
unrivalled ; and by working in close contact with him More must 
have become acquainted with a great deal that went on behind the 
scenes. Like the wise man that he was he kept his own counsel, and 
what he delighted in most was not the impressive state that my Lord 
Cardinal kept, nor the mad magnificence of such gestures as the Field 
of the Cloth of Gold, but the times that he could snatch to be away 
from such things surrounded by his own family at his own fireside, 
or in his own garden. 

His children were his chief delight, and the fact that the three 
eldest of them were girls was a lucky circumstance for women generally. 
In an age when it was as rare to find a housewife who could write, 
as it is now to find one who can cook, men of letters must have been 
astonished by the family conversations under More's roof. Of all the 
splendid things that Holbein did none is more pleasing than his 
sketch (the finished picture, if it was ever made, is lost) of the More 
family. Here they all are : father and mother ; grandfather ; 
children ; various in-laws ; and even the household fool, charmingly 
grouped in the harmony which must in fact have prevailed there. 
William Roper who lived for upwards of sixteen years in the house said 
that he never knew his father-in-law " as much as once in a fume.' s 

It was probably the fact that they took him away from the home that 
he loved so much, which was the chief thing that More objected to in the 
various diplomatic and political missions on which he was sent abroad. 

Clouds were already beginning to show on the horizon ; no bigger 
than a man's hand, at first ; no bigger, indeed, than the fanatical hand 
which in 1517 nailed the famous Protest to the church door at Witten- 
berg. More wanted reform, but he did not want it in the shape of 
heresy. There was a certain English stupidity in the man which made 
him protest that if the windows were dirty, it was not necessary to pull 
the house down to remedy the defect. In 1521 when the King's book 
against Luther was produced (we still see the effect of it on any coin 
of the realm), More had a hand in editing it, and it may well be that 
he did not then fear much what Luther could do. But Luther was 
not the only cloud. In 1527 there were rumblings in the Royal sky. 
Henry, who had gone to a great deal of trouble in 1509, to get Papal 
permission to marry his brother's widow, had got tired of her, and seen 
Anne Boleyn " the little lively brunette with fascinating eyes." He 



IIO GREAT CATHOLICS 

now wanted an annulment of his first marriage so that he might contract 
another one ; and Wolsey was sent to France in the summer of 1527 
with instructions to leave not a stone unturned (nor, presumably, any 
avenue unexplored) to secure what- the King had set his heart on. 
More went with the Cardinal, and 5 just before he left, he said gloomily 
to Roper, " I would to God, son Roper, upon condition three things 
were well established in Christendom I were put in a sack and here 
presently cast into the Thames." 

The three things were that whereas all Christendom was at war, it 
might be at peace ; that whereas the Church of Christ was torn with 
dissension and heresy, it might be unified and perfected ; and that 
the matter of the King's marriage might be brought to a good con- 
clusion. Thus do time and events, changing, remain ever the same ! 

Wolsey did not have his usual success abroad, and although he 
returned home in ostensible triumph, with his customary pomp and 
pageantry, his star was already setting ; and his astute mind must have 
known it. He had failed in the matter of the divorce, thereby alienating 
Anne Boieyn. Even Cardinals cannot afford to get on the wrong side 
of fascinating brunettes with sparkling eyes ! 

Pope Clement now came in for a mauvais quart d'heure. He was in 
the hands (by reason of the fall of Rome in 1527) of Charles V, nephew 
to the English Queen, who took a very strong line indeed about his 
Aunt being slighted. On the other hand Clement had not the 
slightest desire to offend Henry, and was fully alive to the dreadful 
danger of losing England out of Christendom. No doubt heartily 
cursing the weakness of his predecessor for being ingenious enough to 
find excuses for granting the original dispensation for a marriage, 
he did what ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, 
and appointed a Commission. It availed him nothing. Catherine 
would not budge an inch, nor would the fascinating brunette ; the 
Commission was recalled to Rome and the King began to turn to his 
friends and to separate the sheep from the goats. 

Wolsey was the first to feel the blast. He had failed in the matter 
of the divorce, so in 1529 a bill of indictment for praemunire was brought 
against him and he was brought to ruin. 

So much for a long parenthesis, which is necessary to explain how 
in 1529, on the 25th of October, the King personally h&nded the Great 
Seal of England to Sir Thomas More in the Privy Chamber at 
Greenwich. 

Henry had already sounded More on the question of the divorce, 
and had promised him that there would be no pressing for a decision 
one way or the other ; that promise was repeated after More took 
the oath as Chancellor. Both promises were subsequently broken. 

In many ways More was an ideal Chancellor ; he was a lawyer and 



ST. THOMAS MORE /// 

he was a hard worker ; and it was under his regime that the unheard- 
of circumstance occurred that he was able to leave his Court and go 
home because there were no more suits pending. 

" When More some time had Chancellor been 
No more suits did remain 
The like will never more be seen 
Till More there be again." 

In an age which delighted in puns it was something to have a name 
like More ! 

Events were happening on the stage of history which were going to 
cut short so promising a Chancellorship. In 1531 the King was 
acknowledged to be " the supreme Head " of the Church "in so far 
as the law of Christ allows ". For Thomas More who, when it came 
to moral issues, believed in plain speaking, it was a fairly obvious 
progress from that moment to the later one on May I5th 3 1532 when 
he handed back to his Sovereign the Great Seal in its white leather 
bag enclosed in crimson velvet. 

He was Chancellor no more ; as he jokingly announced at the door 
of his wife's pew (taking the place of the servant who ordinarily gave 
notice of the fact that he had left the church), "My Lord has gone, 
my lady." 

No doubt the step eased his conscience ; but it infuriated his good 
wife. She enjoyed being the Chancellor's Lady, and the ornate barge 
with its eight liveried watermen meant a good deal more to her than 
tender scruples. 

Nor did tender scruples mean much to the man who was rapidly 
worming himself into Royal favour ; the erstwhile servant of Wolsey, 
a man without a tenth of the ability of the great Cardinal, without a 
ten-thousandth part of More's moral worth the cunning Cromwell. 

It is a bad day for states when kings and princes gather round them 
the worst counsel they can get, rather than the best, being flattered 
by the one and fearing the other. 

Indeed Cromwell and the King between them badly bungled the 
business of trying to get rid of More, which they were now determined 
to do. There were charges about writing a pamphlet against a King's 
Proclamation which was nonsense and proven so. There were 
accusations of receiving bribes, which he easily refuted. There was the 
ridiculous business of the Holy Maid of Kent, in which he had acted 
with most commendable circumspection. There was the absurd 
endeavour to find fault with his part in the King's book. All these 
broke down to the intense annoyance of the King who, like all Tudors, 
was a good friend, but a very bad enemy. But on Sunday, April 1 2th, 
when one of the King's officers ordered him to appear before the 



II2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Commissioners next morning to take the new oath Thomas More 
knew that they had got him at last. 

Next morning he did what had always been the prelude to any 
important matter in his life ; heard Mass and went to the Sacraments. 
Thus fully equipped to face the worst that the world could do, he left 
his happy home and household in Chelsea for the last time, and with 
what must have been a heavy heart came to the Archbishop's Palace 
at Lambeth that same Palace where as a boy he had served in Morton's 
household and made them all laugh by extemporizing in the Christmas 

plays. 

Of course he would not take the Oath ; nor would the saintly Fisher. 
Such men have a scale of values other than the* mere earthly one. 
He was willing to accept Anne Boleyn's accession as Queen as an 
accomplished fact ; but nothing would persuade him to say that it 
was a fact justified by Christ's law. 

It is possible that Henry, by himself, might have been satisfied with 
some sort of compromise ; but not so Anne and Cromwell ; between 
them they had their way, and after four days of delay More was sent 
to the Tower. 

Of his year's imprisonment why say much ? His jests with his 
jailers; nay, indeed, his jests with his executioner, are common 
knowledge. 

He was comforted throughout his stay in the Tower by the untiring 
devotion of his daughter Margaret who was (as she wrote at the end 
of one of her many lovely letters) his " most loving obedient daughter 
and bedeswoman, always, which daily and hourly is bound to pray 
for you," 

The drawn-out story of the attempts to entrap him, and the 
lamentable farce of his trial make poor reading for English justice. 
Indeed More had more than once to put the Chancellor who presided 
over the Court right in matters of procedure ; and finally when the 
ill-advised Chancellor interrupted him with the unfortunate question 
" What, you wish to be considered wiser and of better conscience than 
all the bishops and nobles of the realm ? " More had ready the crushing 
answer which will serve its turn yet in many cases : " My lord, for one 
bishop of your opinion, I have a hundred saints of mine ; and for one Parliament 
of yours ^ I ham all the General Councils for a thousand years ; and for one 
kingdom^ I ham Prance and all the kingdoms of Christendom.' 5 ' 

Answers like that were not popular ; and on the unsupported evidence 
of one man, and that a suborned one (the despicable Rich), Thomas 
More, Knight and-one time Lord Chancellor of England was con- 
demned to death. 

The day before he died he sent his hairshirt to his beloved Margaret 
and a letter written with a coal ; a letter such as only a good man 



ST. THOMAS MORE j/j 

could have written and which It does all men good to read ; and on 
July 6th he was taken out to the place of execution and killed. 

Morally the act was, of course, plain murder ; politically it was 
stupid in the extreme, and it raised such a storm of scorn in Western 
Europe as startled even the blind Henry. The Emperor Charles V 
declared that he would sooner have lost the best city of his realm than 
such a man, and Christian men told one another everywhere that 
" this day a prince is fallen in Israel." 

Many historians nowadays find that they can write More's life in 
two sentences. He enjoyed Royal favour ; he flourished. He was foolish 
enough to incur Royal displeasure ; so he died. And there they write their 
Hie jacet. One won't quarrel with the summary, provided it be 
remembered that, dying, More left something of value behind. 

What he left behind of value was not the Utopia ; not the fact that 
he was a good judge ; not his learned writings, nor his witty conver- 
sation ; but the fact that he saw the necessity of a yard-stick for measur- 
ing the things of this world. Even in worldly matters More had this 
essential sense of balance. The Field of the Cloth of Gold was very 
magnificent ; but it lacked the solid importance of his own hearth 
rug. It was pleasant to walk and talk with kings ; but more urgent 
to keep in touch with his children. Affairs of State had to be seen to ; 
but only when family matters had been settled first. 

And when it came to a comparison of the matters of this world and 
the next More still had his yard-stick. He believed in what all 
Christendom had believed in for over a thousand years, what had 
held all Christendom together, and given it unity and purpose the 
Divinely guided teaching of a Divinely instituted church. When 
matters of this world, however pressing and important, ran counter 
to that, Thomas More knew how to judge. 

The importance of home life ; and the supremacy of the Church 
who shall say that these two things will never be in peril again ? Nay, 
who shall say that, here, in England, Englishmen may not be called 
upon to defend them within the next decade ? If such a call comes, 
it will be well for us to remember that a greater Englishman than any 
living to-day has thought such things worth dying for. 



THE MOST REV. ARCHBISHOP GOODIER, SJ. 



ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA 



A.D. I49I- 

[We accept, with Astrain and other historians, the date of Loyola's 
birth as 1491. Dudon, his latest historical biographer, prefers, but 
with much hesitation, 1493. Apart from the external ^ evidence, we 
would suggest that the actual events in the Saint's life favour the 
earlier date.] 

THE FAMILY FROM which Inigo Lopez de Loyola came was Basque. 
It was a noble house ; its sons had distinguished themselves for 
centuries, consistently on the side of the ruling monarchs. Of this 
family, in his generation, Inigo was the youngest of thirteen children ; 
therefore, according to a common custom, he was destined for the 
Church. But the boy had little inclination that way, and left the 
rectorship of his village to his brother, Pero. His father and mother 
had died before he was fourteen ; his brothers had scattered, one 
to seek his fortune in America ; Inigo himself had grown up at home, 
with such smattering of education as his surroundings provided. At 
the age of sixteen (1507), he accepted a post under a relative, Juan 
Velasquez, the king's treasurer, which would give him every chance 
of seeing and enjoying life in the gay cities of Spain, and round about 
the court of Ferdinand the Catholic. There he remained for eight 
years, that is, till he was twenty-four ; no better, it would seem, but 
perhaps no worse, than other gay young courtiers about him. Of those 
years he tells us himself that he just enjoyed himself ; he was fond 
of the life as he found it, he delighted especially in its tournaments and 
feats of arms ; there was a lady at court high above him to whom he 
became devoted, like Dante to Beatrice, but it does not appear that 
this was more than an ardent youth's romantic dream. At length a 
scrape, in which his name was involved (1514) made it advisable that 
he should seek occupation elsewhere, and Inigo 's life at court came 
suddenly to an end. 

Perhaps he was not altogether disappointed with the change, for the 
next phase in his career promised to be still more in accordance with 
his ambitions. From the counting house and the court he entered 

114 



ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA j/j 

the service of another relative, Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of 
Najera, who in the following year (1516), the year of the marriage of 
Ferdinand and Isabella, was appointed Viceroy of Navarre. It 
promised to be a good time ; civil war changed it all. At the siege 
of Najera (1520) Inigo had his first baptism of blood, and during and 
after the battle proved himself for what he was. When the town 
was taken, contrary to the custom of the time, he insisted that there 
should be no looting. " Pillage, 5 ' he said, " became neither a 
Christian nor a gentleman " ; and it is worthy of note that the young 
captain was obeyed. The civil war, thanks in no small part to Inigo's 
shrewd counsel, came. partially to an end, but developed into a French 
invasion of Navarre. Andre de Foix, with his French army, supported 
by many Navarrese, arrived before Pampeluna, where Inigo was 
stationed, the last and surest stronghold of the king. The town 
capitulated forthwith, for defence was hopeless ; still, though defence 
was hopeless, and against the judgment of the commandant, Inigo 
persuaded his comrades to defend the citadel to the last. In the 
struggle that followed a cannon ball broke his leg, and with his fall 
resistance ended. Inigo was then (May 19, 1521) just thirty years 
of age. 

His captors treated him with honour. Their physicians were placed 
at his service ; he was given back his sword ; after twelve days the 
French themselves carried him to his brother's castle at Loyola, in 
the neighbouring Basque Province. In the enemy's camp as well 
as in his own Inigo commanded the esteem of men. At Loyola he 
went through an ordeal. The leg had been badly set and would 
henceforth be crooked ; he had it broken again that it might be 
made straight. There was an unseemly bone protrusion ; Inigo 
ordered that it should be sawn away. The leg when set was too short ; 
he insisted that it should be stretched. With all this the convalescence 
was very long. To fill up the time the invalid called for books, tales 
of romance that had been his delight in the old days at Madrid. But 
no such books were forthcoming in the castle ; all that could be 
found were a life of Christ, and a volume of lives of the saints. For 
want of something better he read them. They set him thinking, 
and his present plight drove the thoughts home. Inigo, the romantic 
troubadour, the chivalrous soldier, the man easily loved by follower 
and victor, suddenly found a new vent for his romance, and chivalry, 
and love. These men of whom he read were heroes, every bit as much 
as a leader of men on a battlefield ; they fought and died for their 
King and His cause, quite as truly as any soldier. Nay, they were more 
heroic ; for their service cost them more, it was given without thought 
of reward, it was given to a King whose cause was far more worth 
serving than any other. What a reign His had been, and what a 



jj GREAT CATHOLICS 

conquest i There had been no battles, no killing ; there had been no 
guns, nor any thraldom ; there had been only a great love which had 
engendered love, and it had won the world. These were the men 
whose lives had altered Christendom, and had not merely won a 
petty battle. Why could not he be what these had been ? Why could 
he not take service under One whom to serve was so worth while ? 
He would alter his life ; he would be like the master of men, Dominic, 
the winner of men, Francis ; he would be a Carthusian, he would be 
anything at all, so long as he could serve the King of kings whose 
kingdom brought peace and goodwill to men. He would love this 
King and serve Him ; he would put away all other service for His sake ; 
he would fight as they had fought, with no other weapon but love ; 
he would be the knight-errant of love, with love he would go and 
conquer the world. 

As soon as he was fit to travel Inigo kept his word and set out, 
whither he did not know. His first goal was the Benedictine monastery 
of Montserrat. There he made a general confession of his life ; he 
kept the knight's vigil before Our Lady's altar ; he hung up his sword 
at her shrine ; he went out into the world absolutely penniless and in 
a beggar's garb, for he changed his clothes with a beggar on the road. 
He came to a village called Manresa, intending to hide there for a few 
days ; he stayed ten months. He begged his bread every day ; he 
slept wherever good people were willing to receive him ; and again 
there soon appeared the same phenomenon as before, of men and 
women being drawn to the stranger who only asked for alms, so that 
there were many doors open to admit him if he wished to enter. But 
he preferred to live alone ; he spent almost all his time in prayer ; 
years after, when asked about matters in the spiritual life, he would 
say : " I learnt that at Manresa." Still he must fulfil his purpose of 
going to the Holy Land. He left Manresa with nothing but the clothes 
he was wearing and one or two books on his back, begged his way to 
Barcelona, thence to Rome, thence to Venice, thence even to Jerusalem. 
There he found his heart's desire ; he was happier in Jerusalem than 
he had been anywhere in all his life before. He told himself he would 
stay there all the rest of his days. He would live the life of Jesus on 
the spot ; he would be as like Him as h*e could be, he would do His 
work, he would preach to the people as He preached, perhaps like Him 
he would one day be put to death. Such was Inigo, and such was 
his state of mind, in the Autumn of 1523, when he was now thirty-two 
years of age. But his hopes were frustrated. Single-minded 
enthusiasts like Inigo, lovers like him who knew no barrier to "their 
love, were dangerous guests in a land of Mohamedan fanatics ; besides, 
in the short time he was there, he ignored the ordinary rules laid down 
for the security of pilgrims. The Franciscan Provincial of Jerusalem 



ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA 1/7 

interfered ; Inigo was ordered back to Europe, was forbidden to stay 
in the country under threat of excommunication ; here, as at 
Pampeluna, it required much to move him from his purpose. He had 
no choice but to do as he was told ; he arrived again in Venice, a 
beggar in rags, in January 1524. 

What was he now to do ? His first plan had utterly failed, yet he 
knew he had a mission. He would wait and see ; in the meantime 
he would study for the priesthood. He came back to Barcelona ; 
there this palmer of thirty-three settled down in a free school for small 
boys to study Latin grammar. He found a lodging in a garret over a 
little shop ; he begged his bread from day to day ; he let the soles of 
his shoes wear through, telling himself that it was cheaper to go bare- 
foot. After two years of this he made his way to the University of 
Alcala. There he tried to learn everything at once, with the result 
that he learnt nothing, though he stayed a year and a half. Meanwhile, 
as he had done at Barcelona, he could not keep himself from doing 
good, trying to make people care for Jesus as he cared. The Inquisition 
got on his track ; he was put in prison for forty-two days ; once more 
he found it advisable to move on. He tried the University of 
Salamanca (1527) ; but there he suffered an even worse fate. Within 
a fortnight of his arrival he fell under suspicion. He professed to 
teach others, having himself learnt nothing, and from a book written 
entirely by himself. He was again thrown into prison ; he was 
released on condition that he kept his teaching to himself. Inigo's 
decision shows where his heart was ; since he could not help people 
any more in Salamanca he would go elsewhere. He would leave 
Spain altogether ; he would go to the University of Paris, the centre 
of all learning, and there he would begin life all over again. 

Inigo arrived in Paris in February, 1528. He was thirty-seven, 
and his life so far, had come to nothing. He began once more from 
the beginning ; a year of grammar, four years of philosophy, two of 
theology. He shared rooms with a Savoyard peasant, Pierre le 
Fevre, and an impecunious Navarrese nobleman, Francis Xavier. 
While they helped him with his studies, he helped them in other ways. 
Soon, like other men, these two fell victims to Inigo's fascinating love. 
Other students followed ; Inigo did not pick his men ; he took those 
who came to him. On August 15, 1537, seven of them came together 
and took a solemn vow to give their lives, in some way, for this King 
of whom Inigo had spoken. What they would do they did not 
know ; only this, that, like him, they would begin their new life in 
Jerusalem. It was all very foolish and romantic, but there it was ; 
they had caught the love of Inigo, and, like him, love made them 
want to do foolish things. Still it was not all foolishness ; if Inigo 
would be a fool for Christ's sake, he did not forget at least some human 



n S GREAT CATHOLICS 

prudence. He took his own degree in 1534; he insisted that these 
first disciples should finish their own studies, though it would take 
them three years more. Meanwhile he would go back to Spain, and 
settle his own and their affairs. They would meet again in Venice, 
in 1537, for their pilgrimage to the Holy Land ; after that their King 
would tell them what he would have them to do. We may leap the 
intervening years, for so it came about ; on January 8, 1537, they 
assembled in Venice, their numbers increased. It was fifteen years 
since Inigo had set out for Palestine, at the age of thirty-one ; now 
he was forty-six, and had come back to the same point. There was 
just this difference ; that whereas before he was alone, now he had a 
group of men about him, fired with his own desire. There was no 
other bond to bind them together ; no superior, no obedience, nothing 
but the realisation of the truth of Jesus Christ and love of Him, nothing 
but the common longing to be of service to Him, to be what He was and 
to do what He would do were He in their place there and then. Beyond 
that they had no further ambition ; that they should found a religious 
order had not so much as entered their minds. After all only one of 
them, Le Fevre, was as yet a priest ; Inigo himself had not yet received 
ordination. 

But now circumstances began to alter their perspective. At the time 
it was not easy to go to Palestine ; the Mohamedan ships were scouring 
the Mediterranean, and merchants refused to sail. Inigo and his 
disciples could not waste their time while they waited ; they began 
at once with such service as the thought of Christ suggested, the 
tending of the sick in hospitals, and the records tell us of the extremes 
of self-conquest to which they went. Next was devotion to the 
Blessed Sacrament, what may be called the special devotion of Inigo 
Loyola. In the city, as in many places elsewhere, it had become 
almost extinct ; these laymen set to work to revive it. Careful now, 
after his lessons elsewhere, to secure approval for his work, Inigo 
sent two to Rome to ask for papal approbation ; they were examined 
and approved, which gave them a still greater sense of brotherhood. 
In consequence, all now received the priesthood, and renewed together 
the vows they had taken three years before at Montmartre. But the 
voyage to Palestine still, remained impossible ; until there was more 
hope they would divide into groups, and scatter themselves over 
North Italy, looking for what good they could do. They waited 
and waited, but in vain ; in the -end, after a year of waiting, the 
Palestine dream had to be abandoned. Very well, they would go out 
to win the world for Christ, starting from where they were. They 
would go to His Vicar on earth, and offer themselves to do whatever 
he might wish them to do. But who were they ? If anyone asked them, 
what were they to say? Already they were beginning to be called 



ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA ng 

Iniguists, but Inigo would have none of that. It was about this time 
that Inigo became Ignatius ; one suspects the change had something 
to do with the name. In the end they hit upon a title that satisfied 
them all ; it summed up in a word their whole ideal, it contained the 
only bond and rule they needed. If enquirers asked them who they 
were, they would say, quite simply and unequivocally, they were 
" the Companions of Jesus." Just that and no more. 

Still, though at first they did not recognize it, they had made two 
far-reaching decisions ; the decision to remain in Europe, and the 
decision to keep together as a corporate body. They next decided 
that their headquarters should be in Rome, and Ignatius went there 
with two others to establish themselves there. In Rome they behaved 
as elsewhere, giving retreats and preaching ; their work came to 
the notice of the Pope, and he told them that Rome must be their 
Jerusalem. And it was only then after four years of companionship, 
that the followers of Ignatius began to feel the need of a closer bond 
of union. They came together in Rome, all that could corne. They 
decided on some form of Constitution ; they would vow them- 
selves to poverty and chastity ; but what more ? They would bind 
themselves to obedience to the Pope, would go wherever he might 
choose to send them, would undertake whatever he might ask of them. 
But, among themselves they must also have a head ; they must become 
an order of religious. The vote for a head was taken ; all but one 
chose Ignatius. He protested ; he gave them back their votes, bade 
them pray and vote again. But the result was the same. Their vows 
were renewed in his hands ; their foundation was formally approved 
(1540) ; the seed sown in Paris six years before had come to fruit. 
Ignatius Loyola, the first General of the Companions of Jesus, was 
in his fiftieth year. 

And now at last, when he was appointed General and must speak, 
the soul of this conqueror of men began to show itself. All through 
his life to this point one cannot but be struck by the way men were 
drawn towards him, no matter in what guise he came among them. 
The soldiers at Pampeluna, the French that held him prisoner, the 
family retainers at Loyola, all testify their enthusiastic admiration 
for this leader of men. When he turned beggar, and refused from 
anyone more than his daily bread, or his means of transit from place 
to place, at Manresa, at Venice, at Barcelona, in a short time men and 
women gathered round him, eager for the privilege of maintaining him, 
even eager to submit themselves to his guidance. He became a poor 
student, at Alcala, at Salamanca, at Paris, and within a few days, 
at each university, fellow-students and many more sought his company 
and leadership ; so many that his influence brought him into suspicion 
and trouble. When the time had seemed ripe, and he had found the 



120 GREAT CATHOLICS 

men he wanted, he laid open his soul to one or two, told them of Ms 
love for, and longing to be like, Jesus Christ ; and at once this ^ poor 
scholar, of over forty years of age, won the hearts of ambitious 
youths of twenty, and found them longing to love and live like him- 
self. He set out before them what must have seemed a wild-goose 
chase ; wise men who heard of it shook their heads, did all they could 
to prevent these promising cadets from throwing away their lives, 
even threatened Inigo himself with punishment, for so diverting youth. 
But he was not moved, nor were they. They would beg their way 
penniless to Jerusalem, there to do they scarcely knew what ; and 
these young men who had come to know him, with no other, influence 
upon them but the man himself, had surrendered brilliant careers, 
and had vowed themselves to follow him wherever he led. He 
had tested their devotion by leaving them for two whole years to 
themselves, away from him, in their own surroundings, with their 
natural ambitions telling on them as before ; and it had stood the 
test. There had been no question of a superior, or of obedience, 
or even of organisation of any kind. The only bond had been the 
personal admiration and love of these men for Ignatius, and the 
personal love of Ignatius for each one of them ; a love, in both cases, 
buried in one still more absorbing, the personal love of them all for 
Jesus Christ their Lord. 

This was what now became the more manifest in everything he said 
and wrote. His men must not be called Iniguists ; they were not the 
Companions of Inigo, they were the Companions of Jesus. They 
were not obedient to him, they were obedient to the voice of Jesus 
Christ. Obedience to a mere man would never make them do what 
he wanted them to do ; no, not even obedience to Christ, if it were just 
obedience and no more. But with love, and such love, what might 
he not hope for ? And he would quote the saying of Augustine, as a 
sort of motto for them all : " Ubi amatur, non laboratur, aut si laboratur, 
labor amatur " ; cc Where there is love there is no labour, or if there is 
labour the labour is loved." No,o not even obedience, if obedience 
there must be, should be their bond or their inspiration. They wished 
him to write rules, to draw up a Constitution for their guidance ; 
whatever else he wrote, this should appear in the very first sentence : 
" More important than any written Constitution is the interior law 
of charity and love." So would he be guided throughout. Poverty ? 
He would not bid his subjects to remain poor men ; he would bid 
them to "love poverty like a mother." Humility? He would not 
tell them to be humble ; he would tell them to " love and ardently 
desire " humiliations. He would not demand obedience ; enforced 
obedience he would expressly repudiate. Instead, he would insist 
that subjects love their superiors, and that superiors love their subjects 



ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA 121 

no less. He would not say much to them of the apostolic life ; instead 
he would fill them with love for their fellow-men, love for all men, 
" quidam univer sails amor," which would take them all over the world, 
doing good of whatever kind, to everyone, everywhere, at whatever 
cost, out of this same pure love of mankind. He would not have them 
look for any reward, not even any fruit of their labour as such ; love 
should be its own reward, and the emblem of love was the cross rather 
than the crown. So would they " imitate and follow " their Lord, 
so would they reproduce His life in their own, " desiring with all 
their souls whatever Christ our Lord loved and embraced. " This 
was the man who now revealed himself, in the Constitutions he took 
more than ten years to write, and in the letters of guidance and 
affection which now began to come from his pen. 

And where had this love already led them ? It was only six years 
since the little group had gathered together at Montmartre ; only 
three years since they had reassembled at Venice. In those three years 
they had scattered themselves over North Italy, teaching the people, 
serving the sick, caring for the poor and depraved, and already the 
Church, from the Pope and his Curia downward, had begun to take 
notice of them. Not all were friends ; a saint never has all friends, 
the best loved of men is usually the most hated. There were suspicious 
cardinals, resentful ecclesiastics who would have nothing to do with 
these intruders, jealous fellow-preachers who would point to their 
heresies, deserters who would tell lying tales about their lives at home f 
debauchees who were indignant that these begging priests should 
interfere with their pleasures ; even in these first three years all these 
had set themselves to malign the Iniguists as upstarts, heretics, schemers, 
intruders, immoral. And then Ignatius had come upon the scene. 
He had encountered the profligate, and made of him a bosom friend. 
He had talked with a resentful rival, and the two had become zealous 
supporters of each other. He had gone to Rome, and all opposition 
had ceased. Ignatius was too genuine, too lovable, too true to Christ 
and the work of Christ for men to have any doubt. Digitus Dei 
est hie ; " The Finger of God is here," a Pope could at last say ; 
and from that time, whenever there was anything of serious consequence 
to be done, he knew that, if other resources failed, he could apply to 
his faithful, and loving, and unflinching Ignatius. 

Hence in this very year, 1540, when for the first time these Com- 
panions of Jesus asked for a Constitution, Ignatius's beloved Le Fevre 
was already in the heart of Germany, still a young man in the thirties, 
the first apostle of the Counter-reformation. A few weeks more, and 
his other beloved, Francis Xavier, was off at a day's notice for the 
mysterious Indies ; Xavier, who later would hear from Ignatius : 
" I will never forget you. Always your own, Ignatius, 55 and would 



122 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



read those letters on his knees. To the end of his hfe Xavxer knew 
no other rules of his Order ; instead, when he would describe his 
Institute to his fellow-apostles, we find such as dus in his letters 
"The Company of Jesus is nothing more than a Company of love 
But it was not only these two ; now that the floodgates were opened 
and the General, who rules as yet by love only and without any 
reflation, could direct his men where he would, the waters began to 
flow The Pope needed theologians for Germany; they were sent. 
Kings asked for chaplains for their soldiers ; they were provided the 
fct army chaplains in history. Rome wished to know the actual 
state in England, Ireland, and Scotland ; two were appointed for the 
perilous nJsion,the first Jesuits to visit these island^ Thmgs were 
not happy in the University of Paris ; the great Maldonatus and 
others were soon in the city. Missionaries were needed in Barbary ; 
others in Abyssinia ; others again in Austria, Hungary, Poland ; and 
thev were found. It seemed as if young men of spirit had only to come 
in contact with the person of Ignatius, and all the world became too 
small for the exercise of their " universal love." 

Such was the growth of the tree whose seed was sown on the 
sick-bed in the castle of Loyola, twenty years before. How different, 
perhaps, from anything the sick man himself had then imagmed ! 
For then his first thought had been the surrender of everything and 
waver He had discovered Jesus Christ; Christ had become 
necessary to him ; not for all the world, not for all the work and 
conquest in the world, would he let Him go. And yet, with all the 
difference between the ideal and its realisation, how much was there 
that still remained the same ! The General of the Companions of 
Tesus whose men were writing to him from all over the world, who 
in return was responding to them with letters Ml of love and interest, 
of prudence and guidance, who was being appealed to by rulers in 
Church and State, was to be found every morning on his knees before 
the altar, with tears running down his cheeks, clinging to the Christ 
whose love these twenty years had only rendered deeper ; in the 
evening might be found on the verandah outside his window, lost in 
ecstasy as he contemplated God, manifested in the beauty of the 
stars Once he had thought to become a Carthusian ; in spite of all 
his labours and distracted life he had never ceased to be a contem- 
plative. He would teach sinners and all men to pray as best they 
could ;' but his own prayer, to which he would invite all who could 
reach it, was the intimacy of perfect union with his Beloved Lord. 
So did he, in an astonishing way, seem to forget his own existence ; 
to suspect Ignatius of worldly ambition or falsehood is merely ignorance. 
Three times he asked to be relieved of the management of the 
Company ; his health was too precarious, he could be more useful 



ST. IGNATIUS LOYOIA 123 

elsewhere, it would succeed much better under an abler General. 
When the news came of great things done by his disciples, the colour 
would rise to his face, to think that he sat there at home doing nothing. 
When men spoke the praises of his Order in his hearing, he would 
wonder how it had all come about. Though, as is manifest in his 
Constitutions and letters, nothing was of greater interest to him than 
the spiritual lives of his disciples, of his own spiritual life he could 
be induced to say little or nothing. It is only through some chance 
notes, written for himself alone to see and discovered after his death, 
that we know of his daily prayer, his intimate knowledge of the Blessed 
Trinity, his familiarity with the saints, his spiritual canticles of the 
purest ecstasies of love. 

To complete the portrait of Ignatius it would be necessary to speak 
of his other works, besides the Company of Jesus ; the " Company 
of Orphans," which he also founded, drawing laymen into it to help 
him, the House of St. Martha for fallen women, the work on behalf 
of the Jews of Rome, and more. But we are not writing a book. 
From the days at Manresa, where he had broken his constitution by 
the rigour of his life, he had always been a sick man ; he had endured 
stomach trouble ever since, once at least he had been near to death. 
When he settled in Rome, in 1540, at the age of fifty, he became worse ; 
the climate of Rome never suited him. In his last few years he was a 
permanent invalid, and was compelled to do much of his work through 
the hands of others ; on this account he asked again to be relieved of 
his office, but his disciples would not consent. On July 3Oth, 1556, 
when he was sixty-five, he had been visited by his doctors, but they 
had feared nothing unusual ; Ignatius, it would seem, knew better. 
That evening he carried on his ordinary business ; he showed the 
same interest, but some noticed that his mind was more aloof than was 
his custom. During the night the infirmarian, who slept within call, 
heard him pouring out his soul from time to time in simple words of 
pure love. In the early morning of the 3ist he went in to him as usual. 
He found him at the point of death. He ran for help, but it was too 
late ; quietly and unconcerned, without a parting word to anyone, 
without the last sacraments of his Church, without any sign that it 
mattered one way or another, this universal lover of men passed to the 
love of One whom he loved yet more. He died, and immediately 
all Rome was moved ; not so much, it would seem, as with other 
saints, because men had been struck by his sanctity ; but because of 
his meekness and clemency, of the affection and love they had borne 
him, of the ideal and example his quiet life had been to them all, 
prelates and layfolk alike. 



ERNEST C. MESSENGER, Ph.D. 



CARDINAL POLE 



A.D. I 00-1 8 

A PLACE SHOULD certainly be found, in a volume devoted to Great 
Catholics, for Reginald Cardinal Pole. It is a matter of ordinary 
historical knowledge that he was chiefly responsible, together with 
Queen Mary, for the brief restoration of England to unity with the 
Holy See in the middle of the sixteenth century, and that he was the 
last Archbishop of Canterbury to acknowledge the supremacy of the 
Pope. But his personal greatness, and his accomplishments in other 
spheres, are not so well known, and I purpose in this essay to sketch 
them very briefly. 

Reginald Pole was of royal descent. His mother, the Lady Margaret 
Pole, was a niece of King Edward IV, and therefore connected with 
the Yorkist family. His father enjoyed great favour at the court 
of the Lancastrian King Henry VII, and was attached to the household 
of the King's eldest son, Prince Arthur. As all the world knows, 
Arthur married Catherine of Aragon, but died shortly afterwards. 
Catherine then married Prince Arthur's younger brother, Henry, by 
papal dispensation. 

Reginald was born in the year 1500. We gather from one of his 
letters that his pious mother dedicated him to God from his earliest 
youth 1 and it would seem that she hoped from the first that he would 
embrace an ecclesiastical career. Reginald's father died in 1505, 
but the Lady Margaret was at once assisted by Prince Henry, who 
even before his accession to the throne made himself responsible for 
Reginald's education. The boy was first sent to school at the age of 
seven, to the Carthusians at Sheen. It is interesting to note that 
Reginald thus came under the same salutary influence as did his great 
friend Sir Thomas More. 

At the age of twelve, Reginald entered as a student at Magdalen 
College, Oxford. Here he had for tutors the famous Thomas Linacre, 
who was devoted to medical science, and physician to the King, and 
also William Latimer, a well known humanist. Reginald was 
evidently a very promising student, and he was admitted Bachelor 
1 Letter to the Countess of Salisbury, Cotton, App. L, 79, British Museum. 

124 



CARDINAL POLE 125 

of Arts at the age of fifteen. Two years later, i.e. In 1517, he was 
presented by King Henry to the prebend of Boscombe in Salisbury 
Cathedral. In 1518 he received the collegiate church of Wirnbourne, 
and in 1519 the prebend of Yatminster, also in Salisbury Cathedral. 

It is often said that Pole held these benefices as a layman. The 
only basis for this statement is the fact that when later on he was 
raised to the Cardinalate in Rome, he had his head shaved. But it 
seems quite probable that Reginald received the tonsure in England 
shortly after he took his degree. Certain it is that he is described as 
a " clerk " in the announcement of his presentation to Wirnbourne. 
Again, sons of nobility and gentry in those days often received the 
tonsure at an early age, even though they had no intention of pro- 
ceeding to the priesthood, in order that, having thus entered the clerical 
state, they might possess the revenues of ecclesiastical benefices. 
These had to be forfeited on marriage. It would seem, indeed, that 
occasionally dispensations from these requirements of Canon Law were 
granted. At any rate, after he had revolted from the Holy See, 
Henry VIII, as Pope of his new Church, gave one dispensation to a 
layman to hold a benefice, even though married. 1 Even so, we gather 
from this that a dispensation was necessary if a layman was to hold 
a benefice, and therefore we are surely justified in saying that when 
Pole held these benefices, he was either tonsured, or else expressly 
dispensed by ecclesiastical authority. The early age at which these 
benefices were conferred upon him, and the plurality involved, 
were not contrary to Canon Law as it then stood, and therefore no 
blame attaches either to Reginald or to those who conferred them 
upon him. The Council of Trent later on put an end to these abuses. 2 

As has already been said, Reginald's mother probably hoped from 
the first that he would eventually become a priest. But others had 
different plans for his future, and in particular, Catherine of Aragon 
cherished the idea that the best way to prevent a revival of the feud 
between the houses of York and Lancaster would be to marry her 
daughter Mary (afterwards Queen of England), to one of the sons 
of the Lady Margaret. It was doubtless with this end in view that 
she arranged for the Countess of Salisbury, as the Lady Margaret 
had now become, to be appointed governess to her daughter. This 
was calculated to ensure that the Princess Mary would be much in 
the company of the sons of the Countess. Her eldest son was already 
married by this time, and there can be little doubt that Reginald was 
the one on whom Catherine's hopes were fixed as the future spouse 
of her daughter. King Henry himself did not sympathize with this 



1 See Frere, Marian Reaction, 

2 See my work The Reformation, the Mass and the Priesthood, Vol. II, p. 13, and the 
Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. II, pp. 475-6. 



Is g GREAT CATHOLICS 

scheme, but at any rate the possibility of such a marriage between 
the parties was mooted again and again during Pole's lifetime, as we 

shall see. 

In those days, a gentleman's education was thought to be incomplete 
if it did not comprise a stay abroad, and accordingly, at the age of 19, 
Reginald went to Padua in Italy, for the purposes of continuing his 
studies. The high favour he enjoyed at this time in the eyes of King 
Henry is shown by the fact that His Majesty made him an allowance 
of 500 crowns, in order to defray all his expenses abroad- The 
University of Padua was then one of the best in Italy, and during his 
stay there, Pole met many of the most famous scholars and prominent 
ecclesiastics of the time. He was a constant guest at the house of 
Pietro Bembo, afterwards Cardinal, " the prince of humanists, 35 and 
during his six years' residence at the University, he gathered round 
himself a very brilliant circle of scholars and students. 

From time to time Pole visited other Italian cities. Thus in 1525 
he paid his first visit to Rome. Meantime he had not been forgotten 
in England, and in 1524 he was appointed a Fellow of the recently 
established College of Corpus Christi at Oxford. But the Pole family 
were by now somewhat under a cloud. Reginald's elder brother 
had been sent to the Tower by the irascible Henry because of his 
connection with the ill-fated Duke of Buckingham, the father-in-law 
of Ursula Pole. But the Countess of Salisbury herself was still in 
favour, and so was her son Reginald. When he returned to England 
in 1527, he received a warm welcome from both the King and Queen. 

The Princess Mary had by now been designated as the spouse of 
either the King of France, or his heir, and thus Reginald was free 
to proceed in his ecclesiastical career. He was almost immediately 
appointed Dean of Exeter (August isth, 1527). But instead of 
taking a prominent place in affairs, he withdrew once more to Sheen. 
This rather noticeable retirement from Court most probably had its 
explanation in the domestic complications in King Henry's household. 
Henry had for some time ceased to be faithful to Catherine of Aragon. 
A natural son by one of the Queen's ladies had been created Duke of 
Richmond. He had also had immoral relations with Mary Boleyn, 
and now he lost his heart to Mary's younger sister, Anne. Already 
steps had been taken to try to establish that his marriage with 
Catherine had been invalid from the beginning. Reginald Pole may 
well have desired to keep clear of these questionable proceedings. 

Nevertheless, he was soon approached by Thomas Cromwell, at 
that time in the service of Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell asked Pole 
his views on these matters of the King's business. Reginald replied 
that the King's servants ought above all to recommend that which 
was most in accordance with the prince's honour and interest. 



CARDINAL POLE 1*7 

Cromwell thereupon proceeded to explain the Machiavellian views 
which he himself held. The King's inclinations, he said, were to be 
studied carefully, and then furthered, without, however, sacrificing 
the appearance of religion or virtue. He recommended Pole to 
study Machiavelli's book, II Principe, rather than Plato. Pole 
promised to read the work, but did not commit himself further. 

The affair of the King's Divorce dragged on. Browbeaten by 
Henry's envoys, the Pope, in May, 1529, at last appointed a com- 
mission to examine into the validity of the marriage with Catherine. 
The Commission sat in England in June, 1529, but Catherine appealed 
from the Commission to the Pope. That meant that the cause would 
have to be finally settled at Rome. Henry had good reason to fear 
that in that case the decision would go against him. In view of his 
headstrong character, the future outlook was indeed uncertain and 
dark, and Pole thought it prudent to ask to be allowed to go abroad 
once more for the purposes of study. It seerns quite clear that his 
object was really to avoid being entangled in the difficult and delicate 
situation in England. 

But though he went abroad, he was not left in peace. In August, 
1529, about two months after Pole had left for Paris, a certain Thomas 
Cranmer was introduced to the King by Cromwell, as one who had 
a good plan for solving Henry's matrimonial problem without having 
recourse to the See of Rome. The first point in this plan was that 
canonists and universities should be persuaded to declare that the 
marriage with Catherine was invalid. The King welcomed this idea, 
and as Pole was now at Paris, Henry commissioned him to sound the 
Doctors of the University there, and to do his best to persuade them 
to pronounce in his favour. Pole begged to be excused from this 
unwelcome task, and pleaded his inexperience. But the King merely 
sent others to assist him. After much pressure had been brought to 
bear on the Doctors of the Sorbonne, a majority declared in Henry's 
favour, and this result was duly sent to the King by Pole. 

But Henry was not yet satisfied. He wanted to gain Pole absolutely 
to his cause, and so he recalled him to England in 1530, and offered 
to him the Sees of Winchester and York. As Canterbury was still 
occupied by Archbishop Warham, the King was thus offering to Pole 
the highest ecclesiastical positions then vacant. It must have been a 
great temptation to Reginald. His whole life had seemed to indicate 
some such destiny and position. He had been marked out for the 
Church from the first, and benefices and dignities had been showered 
upon him. Undoubtedly he was faced with the first grave crisis in 
his life. Should he accept, and throw in his lot with his King, 
humouring his whims as counselled by Thomas Cromwell ? Or should 
he refuse, and thereby place his future, if not his very life, in jeopardy ? 



128 GREAT CATHOLICS 

His family were asked to do their utmost to ensure a favourable 
decision, and they did so. Every possible consideration was urged 
upon him, and he tells us 1 that at length he thought he had found a way 
to satisfy both the King and his own conscience. He went to the 
King to explain his plan, but strange to say, when about to do so, 
his lips refused to move, and when at last he found himself able to 
speak, he uttered every argument against the idea he had come to 
defend. 

The King was furious, but nevertheless consented to read a document 
which Pole drew up explaining and defending his attitude. Cranmer 
bears witness to the persuasiveness of this document. 2 In it, Pole 
urged Henry to leave the matter to the Pope's judgment, and warned 
him that one step further would drown all his honour. But Henry 
had already practically committed himself, and, urged on by 
Cromwell, he finally decided to break with Rome. 

Pole decided once more to leave England, for his continued presence 
could do no good, but rather harm. Accordingly he betook himself 
to Avignon early in 1532, but the climate there proving unsuitable, 
he went on in September of the same year to Venice, where he was 
within reach of his beloved Padua. Here he renewed his acquaintance 
with his old friends, and in addition, made many new ones. Thus 
he came into contact with Contarini and Caraffa, both afterwards 
Cardinals, and the latter destined to occupy the See of Peter, and to 
be one of Pole's greatest enemies. He also met Cortese, Sadoleto, and 
others, and had long conversations with them on the ecclesiastical 
position, the need of a reform within the Church, and other matters 
which interested him and them. 

Meanwhile, affairs in England were going rapidly from bad to 
worse. In November, 1532, Pope Clement VII drew up a bull 
threatening Henry with excommunication if he did not separate from 
Anne and take back Catherine, pending the Papal decision as to the 
validity of the former marriage. But so far from obeying the Pope, 
Henry actually married Anne Boleyn secretly in January, 1533, and 
four months later Cranmer, now Archbishop of Canterbury, by a 
solemn farce pronounced the marriage with Catherine to have been 
invalid. On May 2gth, Anne was crowned at Westminster as Queen 
of England. 

The Pope, of course, could not ignore this flagrant act of disobedience. 
On July nth, 1533, Clement again threatened Henry with excom- 
munication for contracting a second marriage while the consideration 
of the first was still pending in the Roman Court. Henry's only 

1 Letter to Edward VI, Epistles, i, 251-62. 

2 Letter from Cranmer to Lord Wiltshire, Lansdowne MS. 115 ; Strype, Cranmer, 
App. No. i. 



CARDINAL POLE 129 

answer was to appeal to a General Council, though he had already 
refused to have anything to do with the Council which the Pope had 
summoned. 

On September 7th 3 1533, Anne brought forth, not the son and heir 
for which Henry had married her, but a daughter. Thus the question 
of the succession to the throne of England was still uncertain, and the 
Emperor's ambassador wrote to that monarch suggesting that Pole 
might well succeed eventually to the Kingdom, and once more 
mentioning the project of a marriage between him and the Princess 
Mary. 1 But the Emperor did not favour the idea. 

Meanwhile, Henry continued in his headlong course. In 1534, 
Parliament was persuaded to pass the Act of Supremacy, declaring 
the King to be the Head of the Church. A similar declaration had 
already been extorted from Convocation. In January, 1535, the 
bishops were ordered to surrender all bulls of appointment obtained 
from Rome, and to take out fresh commissions for the government of 
their dioceses, acknowledging that their authority emanated from the 
King. The schism was thus complete. 

Henry had not forgotten Pole's existence. In February, 1535, he 
charged Thomas Starkey, one of his chaplains, to obtain from Pole 
his opinion on the validity of the marriage with Catherine, and on 
the authority of the Pope. Whatever may have been Henry's motive 
in this, Pole decided to comply, and to set forth his opinions at length 
in a book. While he was preparing this work, news reached him of 
the martyrdom of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and of his old 
friend Sir Thomas More. He also found other matter to deal with 
in anti-papal books written in England by Sampson, Bishop of 
Chichester, and Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. It seems that these 
books had been sent to Pole by Henry's orders, in the hope that he would 
see his way to adopt their sentiments. But Henry had mistaken his 
man. Pole's mind was made up, and the book, Pro Ecdesiasticce Unitatis 
Defensione, vindicated the Papal authority and directly attacked the 
Royal Supremacy and the new religion thereby set up in England* 

Henry was furious, but he dissembled his rage, and tried once more 
to persuade Pole to return to England and discuss the matter. Pole 
remarked that, like the fox, he had seen many animals going into the 
lion's cave, but none coming out again, and wrote to the King declining 
the invitation, inasmuch as by the Act of Supremacy, everyone refusing 
to acknowledge the King's headship of the Church had been dubbed 
a traitor. 

Meanwhile, Pole was actually reproached for his loyalty to the 
Holy See ]}y Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, who added in a letter that 
Pole's own mother and brothers were likely to suffer in consequence of 

1 Gardner, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, Vol. VI, No. 1164. 



I30 GREAT CATHOLICS 

his opposition to .the King. And to emphasise this, Pole actually 
received letter of protest from his mother, the Countess of Salisbury, 
and his elder brother, Lord Montague. Further letters were sent, 
as we shall see. It seems strange that Blessed Margaret Pole, who was 
so soon to lay down her life as a martyr for the Faith, should write to 
expostulate with her distinguished son for refusing to accept the 
unlawful spiritual claims of King Henry. But the true explanation 
is without doubt that given by Dean Hook, in the account of Pole 
contained in his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. Hook points out 
that the original draft of these letters is amongst the Government 
papers in the Record Office, and remarks : 

" There can but be one inference deduced from this fact 
namely, that the letters received by Pole were a mere transcript on 
the part of his relatives of letters composed by order of the govern- 
ment, and when we consult the documents ^themselves, this natural 
suspicion is fully confirmed by internal evidence.'* 1 

This candid avowal from an Anglican writer rather unsympathetic 
towards Pole is also quoted with evident agreement by Canon Dixon 
in his History of the Church of England, Vol. I, p. 483, note. 

Pole wrote his mother a very touching letter, asking her to 
remember " that ever you had given me utterly unto God. . . . This 
promise now, madam, in my Master's name I require of you to 
maintain." Thus did Pole resist the apparent attempt on the part 
of his mother and brother to make him untrue to his conscience. 

A day or two after this letter was written, Pole was summoned to 
Rome by Pope Paul III, who had succeeded Clement VII. At last 
definite steps were being taken to bring about the long-desired 
reformation of the Church from within. The Pope had decided to 
call a General Council, and desired Pole's advice and help. Pole, 
as in duty bound, promised to go to Rome, but at the same time he 
wrote to King Henry informing him of the position, evidently in order 
to avoid any widening of the breach already made. But it soon 
became obvious that Pole was now regarded as the King's enemy. 
Even so, he was faithful to his conscience. Others in England, when 
faced with the cruel dilemma of choosing between the Pope and the 
unlawful claims of their lawful King, had, for various reasons, chosen 
the latter alternative, and temporised with their consciences. Pole 
was made of sterner stuff. He fully realised the price he might have 
to pay. He knew the fate which Henry had meted out to his best 
friends in England, and we gather from his letters and from other 
sources, that henceforth he was more than once in danger of his life 
from Henry's hired assassins. 

1 Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. Vol. VIII, p. 102. 



CARDINAL POLE 131 

Pole set out for Rome in September, 1536. When he had reached 
Verona, a messenger arrived from England with further letters, 
including two from Pole's sorrowing mother and brother. Writing 
at this time to his friend Cardinal Gontarini, Pole says that these 
letters touched him so deeply that he almost changed his plans. But 
he was confirmed in his original purpose by Bishops Caraflfa and 
Ghiberti, who were accompanying him, and he contented himself 
with " doing what he could to satisfy his relatives." 

Pole duly arrived in the Eternal City, and was at once appointed 
by the Pope to the Commission which was preparing for the forth- 
coming Council. At the end of this year 1536, Pole was suddenly, 
and almost against his will, raised to the Cardinalate. His present 
friend but future enemy Caraffa was made a Cardinal at the same 
time. Pole received many congratulations from his friends, but from 
England there only came reproaches. 

The Commission of which Pole was a member in due course drew 
up an important report, the Consilium delectorum Cardinalium de 
emendanda Ecdesia. It is a noteworthy document, remarkable for its 
outspoken condemnation of abuses in Papal administration, and the 
fact that Pole had a hand in drawing it up shows how anxious he was 
for the reform of the Church. 

In February, 1537, Pole was appointed Nuncio to England. The 
Pilgrimage of Grace had just taken place, and raised hopes in Rome 
of a restoration of the authority of the Holy See. It was thought 
that Pole might perhaps be able to encourage another similar move- 
ment, and that perhaps even Henry himself would find it prudent to 
seek reconciliation with the Church. Henry was apparently willing 
to send certain persons to confer unofficially with Pole in Flanders. 
But it soon became evident, not only that there was no hope of 
Henry's submission, but also that Pole would receive no help or support 
either from the King of France or from the Emperor. The deceitful 
Henry had even requested the French King to capture Pole and hand 
him over to the English. The King of France could not consent 
to that, but instead he requested Pole to leave his dominions. Similar 
opposition to Pole was offered by the Emperor, for political reasons. 
Henry's agents constantly endeavoured to murder the Cardinal, and 
eventually, as it was impossible to fulfil his mission, Pole returned to 
Rome. 

Two years previously, i.e. in August, 1535, the Pope had drawn up 
a bull definitely excommunicating Henry, deposing him, and pro- 
nouncing various spiritual pains and penalties against his adherents. 
But its publication had been suspended, doubtless in the hope that 
more peaceable means might produce the desired effect. But Henry 
had gone from bad to worse. He had dissolved the remaining 



l%2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

monasteries, and sacked the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. 
Thereupon the Pope decided, in December, 1538, to publish the 
suspended bull, and Pole was sent to the Emperor, then at Toledo, 
and to the French King at Paris, to urge them to carry out the under- 
taking they had already given to do all in their power to restore 
England to the faith. In particular, they were to be requested to 
publish the bull of excommunication in their dominions. 

Pole set out on this second mission. At Bologna he received the 
sad news that all his relatives had been committed to the Tower, and 
shortly afterwards came the news of the execution of his elder brother, 
Lord Montague. Pole's mission failed, as before. The Emperor 
and the French King were too engrossed in considerations of political 
expedience to further the cause of the Church of God, and Pole had to 
return once more to Rome. On his way, he heard that his mother 
had been sentenced to death, and later on came the news of her 
martyrdom. The Cardinal's comment on this crowning loss was a 
noble one : 

" Until now, I had thought God had given me the grace of being 
the son of one of the best and most honoured ladies in England . . . 
Now He has vouchsafed to honour me still more, by making me the 
son of a martyr . . . Let us rejoice, for we have another advocate 
in heaven," 

Yet Pole cherished no feelings of enmity or hatred towards his mother's 
murderer, and he declared that if his own slaughter could bring about 
Henry's conversion, he would desire it at once. 

In August, 1541, Pole was appointed Governor of Viterbo and the 
Patrimony of St. Peter. He ruled the province for some five years, 
with great discretion and humanity so much so that, as we shall see 
later on, his enemies complained of his leniency towards heretics there. 
But the Cardinal was destined for more important work, and in 1545 
he went to Trent as one of the three Papal legates appointed for the 
opening of the great Council of the Church. In preparation for this, 
Pole had written an excellent treatise on General Councils, and in 
January, 1546, there was read, at the second session of the Council, 
an address written by him, emphasising the threefold purpose of the 
assembly, namely, the uprooting of heresies, the reformation of 
ecclesiastical discipline and morals, and the external peace of the 
whole Church. It is a wonderful address, candidly acknowledging 
the partial responsibility of ecclesiastics for the evils of the day. 1 

Pole's ill-health compelled him to leave Trent in March, 1536, 
but he continued to take an active part in the discussions of the Council. 

1 An English translation has recently been made by Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., 
and published by Burns and Oates under the title Cardinal Pole's Eirenicon. 



CARDINAL POLE 133 

In particular, he was very much interested in the discussion and 
definition of the true doctrine on Justification. Some years previously, 
his friend Cardinal Contarini had endeavoured to bring about the 
reconciliation of the Lutherans with the Church, by setting forth what 
was undoubtedly an insufficient and inadequate account of the Catholic 
doctrine on Justification as eventually defined at Trent. Pole at that 
time undoubtedly sympathized with Contarini's view, though he 
realised that it was contrary to the Augustinian and Scholastic 
tradition. But it must be borne in mind that at that time there had 
been no Church decision on the matter. The subject was long debated 
at Trent, and the Council's proposed decree on the subject was sent 
to Pole for his observations, and there can be no doubt that he loyally 
accepted the doctrine as eventually defined. 

Pole did not return to Trent, but was summoned back to Rome in 
October, 1546, where the Pope made great use of his services in 
matters of official correspondence. 

At the end of January, 1547, Henry VIII died, and Pole wrote to 
the Pope suggesting that it might now be possible to restore England 
to communion with the Holy See. The Pope appointed him as legate, 
and Pole forthwith wrote to the Privy Council, begging them to receive 
him in the Pope's name. But the Council refused even to read his 
letter, and it became only too plain that under the new king, Edward 
VI, England was to recede still further from the true Faith. But 
Pole continued to keep in touch with home affairs. The Protector 
Somerset actually wrote urging him to abandon the " errors and abuses 
of Rome," and sent for his approval a copy of the First Prayer Book of 
Edward VI. He also invited him to return to England, but Pole of 
course declined the invitation. 

Pope Paul III died in November, 1549. Cardinal Pole stood high 
in favour in the Conclave. At the third scrutiny he received 26 votes. 
Two more would have sufficed to make him Pope, and a move was 
made that evening by a group of Cardinals to have him proclaimed 
Pope at once by " adoration.* 5 But Pole declined, and said that, if 
elected at all, he must be elected after Mass the next morning, in 
accordance with the usual practice. Eventually Cardinal Del Monte, 
one of Pole's fellow legates at the Council of Trent, was chosen. He 
took the name of Julius III. Pole's humble comment on. his own 
failure to be elected was that " the Lord did not require this particular 
ass." 

Actually, Pole had enemies as well as friends amongst the Cardinals, 
and it was urged against him that he had consorted with heretics at 
Viterbo and elsewhere. This was a specious accusation. Pole had 
throughout been anxious for the reform of the Church, and had 
encouraged all who seemed to desire to promote the reform of discipline, 



134 GREAT CATHOLICS 

from within. But some of those whom he supported did not confine 
themselves to matters of discipline, but later went on to attack the 
Church's doctrines, and eventually apostatized. Amongst these was 
Peter Martyr and Ochino, who both went to England to support the 
new Anglican Church. Naturally, this sad ending to promising 
careers was made the most of by Pole's enemies. Doubtless also his 
support of Contarini's ideas on Justification was also brought up 
against him. It was also urged that he had been lax in his government 
of Viterbo, and had not inflicted capital punishment as often as he 
should have done. It was even said that he had a natural daughter, 
a certain English girl whom he had befriended and succoured in Rome. 

Pole was preparing to defend himself in a public work against these 
charges, but the new Pope dissuaded him from doing so. Cardinal 
CarafFa also dissuaded him, and expressed his sorrow that such 
accusations should have been made against him. Yet Caraffa himself 
revived some of these accusations against Pole later on, when he 
became Pope. Meanwhile, Pole betook himself to the Benedictine 
Monastery of Maguzzano, on Lake Garda. 

Early in July, 1553, the short reign of Edward VI came to an end, 
and after a brief and unsuccessful attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on 
the throne, the crown of England came to its rightful owner, the 
Princess Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon. The Pope's delight 
was unbounded, and at once Pole was appointed Legate to England, 
to bring about that reconciliation with the Holy See which had been 
so long delayed, but now seemed certain. 

The immediate sequel is fairly well known. The dominant power 
of the Emperor was once more exercised for political reasons, to the 
detriment of the spiritual welfare of England. The Emperor had 
conceived the idea of marrying his son Philip to the new Queen of 
England, and as Pole would probably not favour this match, the 
Emperor determined to keep him out of England as long as possible. 
He succeeded in doing so until November, 1554, when, Mary being 
safely married to Philip, Pole was allowed to land in England to fulfil 
the mission entrusted to him by the Pope. But it must not be thought 
that he had done nothing in the meantime. From various places on 
the Continent, he had taken an active part in purging the Church in 
England from its Protestant elements, and preparing the way for its 
reunion with Rome. 1 At long last, the difficulties were all overcome, 
and Pole had the inexpressible joy of receiving the submission of the 
kingdom, and of absolving both Parliament and Convocation, and of 
publicly reconciling the realm to the Holy See, on November 3Oth, 
the Feast of St. Andrew. 

1 An account of Pole's activities throughout Mary's reign will be found in the 
second volume of my work, The Reformation^ the Mass, and the Priesthood. 



CARDINAL POLE 135 

Space will not admit of a detailed account of the important work 
Pole now had to do in England. One matter that occupied his 
attention was the repression of heresy. The laws against heresy were 
revived by Parliament, at the request of Convocation, in 1554-5. 
Some measures against heretics were undoubtedly necessary. 1 But 
there is no need to suppose that Cardinal Pole thirsted for their blood. 
His own sentiments on the matter are set forth in a letter he wrote to 
the Bishop of Augsburg : 

" I do not deny, in the case of a man's opinions being extremely 
pernicious, and he no less industrious to corrupt others than 
depraved himself, I might say such a one should be capitally 
punished, and as a rotten member, cut off from the body. But it 
was my constant declaration that this remedy was not to be applied 
till every gentler method had been made use of ... The fact is so 
notorious that on account of my lenity in punishing erroneous 
doctrines, I have hardly escaped a suspicion of favouring their 
cause whose persons I screened. 5 ' 2 

Pole expressly requested the bishops and clergy " to entreat the 
people and their flock with all gentleness, and to endeavour to win 
the people rather by gentleness than by extremity and rigour." 3 
But undoubtedly, if all other measures failed, Pole held that the 
extreme penalty could and should be applied. Even so, he himself 
took little part in the actual persecution. He pardoned at least three 
heretics who had been condemned by Bonner. Archbishop Cranmer 
was one of those who suffered the extreme penalty. At the request 
of Philip and Mary, Pole was appointed to the See of Canterbury 
in his place, and somewhat reluctantly, he accepted this arduous post 
in addition to his office as Legate. 

There is one task of Pole's which deserves especial mention, and 
that is his great plan for a reformation of the newly reconciled English 
Church. This was evolved in a Convocation in October, 1555, which 
was almost immediately transformed into a National Synod. Plans 
were drawn up for a new Catholic translation of the Bible, an 
authoritative exposition of the Creed, a set of homilies for reading in 
Churches, etc. But above all, a great Constitution was passed 
regulating the ecclesiastical life and discipline of the country. 
Pluralities and other abuses were to cease. The duty of preaching 
was to be performed regularly by those with the cure of souls, at least 
on Sundays and holidays. Special care was to be taken by the 

1 See my book, The Reformation, the Mass and the Priesthood, Vol. II, pp. 156-160. 

2 Pole's Epistles, iv, 156. 

* Foxe, Book of Martyrs* VI, pp. 587-8. Collier defends Pole's attitude in 
Ecclesiastical Records, VI, p. xoi. 



igtf GREAT CATHOLICS 

bishops to ensure the suitability of those admitted to holy orders, and 
steps were taken to root out all simony. The bishops -were ordered 
to set up diocesan seminaries, under the care of the Chancellors of the 
Cathedrals, and the diocesan benefices were to be taxed for their 
upkeep. The Constitution also promulgated the Decrees of the 
General Council of Florence concerning the Primacy of the Roman 
See, and the doctrines of the Seven Sacraments. If only time had 
allowed this new Constitution to be put into practical effect, the 
Catholic Church in England might have proved too powerful for even 
Elizabeth to shatter and destroy. 

But the time was too short. Mary's reign, and Pole's own life, were 
both drawing rapidly to a close. And Providence had reserved for 
Pole's latter days the hardest cross of all. Pope Paul IV had quarrelled 
with Philip of Spain, and very drastically decided to withdraw all Papal 
legates from his dominions, including Pole from England. Pope 
Paul the Cardinal Caraffa who had previously repudiated unworthy 
suspicions of Pole's integrity, was an old man, and in his old age was 
displaying much obstinacy, and little wisdom. The rumours of Pole's 
unorthodoxy were revived, and this time they seem to have been 
given credence by the Pope. 

While we condemn the Pope's unreasonable attitude, and lack 
of prudence in this matter, we may allow that there were some 
superficial grounds for this mistrust of Pole, in addition to the earlier 
accusations which had, though unjustly, been made against him. To 
begin with, Cardinal Pole while in England had been assisted and 
advised by Bartholomew Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, and he 
had proposed to adopt his Catechism for English use. But Carranza 
himself had fallen under the suspicion of the Inquisition for unsound 
views on the subject of Justification. This naturally recalled Pole's 
own earlier views on the subject, and enemies might suggest that he 
still retained these views, though they had been condemned at Trent. 
Again, as Carranza himself pointed out in a letter to Pole, the latter 
laid himself open to severe criticism by not residing in his See of 
Canterbury. (Pole rightly urged that business of state kept him 
much in London.) 

In any case, Pope Paul had evidently made up his mind to remove 
Pole from his Legation. He even summoned him to Rome. Protests 
from the Queen, Parliament, and the Hierarchy of the whole country 
were sent to the Pope, but were disregarded. Mary even took the 
drastic step of forbidding the Pope's messenger to land in this country. 
But the utmost Pope Paul could be prevailed upon to do was to appoint 
another Legate in Pole's place, and for this purpose he selected a 
feeble old Franciscan, utterly unsuitable for the post, who died almost 
immediately, after vain efforts to decline the honour forced upon him. 



CARDINAL POLE 157 

Pole at first drew up a strong protest, defending his impugned 
orthodoxy, but when he had finished it he destroyed it, saying " Non 
revelabis pudenda patris tui." He did, however, when appealing to 
the Pope on behalf of his friend Priuli, protest against the way he was 
being treated, and pointed out the harm that was being done to the 
cause of Catholicism in England : 

" I arn already informed by what steps the enemy begins to 
triumph in this realm, especially with respect to those proceedings 
which have been carried on against myself. For whereas I had 
gathered together my scattered flock chiefly by my own invariable 
adherence to the faith which I exhorted them to embrace, as soon 
as it was rumoured that my rectitude in that belief was questioned, 
the enemies of that cause thought they had an opportunity of calling 
off the sheep to a greater distance from the voice of the shepherd." 1 

But as his protest was of no effect, Pole retired to his See of Canterbury, 
and ceased to exercise any Legatine functions. Pope Paul IV's strange 
and unwise conduct did tremendous harm to the Catholic cause in 
England, and it is not altogether surprising that when Archbishop 
Heath, of York, spoke against the Supremacy Bill introduced into 
Elizabeth's first Parliament, he remarked : 

" If by this our relinquishing of the See of Rome there were none 
other matter therein than a withdrawing of our obedience from 
the Pope's person, Paul the fourth of that name, who hath declared 
himself to be a very austere stern father unto us ever since his first 
entrance into Peter's Chair, then the cause were not of such great 
importance as it is in very deed." 2 

The end was at hand. Mary died on November lyth, 1558, at 
7 o'clock in the morning, and Cardinal Pole, her faithful cousin, died 
later on the same day, at the age of 58. His great friend Priuli 
said that 

" As in health that sainted soul was ever turned towards God, 
so likewise in this long and troublesome infirmity did it continue 
thus until his end, which he made so placidly that he seemed to 
sleep rather than to die." 

One of Pole's last acts was to send a messenger to the Princess 

1 Pole's Epistles, V, 31. 

2 See my book, The Reformation, the Mass and the Priesthood, Vol. II, p. 193. Heath 
goes on to explain that the Supremacy Bill meant that -they " must forsake and fly 
from the Unity of Christ's Church, and by leaping out of Peter's Ship, hazard ourselves 
to be overwhelmed and drowned in the waters of schism, sects, and divisions." Ibid. : 
Heath, like all Catholics, made a clear distinction between Papal authority in itself, 
and an unwise use of Papal power. 



138 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Elizabeth, with a note. The letter is extant, but we do not know the 
nature of the verbal message. We can however easily guess that it 
was an exhortation to Elizabeth to keep the Catholic Faith which she 
had professed during her sister's reign. But Elizabeth decided 
otherwise. 

Pole was duly buried in his Cathedral of Canterbury, not far from 
the Shrine of St. Thomas. But his brick tomb has been woefully 
neglected. Cardinal Vaughan presented a panel, which now hangs 
over the tomb, with Pole's armorial bearings. 

Dr. Parker, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, described Cardinal 
Pole as " carnifex et flagellurn ecclesw anglicance" That verdict would 
be repudiated as manifestly unjust by all right-minded people, and 
there can be little doubt that Reginald Cardinal Pole was one of the 
noblest of men, and one of the greatest Archbishops that sat in the 
Chair of St. Augustine. 



Bibliographical Note. The standard English biography of Cardinal Pole is that by 
" Martin Haile " (Mary Halle). The article on Pole by James Gairdner in the 
Dictionary of National Biography is also invaluable. Both have been consulted in the 
present study. 



VERA BARCLAY 



ST. TERESA 

(Born at Avila, Castille) 



A.D. 



yi FTER FOUR YEARS of enclosure in the first little convent of the 
J\. Reform, St. Teresa writes : " As time went on, my desires to be 
of some good to some soul somewhere went on increasing ; and I 
often felt like someone who is in charge of a great treasure and desires 
that all should benefit by it, but his hands are tied so that he cannot 
give it out . , . And so it is that when we read in the lives of the 
saints how they converted souls, it raises in me more ardour, more 
emotion, and more emulation than all the martyrdoms which they 
suffered ; for this is the disposition which the Lord has given me." 

Is it not true to say that this is the disposition which the Lord gave 
to all " great Catholics " ? Without it they would probably still have 
been great but not great Catholics. That is why St. Teresa will be 
shown in this study, not as a great mystic or a great writer (the aspects 
under which she is best known) but as one greatly active <e for the 
good of souls, 35 to use her own expression. 

I shall not try to give an outline of St. Teresa's life as a whole. My 
aim will be to help the reader form a freshened and more vivid picture 
of St. Teresa herself not by the methods of the portrait painter, but 
rather in the way one might collect a number of intimate and 
characteristic snapshots of a great personality and arrange them with 
care in an album. Those who turned its pages would feel their memory 
refreshed and their affection stimulated. 

The snapshots in this case are the lively accounts St. Teresa has left 
us of the small as well as the great events of her very active life. We 
are fortunate in possessing them. How many of the saints lose not 
only their charm but their own identity as the hagiographer presents 
them to us, more concerned with our edification than with the writing 
of history or the true portrayal of character. 1 

1 In the case of St. Teresa, it is rather the portrait painters who fail to do her 
justice. That she was beautiful we know. But none of the portraits given in lives 
of her suggest this. We have her own comment on one of these. She sat for it by 

140 



ST. TERESA *4* 

The point of the present study, then, is to let her speak for herself 
as far as possible. The quotations will not be taken from the " Life," 
which she wrote in obedience to her directors for their use in guiding 
her, but from her later book, The Foundations. This was also written 
in o'bedience, but was intended, not for the scrutiny of puzzled spiritual 
directors, but as a book to be read by her own nuns which makes the 
style more lively and more personal. And as in writing this book she 
drew largely on the log of her journeys, and wrote the final chapters 
while she was actually engaged in the work, the accounts are more 
vivid than those for which she had only her memory to draw on. 
She wrote quickly, in moments snatched from busy days, without 
reading over what she had written. This gives her style freshness and 
spontaneity. 1 

The quotations are not meant to give a complete account of any of 
the foundations, but simply to show St. Teresa in action, journeying, 
buying houses, dealing with scores of individuals of very varying types, 
and talking to our Lord about it all as to the constant companion of 
her journeys and, indeed, the instigator of her incredible doings. 

St. Teresa's great longing to work for the good of souls was answered 
by our Lord with the words, " Wait a little, my daughter, and you shall 
see great things." The words puzzled her. But six months later she 
understood their meaning, when the General of the Carmelites visited 
St. Joseph's at Avila, and delighted with this return to the primitive 
ideals Of the order, gave Teresa licences to found more convents. 
Here is St. Teresa's description of her arrival with six nuns and her 
faithful chaplain, Father Julian of Avila, at midnight, to found the 
first of her new convents in a town Medina de Campo where the 
project was looked upon as "great folly." It was important, she 
felt, to take possession of the house secretly, and be fully established 
before break of day. 

" We arrived at midnight, and alighted at St. Anne's, so as not to 
make any noise, and went on foot to the house. It was just the time 
when the bulls which were to fight next day were being driven to the 
enclosure, and it was a great mercy that some of them did not toss 
us." They entered the patio. The local Carmelite Prior who had 
found the house for them had said the entrance could be adapted as a 
chapel. " The walls looked to me very ruinous, but not so bad as by 
daylight I afterwards saw them to be. The Lord seems to have been 

obedience, and when at last she saw the result of the clumsy lay-brother's work, 
she laughed and said, " God forgive you^Brother John ; after malting me go through 
no one knows what, you have turned me out ugly and blear-eyed. It is a pity her 
death-mask is not better known. 

i For English readers a good deal of the charm depends upon which translation 
is used. I shall give extracts from the History of the Foundations, published by the 
Cambridge University Press. 



I4 2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

pleased to blind that good father so that he should not see how unfit 
it was to place the Blessed Sacrament there " (the Lord evidently 
being on the side of the reckless a favourite thought of St. Teresa's). 
" I went to see the entrance. There was a good deal of earth to be 
shovelled out ; it had an open roof, and the walls were unplastered. 
The night was short, and we had only brought with us a few hangings 
I think three which were not nearly enough to cover the length of 
the entrance, and I did not know what to do, for I saw it was not fit 
to set an altar there. It pleased the Lord for He desired that it should 
be done at once that the lady's steward had in his house a great 
deal of tapestry of hers, and some blue damask bed-hangings ; 
and she had told him to give us anything we wanted ; for she was 
very good. When I saw such good furnishing, I gave praise to 
the Lord, and so did the others. We did not know what to do for 
nails, nor could we buy any at that hour ; but we hunted in the walls, 
and at last with a good deal of trouble we found plenty. Some put 
up the hangings ; we nuns cleaned the floor ; and we worked with such 
a will that when morning dawned the altar was set up, and the little 
bell in a passage ; and Mass was said at once. . . . 

" Up to this time I was very happy, for it is my greatest pleasure to 
see one more church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. But 
my joy was short-lived ; for when Mass was over, I went to look at the 
patio through a little window, and I saw that all the walls were fallen 
to the ground in places, so that it would take many days to repair 
them." 

The Blessed Sacrament had been reserved. " Oh valame Dios ! 
What anguish filled my heart," writes St. Teresa at that memory, 
for the tabernacle was practically in the street. " And together with 
this arose in my mind all the difficulties which those who disapproved 
of our venture had spoken of, and I saw clearly that they were right. 
It seemed impossible to go forward with what I had begun." She 
was even tempted to doubt that it was God's will at all, and to think she 
had been deluded by the devil. " Of all the burden of distress which 
weighed me down I said nothing to my companions, because I did not 
want to give them any more distress than they already had. I went 
on in this unhappiness until the evening, when the Jesuits sent a 
Father to see me, who greatly comforted and encouraged me." 

All St. Teresa's foundations for nuns were dedicated to St. Joseph, 
to whom she had a great devotion. And he seems in almost every 
case to have lived up to the traditional idea that if you seek St. 
Joseph's help he will play a practical joke on you by apparently letting 
you down and then making things come right after all. While we are 
on this question of St. Teresa's bad moments before each new success, 
some other passages may be given even though they belong to later 



ST. TERESA 143 

foundations. Her way of writing about them shows her real humility 
to her, one of the two essential virtues (the other being charity) . 

For instance, there is the time heavy rain threatened to swamp a 
great occasion. " I kept on lamenting, and I said to our Lord, 
as it were complaining, that I would He would either not command 
me to engage in these works, or would set this trouble right. That 
good man Nicholas Gutierrez . . . told me very gently, not to distress 
myself, for God would set it right. And so it was : for on Michaelmas 
Day, at the time when the people were to come, the sun began to 
shine. This moved me to devotion, and I saw how much better that 
dear good man had done with his trust than I with my worry." 

On another occasion St. Teresa admits to " creeps." It was on 
All Hallow-e'en, at Salamanca. A friend provided a house for the 
foundation, but this was occupied by students, and they were only 
cleared out the day St. Teresa and her companion took possession, 
leaving the place in a filthy condition. 

" The night of All Saints I and my companion remained in the 
house alone. I can tell you, sisters, that it makes me inclined to 
laugh when I think of the terror of my companion, Maria of the Sacra- 
ment, who was a nun older than I, a great servant of God. The house 
was very large and rambling, and had many garrets, and my companion 
could not get the students out of her head, thinking that, as they were 
so angry at having to go out of the house, one of them might have 
hidden in it. They could very well have done so as regards hiding 
places. We locked ourselves into a room where there was straw, 
which was the first thing I had provided for founding the house, 
because with its aid we could do without a bed. We slept in it that 
night with a blanket apiece which had been lent us. 

" When my companion found herself locked into that room, she 
seemed a little reassured as to the students ; yet notwithstanding, 
she did nothing but look from one side to the other ; and the evil spirit 
must have helped to put thoughts of dangers into her mind in order 
to upset me ; for with my weak heart, a little suffices. I asked her 
why she was looking about when nobody could get in. She said, 
* Mother, I am thinking, if I died here now, what would you do all 
alone ? ' This, if it should come to pass, seemed to me a dreadful 
thing. It made me reflect a little, and be frightened too ; for even 
when I am not nervous, dead bodies always give me a curious feeling, 
even when I am not alone. And with the tolling of the bells into 
the bargain for, as I said, it was the night of All Saints the devil 
got a good start for making us lose our wits with childish trifles. When 
he sees that people are not afraid of him himself, he seeks other devices. 
I answered her : ' Sister, when this comes to pass, I will think what 
to do ; now let me go to sleep.* As we had had two bad nights, sleep 



144 GREAT CATHOLICS 

soon drove away our fears. Next day they were ended by the arrival 
of more nuns,' 5 

We have seen that Campo de Medina was the first new convent 
founded. Before St. Teresa began this foundation, however, her 
mind had been full of a more ambitious project. No sooner had the 
General departed than she sent an express letter after him, urging the 
importance of starting monasteries of the primitive rule for friars 
(a project of which the Bishop of Avila had spoken to him). Her 
very eloquent letter moved him to send her licence to found two, as 
long as the present and late provincials agreed. 

Busy and distracted as she had been at Medina, " while I was there," 
she writes, " I was always thinking over the monasteries of friars ; 
and since, as I said, I had not one friar, I did not know what to do. 
So I determined to talk to the Prior 1 about it in strict confidence, 
to see what he would advise ; and so I did." 

What follows gives us a glimpse of St. Teresa in conversation, and 
her genius for understanding individual people and dealing with them 
appropriately (even if sometimes a little astonishingly). There are 
several conversations with this delightful and quixotic prior, and 
comments on his actions. We can hear them both laughing ; or see 
Teresa smiling at her thoughts of him. 

When he had heard of Teresa's wish to found a monastery for friars 
" he was very glad and promised to be the first himself. I took this 
for a jest, and so I told him : for although he was a very good brother 
. . . recollected and very studious and a lover of his cell, and was 
learned, I thought he would not have the energy, nor be able to 
endure the necessary hardships for he was delicate and not used to 
them." He assured her he would, and was indeed thinking of 
becoming a Carthusian. " For all this I was not quite satisfied ; and 
I asked him to let us put it off for some time, during which he should 
practise the things which he would have to promise ; and so he did." 
A year passed so, in which the Prior had many troubles, and also 
" made great progress." Then turned up a young friar, later to be 
known as St. John of the Cross, who delighted St. Teresa, and promised 
to join the Reform. " When I saw I already had two friars to begin 
with, I thought the thing already done ! However, as I was not 
altogether satisfied with the Prior, and also we had nowhere to com- 
mence, I waited some time." (She used to call them her " friar 
and a half," because St. John of the Cross was so very small), 

A good man offered a very small house in the country for the 

purpose of making a start with the friars. St. Teresa with one sister 

and Father Julian set out, and after tramping all day looking for it, 

found it at nightfall, " in such a condition of extreme dirtiness that we 

1 Fray Antonio de Heredia, Prior of the Carmelites at Medina. 



ST. TERESA 



145 



dared not spend the night there. 3 * It consisted of an entrance, one 
room, a kitchen and a garret. She at once saw the entrance as a 
chapel, the attic as a choir for saying office (it had " squints " into 
the entrance, which went up to the roof) and the room to sleep in, 
Her companion was horrified, and saibl, " Assuredly, mother, there is 
no one, however good, whose spirit could stand this ; do not think of 
it." And Father Julian thought the same. 

When, however, the Prior (now Fray Antonio) heard about it "he 
answered . . . that he was ready to live not only there, but in a 
pigsty. Fray Juan of the Cross was of the same mind." 

It was not the poverty of the place that made Teresa think it so 
propitious for the great venture (she never chose the uncomfortable 
for preference, and she abhorred dirt and unhealthy conditions) but 
she knew human nature and she felt sure the Provincials would not 
give leave " if they saw us in a well-appointed house ; but in that little 
place and house they would think it did not matter." 

While Fray Antonio started to get together what he could for the 
new house, Fray Juan of the Cross accompanied St. Teresa to 
Valladolid, where she visited the Provincial " an old man, of very 
good stuff and straightforward. ... I said so much to him of the 
account he would have to give to God if he hindered so good a work, 
and His Majesty so disposed him to agree, that he softened greatly 
towards our projects." 

Fray Juan went back to prepare the house and Fray Antonio came to 
speak to St. Teresa at Valladolid, " very happy, and told me what he 
had got. It was very little. Only with hour-glasses was he well 
provided for he was taking five to my great amusement. He said 
he did not like to go without the means of keeping the appointed hours. 
I do not believe he had got anything to sleep on." He resigned his 
priorship, and " went off to his little house with the greatest content 
in the world." During Advent the first Mass was said there, and the 
first monastery of Barefoot Friars was an accomplished fact. ec In the 
following Lent," writes St. Teresa, " when I was going to the foundation 
of Toledo, I went that way. I arrived one morning. Father Antonio 
was cleaning out the doorway of the chapel, with the happy face which 
he always has. I said to him, c How is this, Father ? What has become 
of your dignity ? ' He answered, telling me of his great happiness in 
these words : ' I execrate the time when I possessed it I ' 

" As I entered the chapel, I stood amazed to see the spirit which the 
Lord had inspired there ; and not only I, but two merchants, friends 
of mine, who had come with me from Medina, who did nothing but 
shed tears. There were so many crosses, so many skulls ! I shall never 
forget a small wooden cross there was for holy water, which had fastened 
to it a paper image of Christ which seemed to excite more devotion than 



146 GREAT CATHOLICS 

if it had been of the finest workmanship. The Office Choir was the 
garret^ half of which was lofty enough for standing to say the hours ; 
but they had to stoop a great deal to enter it and to hear Mass. They 
had made at two extreme corners next the chapel two hermitages, 
where they could only be prostrate or sitting : these were filled with 
hay, because the place was very cold, and the roof was close over their 
heads ; they had two openings facing the altar, and two stones to rest 
their heads on ; and there were their crosses and skulls. I found that 
when Matins was finished they did not go away again before Prime, 
but remained there in prayer, so absorbed in it that sometimes when 
they returned to their places for Prime their habits were covered with 
snow, and they had not noticed it." 

They were joined by two other friars. " They used to go to preach 
at many neighbouring places which were destitute of any teaching ; 
and that was another reason why I was pleased that the house should 
have been founded in that place. ... In so short a time they had 
gained such esteem that it gave me the greatest joy when I heard of it." 
They used to go barefoot two leagues, to preach and hear confessions, 
" in much snow and frost. . . . They were so happy that they minded 
all this very little. 31 

At Toledo great objections were raised to a foundation. St. Teresa 
and several nuns lived in lodgings while negotiations were going on. 
A house was found for them by a very poor young man, called Andrada, 
a student, whom a Franciscan friar who had heard his confession, sent 
to help them though when he first presented himself, u it amused me 
much," says St. Teresa, " and my companions more, to see what sort 
of assistance the holy man had sent us." Andrada " thought it an 
easy thing " to find a house, and the very next day spoke to Teresa at 
Mass, saying he had got a house, and here were the keys. Soon after, 
he reported that the nuns could take their furniture in. "I told him 
there was but little to be done, since we possessed nothing but two 
mattresses and a blanket. He must have been astonished. My 
companions were vexed at my telling him," 

" We went on some days with the mattresses and the blanket, 
without more to cover us, and one day we had not even a bit of wood 
enough to broil a sardine, when the Lord moved someone I know not 
whom to put in chapel for us a little faggot, with which we did better. 
At night we suffered a little from cold, for it was cold ; however, we 
covered ourselves with the blanket and with the serge cloaks which we 
wore over our habit, which have often been useful to us." 

St. Teresa adds that this extreme destitution taught them the 
sweetness of poverty ; and that when rich friends supplied all their 
needs, they felt very sad, and the sisters said : " What is the matter, 
Mother, that we seem to be no longer poor ? " 



ST. TERESA 147 

" From that time forward there grew within me the desire to be 
very poor." 

Cheerfulness in bearing hardships always appealed strongly to St. 
Teresa. On the journey to Seville it was the heat that tested theiir 
spirit. " I can tell you, sisters, that when the whole force of the sun 
was beating down on the carts [covered wagons] going into them 
was like going into a purgatory. What with sometimes thinking of 
hell, at other times feeling that they were doing and suffering something 
for God, the sisters travelled very contentedly and cheerfully." Of a 
good priest who accompanied her on a journey that was not only 
dangerous on account of precipices but most annoying because of the 
faithless and inefficient guides, she writes, " his goodness was so deeply 
rooted that I do not think I ever saw him out of temper : which made 
me marvel much and thank God that temptations have so little power 
when anyone is radically good." 

On another journey her ever faithful Father Julian comes in for a 
little bit of sarcasm, however. At Seville they found themselves mixed 
up in a great popular festival when they had hoped to hear Mass 
quietly, one Sunday morning, 

" When I saw this I was greatly concerned ; and to my thinking it 
would have been better to go away without hearing Mass than go down 
into such a hurly-burly. Father Julian thought not ; and as he is a 
theologian, we sisters all had to bow to his judgment ; for the rest of 
our escort perhaps would have followed mine, which would have been 
very improper." It would have been wiser, though, for the sight 
of their habits promptly raised a great commotion among the people. 
" I can tell you, daughters ... it was for me one of the worst moments 
that I have ever passed, for the uproar among the people was as if 
bulls had come into the church." They had to be locked into a chapel. 

It was always when her nuns were involved in dangers that she was 
troubled. They were truly like so many beloved children to her. In 
one place she writes, " I can tell you that, loving my daughters so 
deeply, it has not been my smallest cross to have to quit them when I 
went away from one place to another, especially when I thought that 
I should not return to see them, and I saw their great emotion and 
weeping : for though they are detached from other things, this 
detachment God has not given them perhaps in order to give me the 
keener pain. For no more am I detached from them. . . ." 

The dangers and discomforts of St. Teresa's journeys are beyond 
our imagining broiling heat, precipices, floods, and, almost worst 
of all, the inns. She would proceed with these journeys even though 
suffering from severe fever ; and some of the most trying of them 
took place when she was over* sixty. After describing the journey 
to Burgos, one of the most dangerous she ever undertook, she writes, 



148 GREAT CATHOLICS 

cc I myself was suffering from a very bad sore throat : the pain was so 
severe that it prevented me from entering as I otherwise should into the 
amusement of the adventures of the journey. " 

It is worth quoting some rather long passages on this question of 
suffering, for in them St. Teresa lets us into her confidence even more 
intimately than usual. 

The Bishop of Palencia had asked her to make two foundations, one 
at Palencia and one at Burgos. While at Valladolid she caught an 
epidemic that sounds very much like our influenza, especially in its 
after effects. The illness left her " with so little energy and feeling it 
so impossible to do anything," that she began to oppose the idea of 
these foundations. Looking back on it she says, 

" It frightens and grieves me and I often complain of it to our 
Lord to see what a great share the poor soul has in the weakness of 
the body ; so that it appears to have nothing to do but observe its rules, 
laid down according to its needs and sufferings. This seems to me one 
of the greatest troubles and miseries of this life, when the spirit is not 
so high as to master it. For I reckoned nothing to be ill and suffer 
great pain though it is a trial if the soul is vigorous ; for the soul 
knows that this comes from the hand of God and continues to praise 
Him. But to be on the one hand suffering and on the other inactive 
is a fearful state, especially for a soul which has experienced strong- 
desires never to rest inwardly or outwardly, but wholly to employ 
itself in the service of its great God. There is no help for it in this 
state but in patience and the confession of its own wretchedness, and in 
resigning itself to God's will, to be made use of as He pleases and for 
what ends He pleases. This was my condition at that time : for 
although I was already convalescent, yet I was so weak that I had lost 
even the confidence which God is wont to give me when I have to begin 
any of these foundations. Everything, seemed impossible to me. . . ." 

A few pages on she writes something that draws a useful distinction 
between the determination always to do God's will (which never 
falters in the saints) and the kind of zeal which may well wax and wane 
even in such dynamic saints as Teresa. 

" One day, while in doubt and not resolved to make either founda- 
tion, I besought our Lord, just after my Communion, to give me light, 
that I might do His will in everything : for my lukewarmness was not 
such as to make me falter one hair's breadth in this; desire." The words 
she heard in answer tell us the secret of her truly supernatural 
endurance. 

" Our Lord said to me, as it were reproaching me, * What dost thou 
fear ? When have I ever failed thee ? 'What I have always been, 
the same am I now. Thou must not fail to make these two founda- 
tions.' O Great God, how different are Thy words from human 



ST. TERESA 749 

words ! These words left me with such resolution and spirit that the 
whole world would not have been strong enough to oppose me ; and 
I began at once to set to work, and the Lord to give me the means." 

The foundation at Palencia was duly made ; and then came the 
journey to Burgos, the Provincial accompanying the party. There 
were bad floods. " It was really foolhardy to set out from Palencia 
when we did. It is true that our Lord had said to me that we could 
very well go, that I need not fear, for He would be with us. I did not 
tell this to the Father Provincial at the time ; but to me it gave 
assurances in the great difficulties and dangers which we met with." 
At a certain crossing called the Pontoons " the water was so high that 
the passage could not be seen or guessed at. ... To see ourselves go 
into a world of water without a way or a boat, even though our Lord 
had given me an assurance, I was not without fear. What then must 
my companions have felt. 35 It is interesting to see from these two 
passages that St. Teresa did not confide even to those intimate 
companions in their great danger the words of Christ which she had 
heard in prayer. From the frequency with which she quotes these 
in her writings one might have imagined her speaking of them. 

The terrible journey was rewarded by opposition being unexpectedly 
raised to the foundation. This makes St. Teresa write, " O my Lord, 
when anyone has done Thee some service, how certain it is to be at 
once repaid with a heavy cross ! And what a precious reward it is to 
those who truly love Thee, if once it is given us to realise its value ! 
But " (she adds with her usual candour) " that time we did not welcome 
our gain, because it seemed to make everything impossible." 

The difficulties were raised by the Archbishop himself. " The 
Archbishop always said that he desired the foundation more than 
anyone ; and I believe it : for he is such a good Christian that he 
would not say it if it were not true. His conduct did not show it ; for 
he imposed conditions which, to all appearance, we could not possibly 
fulfil : this was the deviPs device to prevent the foundation. But, 
O Lord, how well it is shown that Thou art mighty ! For the very 
means which he devised to stop it, Thou didst adopt for making it 
better. Blessed be Thou for ever ! " 

St. Teresa was, as usual, more concerned for others than for her own 
disappointment. " I . was grieved for the distress of the Father 
Provincial, and very sorry that he had come with us. ... While I 
was in this trouble . . . our Lord, without my being in prayer, said 
to me these words, ' Now, Teresa, stand firm V 

Several very trying months followed, during which various friends 
bestirred themselves on St. Teresa's behalf. A wealthy lady, Catalina 
de Tolosa, provided the endowment and constantly visited the nuns 
in the draughty attic where they were lodged. " And because of this 



150 GREAT CATHOLICS 

people kept continually saying disagreeable things to her. . . . She 
answered with a prudence which she possesses abundantly, and bore it 
so well that it showed God was teaching her the art of pleasing some 
and putting up with others, and was giving her courage to bear it all. 
How much more courage for great things have the servants of God 
than the high-born people who are not His servants ! not but that 
Catalina herself was of the purest descent ; for she is very much of a 
hidalgo." 

At last a house was found, with the help of a man who became a 
great friend of Teresa's the licentiate, Aguiar. ce We may truly say 
that, under God, it was he who gave us the house. A good head for 
business is worth much. His is first rate ; and God gave him the 
good will. 53 Of the house he helped to find she writes, " Well did our 
Lord repay us for what we had been through, by bringing us into a 
paradise for with its garden, its views, and its water it seems no 
less. . . . The Archbishop heard of it immediately, and was delighted 
that all had turned out so well, and put it down to his own obstinacy 
and quite rightly."' 

The convent was duly founded,- and a High Mass sung by a 
Dominican Prior, " with great magnificence of musicians, who came of 
their own accord. All our friends were rejoicing, and so was almost 
the whole city. . . . The joy of the good Catalina de Toloso and of the 
sisters was so great as to move my devotion." 

And then follow some words on enclosure that are well worth 
quoting. 

" No one who has not experienced it could believe the fullness of 
satisfaction we feel in these foundations when at length we find ourselves 
enclosed where no secular person may enter ; for however dearly we 
may love them, it does not prevent us from being delighted to find 
ourselves alone. It seems to me like as when a number of fishes are 
taken out of the river in a net, which cannot live unless they are put 
back into the water. So it is with souls which are used to living within 
the flowing waters of their Spouse : when they are drawn out thence 
and find themselves in the net of worldly affairs, they really do cease 
to live until they find themselves back again. This I see always in all 
these sisters." 

The quotations given will have helped the reader to form some idea 
of St. Teresa's personality her courage and childlike simplicity, her 
sympathy for others, her humour, her great practical good sense, and 
her almost audacious optimism. But perhaps the most striking effect 
of reading her story in her own words instead of in those of the 
reverential biographer, is that they make us feel, as no comment could 
do, the essential humility of great saints. 

Burgos was the last foundation St. Teresa made and she finished 



ST. TERESA 757 

writing the Fundaciones while she was there. Her last painful journey 
was soon to begin, and she had not many months more to live. 
Praying about her new family she heard the words : " c . . . Thou 
mayest safely depart. 5 I at once arranged to be going, for I felt I was 
no longer doing anything here, except enjoying myself in this house 
which I so much like ; while elsewhere, although with more difficulty, 
I might be doing more good." Words which are a fitting conclusion 
to this study, for they are almost the same as those with which we 
began, and they show us St Teresa in the same mind as when she set 
out on her great adventure, twenty years before. 



REV. FRANCIS HOLLAND, O.S.C. 



ST. CHARLES BORROMEO 



A.D. 



THE DIOCESE OF Milan numbers among its bishops thirty-five 
canonized saints. It claims as its principal patron the great St. 
Ambrose, Father and Doctor of the Universal Church. The blood of 
illustrious martyrs has sanctified its soil SS. Gervasius and Protasius, 
St. Victor, SS. Nabor and Felix, SS. Nazarius and Celsus, but St. 
Charles Borromeo is its special pride. In him it honours a pastor 
who not only restored its ancient glories but who, in the short 
space of twenty years, accomplished a work that has made him for all 
time the perfect pattern of the Christian episcopate. To his own 
flock at Milan and indeed to the whole Catholic world he is the living 
realization of the priestly ideal, a great bishop who in his days pleased 
God and was found just. 

He was born in. an age when some people used to say " If you want 
to go to Hell become a priest." It is hard for us to realise the dreadful 
state of religion in the early part of the sixteenth century. For 
instance, until St. Charles took possession of his See in 1565 no 
Archbishop had resided at Milan for eighty years. The non-residence 
of bishops was one of the crying abuses removed by the Council of 
Trent, as was also the plurality of benefices. No one seemed to mind 
if one prelate held the revenues of a dozen abbeys or if a mere child 
were head of a religious house. Charles himself was twelve years old 
when his uncle Giulio Cesare Borromeo handed over to him the 
Abbey of Arona with its revenue of thirteen thousand pounds a year 
and the boy startled his father by insisting that the money should be 
spent on the poor. As for the clergy, secular and regular, the lives 
of many of them were openly scandalous. They walked the streets 
in lay dress complete with sword and pistol. Churches were in a 
half-ruinous condition, the sacred vessels corroded with rust, the 
vestments moth-eaten. The Cathedral of Milan was a public 
thoroughfare for traders and their cattle. In country districts the 
priests lived in open concubinage and regarded Confession as necessary 
only for the laity. Many of them did not even know the formula of 
absolution. It is not surprising that many of the laity went to the 

152 



ST. CHARLES BORROMEO 155 

Sacraments once in ten or fifteen years., perhaps never at all, and that 
the poor did not know the Pater or Ave or even how to make the 
Sign of the Cross. Religious houses, monasteries and convents were 
equally lax, if not more so. When afterwards as Archbishop Charles 
tried to reform the Fratres Urniliati, three members of the Order who 
were actually rectors of churches, hired a deacon to assassinate him. 
The attempt failed, but not through any fault on the part of the 
brethren ! 

In sharp contrast to all this spiritual squalor the Borromean house- 
hold was a model of solid piety. Count Gilbert, the father of Charles, 
used to recite the Divine Office daily, went to the Sacraments every 
week an extraordinary thing in those days and carried the virtue 
of almsgiving almost to excess. Countess Margaret, sister of John 
Angelo Cardinal de Medici, afterwards Pope Pius IV, was a devout 
Christian woman. She died, however, when Charles was nine years 
old. The territory by Lake Maggiore, the Castle of Arona and the 
palace in Milan formed the family estate, to which Frederick, being 
the elder son, was heir. To Charles there were only two possible 
careers, the Army or the Church. He had been tonsured at the age 
of seven and so was technically a cleric. At twelve as we have seen, 
he was Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Arona, Two years later 
he entered the University of Pavia. Intellectually he was not brilliant, 
but he had a tremendous capacity for hard work, not at all a bad asset 
in a young man with ambition, especially when coupled with noble 
birth and powerful family influence. His career was assured. At 
twenty-one he was a Doctor of Civil and Canon Law. But there 
was more to come. At the end of December, 1 559, his mother's brother 
ascended the Papal Throne. Charles came to Rome for the Coronation 
and the very day after his arrival was appointed Protonotary- Apostolic 
and Administrator of the Archdiocese of Milan. Dignities and offices 
began to fall like rain. In quick succession he became Legate of 
Bologna, Ancona and the Marches, which brought a handsome revenue. 
He received also an annual grant of a thousand crowns from the diocese 
of Ferrara. On January 3ist, 1560, the Pope created him Cardinal 
Deacon of the title of SS. Vito and Modesto ; then Papal Secretary of 
State, Grand Penitentiary, Protector of Portugal, Lower Germany, the 
Catholic Swiss Cantons, the Orders of Franciscans, Carmelites, Umiliati 
and others. Charles Borromeo was at this time just over twenty-two 
years of age. 

It would be difficult to imagine a more unpromising preparation 
for sainthood. Yet the signs had not been wanting. Pius IV, with his 
Lombard commonsense, his shrewd judgment of men born of a wide 
experience of many countries, had not acted without knowledge of his 
nephew's character. The stocky, round figure of the Pope was a 



I54 GREAT CATHOLICS 

familiar sight in Rome striding beside that of the tali young Cardinal 
with the blue eyes and big, nose and the rather pale smooth face, for, 
as the servants complained, he scarcely gave himself time to eat or 
sleep. The talk was on one topic, reform and the necessity of re- 
opening the Council of Trent. The Council had lingered with many 
interruptions since its first session fifteen years ago (December i3th, 
J 545)- Four or five times the sittings had been suspended, once with 
an interval of four years. It had last met at Trent in 1551, ten years 
ago, and the obstacles in the way of a resumption were almost 
insuperable. To Charles as Secretary of State the Pope entrusted the 
work of reassembling the Council and of superintending its actions. 
Though devoid of any diplomatic experience he succeeded in over- 
coming the objections of Germany, France, Spain and Switzerland 
and at last in January, 1562, the Council, consisting of two Cardinals, 
one hundred and six bishops, four mitred abbots and four generals of 
religious orders met at Trent. The deliberations lasted almost two 
years and during this time the whole guidance of the Holy See over the 
Council passed through Borromeo's hands. Thirty-five thousand 
letters written in his long sloping hand bear witness to days and nights 
of restless labour, to infinite patience and tact and an intense 
Application not only to large issues, but to minutest details. The 
confirmation of the Council by the Constitution Benedictus Detts in 
January, 1564, and the publication of the Catechism of the Council 
of Trent brought Charles's career in Rome to an end. On the death 
of his elder brother he had had himself ordained priest, much against 
the advice of his uncle who was anxious for the Borromean line. 
He was consecrated Archbishop of Milan on the feast of St. Ambrose, 
1563, and after the death of Pius IV three years later, persuaded the 
new Pope, St. Pius V, to allow him to reside in Milan among the flock 
he so ardently longed to serve. He had visited his diocese a few 
months previously and during a stay of some nine weeks had managed 
to hold his first Provincial Council. The Conclave had necessitated 
his return to Rome, but in April, 1566, he re-entered Milan. Thus at 
the age of twenty-seven he began to exercise the fulness of the Pastoral 
Office. 

The diocese was one of the largest in Italy, extending over a hundred 
miles on its northern side towards Germany and comprising the Duchy 
of Monteferrato, parts of Venice and Switzerland. Southwards it 
stretched to the shores of the Mediterranean. It contained two 
thousand two hundred churches, three thousand clergy, one hundred 
communities of men and ninety convents of women. Twenty of the 
latter Charles subsequently suppressed. All told there were some 
six hundred thousand souls under his care. 

For the remaining eighteen years of his life the driving force behind 



ST. CHARLES BORROMEO 755 

all his activities was bis high ideal of the priestly state. He clearly 
saw that our great High Priest in laying upon the Apostles His own 
priesthood imposed also the obligation of walking in His footsteps and 
imitating Him ; that His Priests were to be living images of Himself, 
other Christs manifesting His own Divine perfection, communicating 
it to others, perpetuating it to the end of the world, and that con- 
sequently the priesthood is not a state instrumental to the acquisition 
of perfection, but of its very nature imposes the obligation of exercising 
a Chris tlike perfection already presupposed. All this Charles perceived 
with a wisdom and a discernment that was the fruit of a growing union 
with God in prayer. His life, in public and private had always been 
blameless. Even the sharp-witted Romans, keen critics of clerical 
conduct had had no fault to find. But for some time, especially since 
the death of his brother, he had begun to devote himself more and more 
to the service of God. He had made over to the Sovereign Pontiff 
the revenues of twelve benefices, resigned the Principality of Oria with 
its yearly income of ten thousand ducats, bestowed the Marquisate of 
Romagnano on one of his relatives and sold his three armed galleys 
and even the valuable furniture he had brought from Rome. The 
proceeds of the sales went to the poor. His object was to free himself 
from everything that would in any way interfere with the exercise 
of the pastoral office. In contrast with this vision of the exalted dignity 
and dreadful responsibilities of the priesthood he saw how many 
bishops and priests had abandoned the high standard of their state. 
The light that was to shine before men was rapidly becoming dim, the 
salt was losing its savour, and the world in consequence was threatened 
with ruin. With all the energies of his mind and heart Charles 
determined to restore to the priesthood its light and savour that men 
might live enlightened by its brightness, seasoned by its purity. This 
determination found its concrete expression in the six Provincial 
Councils and the eleven Diocesan Synods which he held in the course 
of his episcopate, the record of which is contained in the Acts of the 
Church of Milan, a monumental collection of ecclesiastical and 
spiritual legislation unique in the history of episcopal government. 
These Acts include also his minute regulations for numerous Confra- 
ternities and especially for the Congregation of Oblates of St. Ambrose, 
rules for his own household, edicts on the discipline of clergy and laity 
in general, on the manner of observing Feasts, Vigils, Synods and so 
forth, instructions as to preaching, administration of the Sacraments, 
fabric of Churches, etc. In fact Charles effected nothing less than a 
precise and perfect application of the decrees of the Council of Trent 
to the whole complex system of provincial and diocesan administration. 
The spirit which animated his reforms is manifest in the address 
which the young archbishop made to his suffragans and clergy at the 



I5 S GREAT CATHOLICS 

second Provincial Council : " Fathers, this is our duty and our office, 
placed as we are in the exalted seat of episcopal dignity, to look out 
for dangers as from a watch-tower, and to repel them when they 
threaten those who are resting under our charge and care. As parents 
we ought to have a fatherly oversight of our sons ; as pastors never to 
take our eyes off the sheep which Jesus Christ has delivered by his 
holy death from the mouth of hell ; and if any are being corrupted by 
the impurity of vice, to heal them with the sharpness of salt ; if any 
be wandering in moral darkness, we ought to hold the light before 
them ; for as the Supreme Creator of all things, when in the beginning 
He made the Heavens which we behold, adorned them with a 
multitude of stars illuminated by the splendour of the sun to shine 
by night upon the earth, so in the spiritual renewal of this world He 
has placed in the Church, as in the firmament of Heaven, prophets 
and apostles, pastors and doctors who, like stars illuminated by the 
light of Christ Our Lord, the everlasting Sun, preside over the 
darkness of this clouded world, to drive away darkness from the 
minds of men by the splendour of a noble and holy discipline." 

It is impossible in such a brief sketch to give an adequate idea of 
the difficulties with which Charles had to contend in carrying out his 
work of reform. There were three principal sources of opposition, 
the clergy, the civil authorities of Milan and the people. The first 
two were by far the most troublesome. The majority of his colleagues 
in the episcopate had long been accustomed to reside at a distance 
from their Sees and to live in princely fashion on the revenues of their 
numerous benefices. One bishop in answer to Charles's demand that 
he should return to his See declared that he would not have enough 
to do. The lesser clergy, secular and regular, were in a worse 
condition since to the scandal of non-residence many added that of 
flagrant immorality. On one occasion the Archbishop met with 
physical violence, the Canons of La Scala barricading the doors against 
him and firing ori the Archiepiscopal cross. Again, but for Divine 
intervention he would have been murdered at the altar by the Fratres 
UmiliatL The great plague broke out in 1576 and hundreds of the 
clergy fled in panic, leaving the stricken populace without Mass or 
Sacraments, Charles gathered around him the few priests who were 
willing to stay and face the danger. It was the example of his own life 
and character that gave them courage and where he led they followed, 
ready if necessary to lay down their lives. He supplemented the little 
band with priests from religious Orders, principally Capuchins from the 
Swiss Cantons, and bishop and priests together, in perfect unity of 
self-oblation, gave themselves as living sacrifice to the service of their 
Divine Master. In this voluntary and complete offering of self, inspired 
by the love of souls for God's sake, Charles saw the return of the old 



ST. CHARLES BORROMEO 757 

ideal of sacerdotal perfection, the ideal portrayed by the Good 
Shepherd Who did not hesitate to offer His life for the sheep and Who 
requires a like offering of those on whom He stamps the sacred character 
of His priesthood. It was a renewal of the law of the priestly life, a 
new stirring of the vital impulse inherent in the divinely instituted 
organism which was to work on the souls of men, assimilating them to 
itself, transforming them into the likeness of its own Divine Exemplar. 

In the year after the plague, 1578, Charles founded his Congregation 
of Oblates, a body of secular priests who, as the name implies, offered 
themselves by a voluntary promise to obey him and his successors in 
the service of the diocese. The Congregation was the logical outcome 
of his deep, penetrating vision of the relationship between the Pastoral 
Office and the Priesthood in the universal cure of souls. The universal 
cure of souls demands an intimate mutual relationship between the 
priesthood and the episcopate ; on the part of the priesthood, of 
willing obedience and close personal co-operation ; on the part of the 
episcopate, of prudent guidance and fatherly solicitude. It is therefore 
a relationship of pastoral authority and priestly obedience based on a 
common duty and responsibility towards the flock of Jesus Christ. 
Charles, in forming his new Congregation, impressed on it this 
distinctive character, that the priestly perfection of its members, 
fostered and preserved by community life and rule, should be exercised 
in the diocesan cure of souls under the government and direction of 
the bishop of the diocese. The Oblates by virtue of their act of 
oblation, which if necessary could be confirmed by a simple vow, were 
thus united with the Bishop as members of the body are united to the 
head, sharing in his spirit, his zeal and his desire for the glory of God, 
ready at any time to undertake any mission he might entrust to them. 
Charles instituted societies or consortia of Oblates throughout the arch- 
diocese.- These consortia consisted of groups of diocesan priests directed 
by a president who in turn was responsible to the Provost of St. 
Sepulchro, and he to the Archbishop. Thus the salt regained its 
savour, the light of the priesthood was rekindled and to-day, after 
almost four hundred years the spirit of Charles Borromeo still animates 
with undiminished vigour the Church and clergy of Milan. 

Before mentioning the difficulties Charles had to encounter with 
the Spanish Authorities difficulties which lasted almost to the 
end of his life it would be well to group together his other pastoral 
achievements which have left their mark on not only Milan, but 
on the Universal Church. His first care on entering the diocese was 
to re-organise the education and training of young men for the 
priesthood in accordance with the new decrees of the Council of 
Trent. Three things he had to provide educated and cultured 
professors experienced in parochial administration and well equipped 



/jS GREAT CATHOLICS 

with the necessary theological learning ; a sufficient number of priests 
to fill the numerous vacancies caused by the abolition of pluralities ; 
and lastly, adequate means for the support of the system. In the 
diocese of Milan alone he succeeded in establishing six seminaries 
fully staffed and endowed, accommodating over seven hundred 
students. He also founded the Jesuit College at Brera (1573) and the 
Swiss College in Milan (1579) which provided a native clergy for the 
Orisons and proved as important an outpost of the Faith for 
Switzerland as was the College of Douai for England. This seminary 
system, planned strictly according to the mind of the Council of Trent, 
was the pioneer of the great movement which renewed the life of the 
Church throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and still 
remains the standard pattern for the formative education of the 
clergy. 

Charles was responsible for another institution which has had a 
world-wide influence on the Church. Within the first year of his 
episcopate he began the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (April, 
1566)5 an organisation of lay catechists or pescatori as they were called, 
who undertook the work of instructing children and preparing them 
for the Sacraments. The confraternity developed under his personal 
direction and at the time of his death there were seven hundred and 
forty schools, over three thousand catechists and forty thousand 
children under instruction. The modern Sunday school and the 
Confraternity of Christian Doctrine recommended to all parishes 
by the present Holy Father are direct descendants of this first 
confraternity of St. Charles. 

The reform was not confined to the secular clergy and the laity 
but embraced also the religious orders. With tremendous difficulty 
he succeeded in uniting two branches of the Franciscans, the Amadei 
and Chiareni, and joined them to the general body of the Order. He 
also compelled two other branches, the Conventuals and the 
Observantines to give up their private property and return to the 
spirit of poverty in accordance with the rule. The Umiliati, after 
several attempts at reform, were finally suppressed by St. Pius V. 
Charles obtained permission from the Pope to use six of their houses for 
his own foundations and to apply the revenues of several others to the 
maintenance of the Cathedral. He had a profound admiration for 
the Society of Jesus, which was as yet in its infancy, and introduced the 
fathers into his diocese. They became the first directors of his 
seminaries. He also developed the Congregation of Barnabite fathers 
and employed them in various offices of the diocese, chiefly as 
missioners and preachers. 

Switzerland, of which Charles was Apostolic Visitor, claimed a large 
share of his attention. Though technically the northern parts of 



ST. CHARLES BORROMEO 159 

Switzerland lay within the jurisdiction of the .Archbishops of Milan, 
in actual practice they had been for years without any form of 
ecclesiastical government, and were consequently in an appalling 
state of spiritual disorder. Clerics bought and sold their benefices 
with impunity, engaged in secular trade and business and were ignorant 
of the most elementary functions of their sacred office. The Blessed 
Sacrament was treated with shocking irreverence and the churches 
were scarcely recognisable as places of worship. Charles tactfully 
invited the cantonal authorities to co-operate with him in restoring 
order and to his surprise, the invitation was well received. Envoys 
were sent to accompany him in his visitation of the three valleys and 
backed by their authority he succeeded in removing the greater abuses 
and laid the foundation of lasting reform based on the Tridentine 
decrees. He made a second visitation in 1570 and so great was his 
reputation for sanctity that even the Swiss Protestants, overcoming their 
natural antipathy to a Catholic bishop, paid him the tribute of an 
official welcome. 

The Milanese authorities, however, were not inclined to be friendly. 
The city at this period was under Spanish domination, with a Governor 
appointed by the King. Trouble broke out soon after Charles held 
his first Provincial Council. The Senate objected to the punishment 
of lay offenders by the ecclesiastical courts and accused the Archbishop 
of trespassing on the royal prerogative. Both sides appealed to the 
Pope and in the interim the difficulty of the situation was aggravated 
by a savage attack on the Archbishop's sheriff. Charles excom- 
municated the instigators, including the chief of police, and the Senate 
in revenge, organised a campaign of malicious slander, accusing him 
of personal ambition and hypocrisy. A general edict was passed 
instituting severe penalties against all who should infringe in any 
way on the jurisdiction of the King, the effect of which was to bring the 
machinery of all the ecclesiastical courts to a standstill, and the 
Governor even threatened to expel the Cardinal from Milan. Charles 
laid the facts before the King of Spain, who, much to the Senate's 
annoyance, decided in his favour. The Governor also received a 
sharp reprimand from St. Pius V. The Pope died in May, 1572, and 
Charles spent six months in Rome for the Conclave, On his return 
there was a fresh outburst of hostility. The new Governor, Requesens, 
had at one time been a personal friend of the Cardinal, but now, 
anxious for popular favour, he published some letters from the Court 
of Spain containing prohibitions extremely damaging to the authority 
of the Church. The letters had been written during the previous 
controversy, but the late Governor had prudently kept them secret. 
With their publication the ancient hatred flared up again and Charles 
vainly tried to persuade Requesens to withdraw them. Eventually 



i6o GREAT CATHOLICS 

he was compelled to excommunicate the Governor, who In retaliation 
forbade the meetings of religious confraternities without the presence 
of a magistrate, seized the Castle of Arona, Charles's family stronghold, 
and placed a guard around the archiepiscopal palace. The King of 
Spain eventually put an end to the affair by removing the Governor 
to Flanders. His successor made some rather feeble and stupid 
attempts to renew it. He sent an embassy to Rome to complain of 
the Archibishop's harshness in forbidding carnivals and jousts in 
Lent and ordered a carnival to be held in front of the Cathedral one 
Sunday morning while Charles was celebrating Mass. But the people 
had by this time learnt to appreciate the true worth of their pastor. 
They boycotted the carnival and packed the cathedral to the doors. 
Shortly afterwards the Governor fell ill and Charles, who was absent 
in Brescia, hastened to his bedside and administered the Last Sacra- 
ments. He died reconciled to God, and with his death the long- 
standing quarrel came to an end. It had lasted over twelve years 
and never once had Charles failed in patience or charity even when 
compelled to enforce his authority by extreme measures. It is 
interesting to note that he had a great regard for St. John Fisher, the 
martyred bishop of Rochester, and found in his heroic sacrifice in 
defence of the Holy See the inspiration of his own undaunted courage 
throughout this long and bitter trial. 

One must read the life of Charles Borromeo in order to appreciate 
his character. It is a life full of varied incident, of intense restless 
activity among men and affairs of momentous import in the world 
of his time. Princes and statesmen and great ecclesiastics, he knew 
them ail and they knew him. Had he wished to do so he could have 
lived according to the prevailing standards, no better and certainly 
no worse than many of this contemporaries. There would have been 
few indeed to blame him. Instead he became a saint, his sanctity 
grew and flourished not in the calm shelter of the cloister but in the 
turbulent atmosphere of an evil and corrupt society. It was of that 
highest type which unites the inner life of contemplation with 
tremendous external activity, the pure unselfish love of God expressing 
itself in a complete and absolute oblation of himself to the apostolate 
of souls. When but a young man of twenty-five he seriously thought of 
resigning the cardinalate and of retiring to a monastery there to live, 
as he put it, " as if only God and myself were in the world." God's 
will seemed otherwise, so he determined that if he must live in the 
world he would never be of it. He was a firm believer in the principle 
that the spiritual life admits of no stagnation, that the soul must ever 
make fresh advances in the way of perfection. So as the years went 
by and the cares and anxieties of his office continually multiplied he 
gradually increased his austerities. During the last decade of his life 



ST. CHARLES BORROMEO 161 

he took but one meal a day, if meal it could be called, for it consisted 
almost entirely of bread and water and sometimes a few dried figs. 
He rarely slept longer than four hours and on the occasion of the 
consecration of an altar or a church, the translation of relics or any 
important liturgical function would spend the whole of the previous 
night before the Blessed Sacrament. Every minute of the day was 
devoted to some part of the administration of his vast diocese planning 
and organising Provincial Councils and Diocesan Synods, founding 
convents, religious houses, seminaries and colleges, supervising the 
discipline of his metropolitan cathedral, visiting the parochial and 
collegiate churches of the archdiocese which numbered over two 
thousand, and also conducting canonical visitations of the sixteen 
dioceses subject to the metropolitan See of Milan. From his earliest 
years he had trained himself in the hard school of penance and prayer, 
merciless to his own lower nature, but gentle and sympathetic to the 
weakness of others. This complete mastering of himself was the 
secret of his power of ruling and guiding men, of his magnetic influence 
over the hearts of his people. Himself immovable, resting on the 
sure foundation of unshakable faith, he moved others, used them for 
God's service, attracted them to himself that he might bind them more 
closely to God, fought and defeated them when they opposed the work 
of God. Intellectually he had the large vision and breadth of concept 
one associates with the mind of a great architect, or a great legislator, 
a mind clear, concise, direct, spacious and essentially simple in creation 
and construction, intensely practical in application. The force and 
determination of his personality were softened by an extraordinary 
tenderness, often manifested in a hundred little ways. Sometimes 
when on a visitation he would sleep on the floor or a table, rather than 
a servant should go without a bed. His money he kept in three 
purses, one for household expenses and two for the poor. During 
the great plague he would vest in full pontificals and walk from door 
to door, baptising, confirming and administering the Last Sacraments, 
handling pitiful wrecks of humanity with tenderest care while his 
servants looked on in horror from the street. Or he would often be 
seen sitting by the wayside teaching little children to pray. One of 
the last acts of hib life was to catechise the boatmen who rowed him 
across Lake Maggiore when he returned, a dying man, to Milan. 
In appearance he was above the average height, his frame proportioned 
and well knit though somewhat stooped in later years through weariness 
and lack of nourishment. His forehead was broad and calm, the face 
long- and rather narrow with blue eyes, large aquiline nose and 
sensitive mouth. The whole impression was that of interior peace, 
of quiet strength tempered by a winning kindliness. 
The end came on November grd, 1584. He was forty-six years old 



i6s GREAT CATHOLICS 

and had been a bishop for over twenty years. He died worn out with 
labour at an age when most men are coming to their prime. His 
words at the hour of his death were symbolic of a life of perfect oblation 
in the spirit of the Incarnate Word at His coming " Ecce venio, 
behold I come." 



THE REV. LEWIS WATT, S.J., B.Sc. 



FRANCISCO SUAREZ 



A.D, 15*481617 

ON A CERTAIN Sunday in November, 1613, a Protestant minister 
preached at Paul's Cross a sermon against those who had incurred 
the displeasure of King James I by refusing to admit royal absolutism, 
and threw into the fire which had been kindled there a number of 
their books, including one which had particularly annoyed the King, 
the Defensio Fidei Catholicae by a professor of theology at the University 
of Goimbra, Father Francisco Suarez of the Society of Jesus. Not 
content with this symbolical attack on the author, James set himself 
the task of having him repudiated and condemned by other govern- 
ments. In January of the following year Sir John Digby reported from 
Madrid to his royal master that, in accordance with instructions 
received, he had requested the King of Spain, Philip III, to testify 
publicly his disapprobation of the book. In consequence of this request, 
a committee was set up in Spain to examine the doctrine defended by* 
Suarez, and after some little time reported that it was true and accepted 
by the doctors of the Church ,* moreover, that the book contained 
nothing which was injurious or out of place with regard to the King of 
England. The Spanish Ambassador in England was accordingly 
directed to make this known to James I, and to declare to him how 
greatly Phillip III desired his security and happiness adding that the 
best means of obtaining them was to show much confidence in his 
Catholic subjects. James met with greater success in France, where 
Huguenots and Gallicans were united in their hatred of the Society of 
Jesus. In 1613 the French ambassador in London and the English 
ambassador in Paris were urged by him to press for the condemnation 
of the book which had so excited him. It was some months before it 
found its way into France, imported from the Frankfurt Fair by 
Huguenot booksellers, but when it did arrive the attack upon it began 
immediately in the Parlement, with the ulterior object of discrediting the 
Society in France, and culminated in another public cremation of the 
Defensio. The French hastened to announce this to James I, who was, 
naturally, overjoyed. The Archbishop of Canterbury asked the Anglican 
clergy to make the fact of the French condemnation known as widely 



FRANCISCO SUARE2 /<% 

as possible, and the Puritans suggested public rejoicings. The Spanish 
ambassador, on the other hand, was very uneasy, seeing a threat to 
Spain in the Anglo-French entente against Suarez and his doctrine, and 
Pope Paul V strongly protested to the French government against the 
decree of the Parlement. Suarez himself published a criticism of that 
decree. 

To understand all this European turmoil caused by the publication 
of a book which did no more than reassert, in a systematic and logical 
way, traditional Catholic theology and political philosophy, it is 
necessary to bear in mind not only the religious situation of the times 
(Protestant against Catholic, the Kirk against the Church of England, 
Galilean against Jesuit) but also the political views and ambitions of 
James I. Perhaps in reaction against the very democratic teaching of 
George Buchanan, who had been his tutor, the King constituted 
himself the official spokesman of royal absolutism and the champion of 
kings against ecclesiastical claims, whether presbyterian or papist. Both 
in Basilikon Down and in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, which the 
royal author published in 1599, he maintained the divine right of kings, 
in the sense that all rulers receive their political authority from God 
directly to Whom alone they are responsible for their actions, and that 
the duty of all subjects is entire obedience to the will of their ruler, 
their constitutional rights (if any) being mere concessions granted by 
him. This thesis involved James in a controversy with St. Robert 
Bellarmine, a controversy which was intensified and embittered by the 
anti-Catholic Oath imposed by Parliament in 1606, after the Gun- 
powder Plot. This Oath, which was condemned by Pope Paul V, was 
defended by James I in his Triplici Nodo (1608), revised and republished 
in the following year to meet Bellarmine's criticisms, only to meet with 
more destructive criticism by the famous Cardinal. The central point 
of the controversv was the power claimed by the Popes to intervene in 
civil matters when the spiritual welfare of souls was at stake, but a 
discussion of this point leads inevitably to an examination of the 
foundations of political authority. Suarez was drawn into the contro- 
versy, reluctantly, at the desire of the Pope, but his health and his other 
occupations made his preparation of the reply to the King a slow affair, 
so that its composition, revision at Rome and printing took three years. 
The news that Suarez was at work upon it came to the ears of James I, 
who instructed his agent at Madrid, Sir John Digby, to send it to him 
as soon as possible. Digby's letters to his Sovereign during the years 
1612-13 frequently refer to the book, the first part of which he forwarded 
in January, 1612, and the second part in February. In June, 1613, he 
mentions that he is sending the fifth part, and that there only remains 
to be sent the sixth part. In the autumn James received the entire 
work, which was entitled Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae 



iGS GREAT CATHOLICS 

Sectae Errores. 1 The impression it made on him is sufficiently shown 
by the public burnings of the book already described. He also had 
it " refuted " in a public disputation at the University of Oxford. 

The Defensio Fidei is a large book, far too long to summarise here. In 
the Paris edition of 1859 it covers more than seven hundred pages 
printed in double columns. Its first two parts are devoted to a defence 
of the Catholic Church against the Anglicans ; the third, which contains 
the traditional Catholic theory of political power, discusses the authority 
of the Roman Pontiff and of secular rulers ; the fourth treats of clerical 
immunities ; the fifth (since James had called the Pope anti-Christ) 
deals with that title ; and the sixth is an examination of the Oath 
of 1606, 

It will not be out of place to give a short account of the political 
theory which Suarez opposed to James's defence of the divine right of 
kings. This theory was stated so clearly and expounded so system- 
atically by Suarez that it is sometimes known as the Suarezian theory. 
Such a title, however complimentary to Suarez, does less than justice 
to the theory, for it seems to suggest that he was the first to put it 
forward ; indeed, some writers, even Catholics, have made this 
suggestion a statement. But, whether suggestion or statement, it is 
completely erroneous as Professor O'Rahilly has demonstrated by 
quoting sixty Catholic authors who expounded and maintained the 
theory before Suarez wrote. 2 Bellarmine defended it, and there is no 
reason to doubt that Suarez is correct in saying that it was the 
traditionally accepted theory in the Catholic Church. It was set 
forth by Suarez not merely in the Defensio, where he uses it to refute 
the exaggerated claims made by the King for civil rulers, but (and even 
more completely) in his great treatise on Law, De Legibus, which, though 
not published till 1612, contained the matter of the course of lectures 
which he delivered at Coimbra University from 1601 to 1603. 

Historically, Suarez explains, civil society (or " the State " in one of 
the meanings of this term) developed from the family. The multi- 
plication of families and their need for mutual assistance and co- 
operation disclosed the necessity for some greater society with a wider 
purpose than the family naturally possesses. Juridically, this society, 
civil society, comes into existence as and when families agree, explicitly 
or implicitly, to form it. It is, like the family, a " natural " society, 
one which the nature of man postulates as a condition of a satisfactory 
human life. It is willed by God, the author of nature. Now it is 
impossible for any society to achieve Its purpose if there be no person 

1 The history of the events narrated above is told more fully by Fr. J. Brodrick 
in his Life and Works of Blessed Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J. (Burns Oates and 
Washbourne) and by Pere R. de Scorailles in his Francois Suarez. (Lethielleux) . 

a Studies, March, 1921. 



FRANCISCO SUAREZ 167 

(physical or moral) vested with the authority necessary to regulate 
and co-ordinate the activities of its members with a view to the attain- 
ment of the good of the society. In the case of a natural society (family 
or State) that authority is willed by God, since, willing the society, 
He must will all that it requires for its existence and progress ; and the 
extent of that authority will be measured by the natural purpose of the 
society. It is perfectly true, then, to say that political authority comes 
from God, and, indeed, Scripture confirms this. But there is the further 
question to be considered, on whom does God confer political authority ? 
He has, of course, a perfect right to select some individual and confer 
it upon him, manifesting His will that this individual shall be ruler, as 
with Saul or David. But what if there is no such explicit manifestation 
of the divine will ? In such a case, replies Suarez, political authority 
is vested in the community as a whole, as a corpus rnysticum, for there 
is no particular person (physical or moral) within the community 
unmistakably provided by nature with political sovereignty. It should 
be noted that, according to Suarez, political authority is not the gift 
of the members of the community to the community as a whole. It 
includes powers which, as individuals, they never possessed. Its 
direct source is God Himself. 1 This contention, apart from other 
points, is enough to differentiate Suarez's theory from other theories 
which bear a superficial resemblance to it, such as that of Rousseau. 
A further important difference between Suarez and Rousseau lies in 
their attitudes towards the transfer of sovereignty by the community 
to some particular person (physical or moral). For Rousseau, the 
sovereignity of the people is inalienable ; for Suarez, it is not. He 
maintains that the community may, for the furtherance of the general 
welfare, set up any form of government apt for this purpose. It may 
(explicitly or tacitly) transfer its sovereignty to a monarch, or vest it in 
a group ; if it does so, a contractual relationship arises between 
sovereign and community, the former being bound to govern in the 
interests of the subjects, the latter being bound to obey the ruler within 
the limits of his authority. These limits are set by the natural purpose 
of the State, viz. to secure and foster the temporal welfare of its members, 
and by any conditions limiting the transfer of authority to him. Con- 
sequently the ruler is not empowered to make such laws as he pleases, 
without regard to the general welfare of the community, nor are 
subjects bound to submit to his arbitrary will. Particularly in the 
matter of religion he may not regard himself as the spiritual head of 
the commonwealth, a position which rightfully belongs to the Roman 

1 Gierke's accusation that ** in defending such a paradox even the ability of a 
Suarez could only produce an ingenious jeu d'esprit " has been rebutted by Professor 
Ernest Barker. See Natural Law and the Theory of Society, by Otto Gierke ; translated 
by Ernest Barker (Cambridge University Press) ; Vol I, p. 46 and Vol. II, pp. 241, 243. 



j68 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Pontiff. Suarez thus rejects the doctrine of the divine right of kings 
in the sense in which James maintained it But on the other hand 
he denies that civil authority is derived from the Pope. In purely 
civil and political matters (outside the States of the Church) the Pope 
has no jurisdiction, though he -is entitled to intervene in them when the 
good of souls is at stake. In other words, Suarez agrees with 
Bellarmine that the Pope's jurisdiction in the temporal affairs of the 
non-papal States is indirect only. 1 Put in the language of to-day, 
this amounts to saying that, while sovereign States are politically 
independent in all purely temporal matters, they must look to the 
Christian Church for guidance when religion or morality are concerned, 
and that they exceed their proper function and authority when^ they 
enact legislation which conflicts with the teaching of the Christian 
Church, The world is coming to see, in this thesis, a safeguard of 
liberty against totalitarianism, but it is not surprising that to James I, 
holding the views he did, it was entirely repugnant. It is rather 
piquant to find a Spanish theologian defending a reasonable liberty of 
citizens against an English king who stood for absolutism. 

The importance of Suarez as a jurist must be pleaded in excuse for 
this long account of his controversy with James I. Much could still be 
said under this heading, and would have to be said did this chapter 
profess to be an adequate exposition of Suarez's philosophy of law. 2 
But Suarez was much more than a jurist. He was an eminent 
philosopher and theologian, and had a very distinguished career as 
professor at Rome and in the Iberian Peninsula. He is one of the 
leading figures of the great age of Spanish theology. As a preacher he 
did not prove a success, both because he carried into the pulpit the 
expository technique of the professor and because his voice was early 
weakened by an illness following on his efforts to evangelize the country 
districts round Segovia, where he taught philosophy from 1571 to 1574. 
His vocation was to be that of a lecturer and writer ; much more of 
the former and much less of the latter than he would have chosen, had 
he been his own master. We have twenty-three large volumes from his 
pen (ten being published after his death) ; yet he was forty-two years 
old before he published anything, having then been engaged in study 
and teaching for twenty-five years. For long he held the principal 
chair of theology at the University of Coimbra ; and previous to that 

1 An interesting discussion of this question will be found in Rrodrick, op* cit. Vol. I, 

ch. 12. 

2 On Suarez's doctrines in the field of international law, see The Catholic Conception 
of International Law, by Dr. J. B. Scott, Trustee and Secretary of the Carnegie Endow- 
ment and President of the American Society of International Law ; and The 
Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations, by John Eppstein (Burns Gates & Washbourne). 
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is soon to publish a selection 
from Suarez's juristic writings with introduction and notes. 



FRANCISCO SUAREZ 169 

appointment (forced on him by Philip III) he was professor of theology 
in the Colleges of the Society of Jesus at Valladolid, Segovia, Avila, 
Alcala and Rome. 

It is a remarkable fact that in his oral teaching he dispensed with 
notes, speaking in his rather weak voice with great clarity of enunciation 
and lucidity of thought. In those days text-books were unknown, and 
in the opinion of Suarez there was a real danger lest those who attended 
lectures should find, at the end of their course, that they retained very 
little of what they had heard unless the professor spoke sufficiently 
slowly for them to copy down what he said. Undoubtedly the method 
of dictation has its disadvantages, but the ability to take intelligent 
longhand notes of a lecture delivered with conversational rapidity is 
possessed by few, nor can the professor be sure that his audience is able 
to write some form of shorthand. The pedagogical difficulty is, then, 
a very real one. At Alcala and at Goimbra Suarez found the method 
of dictation in general use, and he followed it himself. It seems also to 
have been the method he employed in preparing his theological 
works, for his biographers make reference to his dictating to secretaries 
(chosen from among his students). Some indeed, speak of his 
dictating to several secretaries together and on different topics. 
In a letter to the General of the Society of Jesus, in which he defends 
himself against certain attacks that had been made against his doctrine, 
he says that his method of teaching differs from that of most other 
professors of his day. They were accustomed, he says, to proceed on 
traditional lines and along well-beaten tracks, handing on the teaching 
they had themselves received, whereas for his part he tried to go down 
to the roots of each question in order to discover the truth. This 
gave a misleading appearance of novelty to his doctrine, a novelty 
which is necessarily suspect in a professor of Catholic dogmatic 
theology. The most common accusation brought against him, then as 
now, was that he departed from the doctrine of the great master St. 
Thomas Aquinas. How far this charge can be justified is a matter 
which cannot be examined here, though it is necessary to remark that 
he himself considered his views on all major points to be identical with 
those of the great Dominican, whom the Society of Jesus had officially 
chosen as its theological Doctor. 1 

It is regrettable that we have very few details about the personal 
appearance and temperament of Suarez. One who had been a student 
at Coimbra and attended his lectures describes him as of medium 
height, very thin, with hollow cheeks and blue eyes. The events 
already mentioned which left his voice impaired also weakened his 
chest and lungs, and this caused him much trouble throughout his life. 

X A vindication of the Thomism of Suarez will be found in de Scorailles, op. cit,, 
Vol. II, ch. 2. 



I70 GREAT CATHOLICS 

As he grew old, he suffered from rheumatism, which interfered a good 
deal with his work, particularly since it crippled his hands. His 
biographers speak of his neuralgia and digestive troubles. His health 
was never really sound, and when he applied in 1564 for admission 
into the Society of Jesus one of the reasons for which he v/as refused 
was his poor health. The other reason was his lack of talent, a point 
to which we shall return in a moment. In order to smooth out as far 
as possible the obstacles put in his way by his physical condition, his 
Superiors, on the advice of the doctors, made special provision for his 
food and accommodation, not without causing dissatisfaction to certain 
critics who objected to the privileges accorded to him. It may well 
have been this lack of health which explains the impression made on 
some of his contemporaries, who describe him as rather sombre, and 
his reputation for being retiring and withdrawn from contact with 
others, though this may also be explained by the enormous labour 
he imposed upon himself. His self-control was well shown in an 
incident which took place while he was professor at Coimbra. He was 
challenged by another professor of the University, one who seems to 
have been definitely jealous of him and his reputation, to a sort of 
academic joust, much in favour in those days. A large audience 
assembled, and party feeling ran high. At the proper moment Suarez 
proposed to his opponent a syllogism with a major premiss which was 
to form the basis of his whole argument. This premiss was promptly 
denied. To the astonishment of the audience, and no doubt to the 
annoyance of his friends, Suarez offered no proof of it, but remained 
completely silent. When the unpleasant affair was over and he was 
back at home again, he was asked why he had not covered his dis- 
concertment by opening some other line of argument. In reply, he 
took down from the shelves a volume containing the canons of the 
Church's General Councils, and showed the inquirers that one of these 
was identical with the major premiss which had been denied. Re- 
proached now with not having vindicated himself earlier, he answered 
that he had preferred not to injure the reputation of his opponent by 
revealing the error he had made. Living in different times and in a 
different atmosphere, we may think this but a small matter ; but 
under the conditions in which the affair took place it reveals something 
like heroism. 

Few, if any, nowadays, or even in his own day, would deny Suarez 
the title of genius. But it is an undoubted fact that this genius was 
late in developing. Its first signs were so unusual as to constitute a 
psychological mystery, if not evidence of supernatural intervention. 
The occurrence can be best described in the course of a brief bio- 
graphical sketch. He was born on January 5th, 1548, at Granada, in 
Andalusia, of a family which had for centuries played an important 



FRANCISCO SUAREZ /;/ 

part in the history of Castille, ecclesiastical, civic and military, 
particularly distinguishing itself in the wars against the Moors. After 
the capture of Granada in the closing years of the fifteenth century, 
Suarez's grandfather received an estate there from Ferdinand and 
Isabella, in recognition of his services. His eldest son, Suarez's father, 
had eight children ; four sons, three of whom entered religion, and 
four daughters, three of whom became nuns. Francisco was the 
second son. The family was wealthy, but later fell on evil times, so 
that Suarez had to obtain permission from his superiors to assist his 
eldest brother and other relatives financially, out of the money received 
for his books. 

Suarez received the usual education of a boy of his time and class, 
probably at the young University of Granada ; but when he was 
thirteen years old he was sent, along with his brother John, to the 
great University of Salamanca, where he entered as a student of law 
(ecclesiastical and civil). There was a College of the Society of Jesus 
at Salamanca, and three years later Suarez applied there for admission 
into the Society. He was one of fifty who applied in that year (1564), 
and of all the fifty he alone was refused, on the ground of lack of 
sufficient talent and health. He appealed to the Provincial of Castille, 
who ultimately agreed to admit him, but only after overriding the 
unanimously unfavourable verdict of those appointed to examine him. 
In June, 1564, he entered the Jesuit novitiate, but before the year was 
over he was back at Salamanca, trying to understand the course of 
philosophy at the Jesuit College. His efforts were all in vain, he could 
make nothing of it. His fellow-students christened him " the dumb 
ox," as St. Thomas Aquinas had been christened in earlier times. His 
professor put him under the care of another student, who was to try 
to make him understand the lectures. The failure of this experiment 
was so signal that Suarez, determined not to leave the Society of Jesus 
but seeing no hope of passing the examinations necessary for the 
priesthood, applied to his superior for permission to pass into the 
ranks of the lay-brothers. This permission was not granted, and he 
was told to pray for success in his studies. A little time elapsed, and 
then came, suddenly and unexpectedly, the extraordinary change to 
which allusion has been made. One day, after his youthful mentor 
had laboriously explained to him a lecture in the simplest terms he 
could find, Suarez asked to be allowed to give his version of it. He gave 
it with such extraordinary ability that the professor was informed 
without delay. Suarez was submitted to a public test, from which he 
emerged with great distinction. Thereafter he outdistanced all his 
contemporaries in the College. Explain it as we will, naturally or 
supernaturally, the fact of this sudden intellectual awakening is 
attested by all his biographers, even the earliest. 



JJ2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

From 1566 to 1570 he studied theology and exegesis at the University 
of Salamanca, one of his professors being a Dominican, another an 
Augustinian. Loyal to the official decrees of the Society, Suarez took 
as his master St. Thomas Aquinas, but he also studied the Franciscan 
Doctor Scotus. In private he revised his philosophy, particularly 
metaphysics. In 1572 he received Holy Orders, and said his first Mass 
on the Feast of the Annunciation. The whole of his life thereafter was 
spent in fulfilling the duties of a professor of theology and in that amazing 
literary activity which gave him a European reputation even in his 
own lifetime. When one looks at the long row of large tomes which 
comprise the published works of Suarez, one is irresistibly impelled to 
ask how he ever found time to compose them, in addition to fulfilling 
the duties of the professorate and of a priest of the Society. Fortunately 
the time-table he followed during the last twenty years of his life (that 
is, while professor at Coimbra) has been preserved. To read it is to be 
filled with the half-incredulous a"we that is produced in the ordinary 
man by reading about the mortifications of the saints. The time of 
his lecture, which lasted an hour and a half, was half-past six in- the 
morning during the summer months, an hour later in the winter. He 
rose never later than half-past three in the summer, half-past four in 
the winter. After an hour and a half of mental prayer, followed by 
the recital of the Little Hours of the breviary, he went to his books. 
By the time most people in England are breakfasting, Suarez was 
settling down to a couple of hours 5 work with his secretaries. He did 
not break his fast till mid-day, for it was his custom to say Mass daily 
at eleven o'clock in the morning. After a very light breakfast, he 
said Vespers and Compline, recited his Rosary and read some spiritual 
book. At two o'clock he anticipated Matins and Lauds of the following 
day. Then he settled down to five hours of mental toil before his 
second meal of the day. After that a short conversation with some of 
the members of his community, lengthy night prayers, and bed. All 
this for twenty years at least, and Suarez a man of feeble health ! 
A contemporary who lived beside him describes him as being as 
regular as a clock in following his time-table, a point of similarity with 
Kant. Another point of similarity is that just as Kant had Lampe 
to look after him, so Suarez had the help of a lay-brother (Pedro de 
Aguilar), who assisted him for twenty years, but who never had to be 
dismissed as Lampe was-. 

A man is not entitled to be called a Great Catholic merely because 
he was an intellectual giant. To justify that title there must be 
something more than merely human greatness ; there must be at least 
something of sanctity. Reflecting on Suarez's utter self-renunciation, 
complete dedication to the service of God, as manifested in his outward 
life, one is forced to ask whether his mere tenacity of purpose is not 



FRANCISCO SUAREZ 173 

evidence of a sanctity which transcends that of even fervent religious. 
But there is other evidence. " Never in my life," said the Bishop of 
Coimbra, " have I known anyone who united so profound a humility 
with such wide learning, who was so esteemed by everybody and who 
thought so little of himself. " As to his union with God, we have seen 
what a large part of the day he gave to prayer. He once said, " If I 
had to choose between our morning meditation and the knowledge I 
have spent so many years in acquiring, I w r ould willingly give up all 
that knowledge rather than one hour of prayer." There is evidence, 
written by an eye-witness and made public after Suarez's death, that 
he had ecstasies in prayer. His devotion to Our Blessed Lady show r ed 
itself in his books. He was the first theologian to treat in a strict 
scholastic way of her position in the Christian economy. His charity 
to his fellow-men was shown over and over again in his lifetime by many 
acts of kindness, and by the invariable courtesy with which he treated, 
both in his writings and in spoken word, the many critics and 
adversaries he encountered. 

He died, after a short illness, at Lisbon on September 25tr;, 1617, 
having been a Jesuit for fifty- three years and a professor of theology for 
forty-three, twenty of which he spent at Coimbra. On his death-bed 
he uttered a phrase which has often been quoted : " I would never have 
believed that dying is so sweet." 

In his lifetime, Pope Paul V referred to him as " eximius et pius," 
and the title " doctor eximius " has been given him by posterity, 
following Pope Benedict XIV. He has an assured place in the line of 
great Catholic philosophers and theologians. As a jurist, he is 
attracting more and more the attention of modern thinkers concerned 
to find a sound basis for society, national and international. 



E. I. WATKIN, M.A. 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER 



A.D. 



SOME MAY BE surprised at the inclusion in this gallery of great Catholics 
of a man who may seem a minor figure. Fr. Baker's life was 
not outwardly eventful. It was, what he would have wished it to be, a 
life of retirement and seclusion. Not for him the martyr's crown or 
a prominent place in the apostolate of England. And though a prolific 
writer Sancta Sophia was compiled from more than forty treatises 
he cannot be regarded as a writer of high literary rank. He is too 
diffuse, too rambling, too formless. Indeed it would be impossible to 
publish his works as they stand. Happily, the outstanding editorial 
ability of Dom Serenus de Gressy, his disciple and biographer, has 
compiled from his writings an orderly and well proportioned treatise, 
a comprehensive guide to contemplative prayer, Sancta Sophia. 
Nor did he possess the imagination and original invention indispensable 
to great literature. Even his style, though lucid and pleasing, is of no 
outstanding beauty. 

Even in his special field, contemplative prayer and mystical theology, 
he is not among the supreme masters. When he wrote, he had 
experienced of the higher mystical prayer which he terms passive 
contemplation, only a single ecstasy. When towards the end of his 
life he entered permanently into this state of prayer he wrote no more. 
He is not an exponent of this supreme mysticism. 

Nevertheless, no Catholic teacher of the spiritual life has a more 
valuable message for us than Fr. Baker. Others have been far greater, 
holier than he. But not one among them is a better guide to the 
life of prayer. By all but a tiny majority, the highest states of 
mystical prayer can be studied only for their witness to God's glory 
and the power of His work in souls, as matter for adoration and a 
testimony to the truths of faith, not as having any practical bearing 
on our spiritual life. Moreover, to read the works of the great mystics, 
a Rueysbrook or St. John of the Cross for practical instruction, is not 
without grave dangers. Guides to the highest mystical union, they 
demand the utter renunciation indispensable to its attainment and 
describe the spiritual purgatory through which those alone can and must 

174 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER /7J 

pass who are invited to enter the earthly paradise, which, like Dante's, 
is situated above purgatory. 

As Fr. Baker shows, these sufferings are not given to souls of lower 
call who have not received the strength to endure them. Their 
description therefore, if regarded with personal application, is apt to 
frighten souls from the life of inner prayer. 

Fr. Baker, while faithful to the principles worked out in their utmost 
rigour by a St. John of the Gross whose works he had read, tempers 
their application to the weakness of the vast majority even of prayerful 
souls. Hence his writings can be put with safety and profit into the 
hands of any who are invited to the life of prayer. 

The snow-clad peak climbed by St. John of the Cross is likely to 
deter those who are not Alpine climbers of the spirit, so that they 
remain comfortably seated in their hotel garden. The more accessible 
uplands to which Fr. Baker summons us, the downs, or at most the 
high moors of his native land, encourage even those of moderate vigour 
to climb after him. 

And if there be any called to even higher ascents they will find Fr. 
Baker's doctrine in conformity with the sublimer teaching they will 
need, a stage on their way to the summit, 

In this moderation, this consideration for human weakness, which 
nevertheless is never false to the immutable, because intrinsic, principles 
which determine man's union with God, Fr. Baker is true both to the 
spirit of his order, the discretion which renders St. Benedict's rule 
the masterpiece of wisdom that it is, and the tradition of English 
mysticism. 

His doctrine of contemplation follows closely the anonymous 
fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing on which he commented chapter 
by chapter. He also made considerable use of Walter Hilton's Scale 
of Perfection. He is thus in the direct line of pre-Reformation English 
mystics, as the Congregation to which he belonged is in the direct 
line of mediaeval English monasticism. 

Fr. Baker's life is so essentially the record of his doctrine as lived 
by himself and taught to others that it is not easy to decide of which 
to speak first. But perhaps it will be as well to begin with his life. 
Its best source as regards his life of prayer is the confessions contained 
under a thin veil of anonymity in his commentary on the Cloud, 
the Secretum. Making use of these, Serenus de Gressy wrote his life, 
published for the first time a few years ago together with a shorter life 
by another Benedictine contemporary Dom Peter Salvin. A third 
life by Dom Pritchard still awaits publication. There is also for his earlier 
life an unpublished autobiographical fragment. 

Fr. Baker was born at Abergavenny in 1575, the thirteenth child of 
Lord Abergavenny's steward. His parents had conformed with no 



I7 S GREAT CATHOLICS 

particular enthusiasm to the Established Church. Christened David, 
he was educated at Christ's Hospital, London and at Broadgates Hall, 
Oxford. He was then called to the bar, working with an elder brother. 

Though his fastidious temperament kept him from gross vices he 
lost hold of religion and even doubted the existence of God. His 
father recalled him home and obtained for him the post of Recorder 
of Abergavenny. A project of marriage, however, fell through. 
In the year 1600, as he rode home absent-mindedly, he suddenly found 
that his horse had taken him onto the middle of a high and narrow 
footbridge over a mountain stream, the Monnow, " where he could 
neither go forward nor turn "... In this extremity he framed . .^ . 
such an internal resolution as this : " if ever I escape this danger I will 
believe there is a God who hath more care of my life and safety than I 
have had of His love and worship." Immediately he found his 
horse's head turned by no means that he could discover and the 
danger escaped. This led him to return to a serious practice of religion 
and to enquire into the controversy between the Protestant and 
Catholic religions. It resulted in his conversion. At his first con- 
fession <c there sprang up a desire of spiritual perfection to be pur- 
chased with the loss of all sensual pleasures and abandoning all secular 
designs." It was not long before he had converted his mother and 
sister. 

Desirous of embracing the religious life, he met in London some 
English monks affiliated to the Italian Cassinese congregation. He 
went out to Italy and was clothed, taking the name Augustine, at 
the monastery of St. Justina in Padua on May 27th in 1605. Here he 
began the practice of mental prayer, his " first conversion ". Knowing 
of no other method than meditation, little adapted to his temper, he 
soon found himself a prey to aridity and gave up mental prayer 
entirely. As his health was bad, his superiors sent him home when 
still a novice to his native air. Though he had intended to travel 
slowly and visit places of interest, a powerful impulse made him travel 
post-haste, so that he arrived in time to procure his father's deathbed 
reconciliation with the Church. He made his profession in London. 
At this time the English Congregation was restored, or rather continued, 
by the affiliation to it and Westminster Abbey, of two Cassinese monks 
by the last surviving monk of Westminster, Dom Sigebert Buckley. 
Though theie is no doubt of this affiliation, its time and circumstances 
are reported very differently by those in a position to know the facts 
and with no motive for misrepresenting them an instructive warning 
against overconfidence in historical details. 

Dom Baker joined this revived congregation, and when later in 1619 
it was fully organized, he became a monk of Dieulouard Abbey in 
Lorraine, the parent of Ampleforth. Rather strangely, however, he 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER /77 

never lived there, though he spent later many years at Douay, the 
parent of Downside. This great light of English Benedictinism may 
therefore be claimed by both houses. For the time he was in England. 

He returned to the practice of mental prayer 3 his " second conversion/' 
and after a few months was raised to " passive contemplation," an 
ecstasy produced by " a speaking of God to the soul.' 5 It lasted at 
most a quarter of an hour. Fr. Baker believed that this rapid spiritual 
advance was assisted by the mortification of his inability to satisfy 
his hunger without very serious effects to his digestion. With a man's 
appetite he could digest no more than a small child. Later in life 
his digestion became normal, though his health was never robust. 
This ecstasy made his prayer " far purer, far easier, less painful to 
nature and more abstract from sense" than before, "yea, it wrought 
a stability or perfect settledness of prayer." It produced an interior 
illumination whereby he understood the meaning of spiritual books. 
It replaced fear of death by an eagerness to die. Further, it gave him 
a conviction of the truth of Catholic doctrine. " I would tell you 
of the wonderful proof and satisfaction that a soul hath of the verities 
of Christian religion by one of the said passive contemplations. . . 
The soul most clearly seeth that all is most assuredly true that in such 
work is manifested or told unto her, as are the verities and mysteries 
of Christianity. O happy evidence of our belief. No thanks to them 
that believe after such a sight. A man may say that God is not 
beholden to them for believing that which they have so clearly, 
evidently and manifestly, as it were, seen with their eyes and handled 
with their hands. Such sights of the soul are far more clear than are 
the sights or feelings of our outward senses." 

This apprehension of Catholic truth by which we must probably 
understand a perception of what may be termed the inner substance 
of dogma ; to spiritual significance is not an essential part of mystical 
contemplation. It is, however, a frequent accompaniment. Malaval, 
the blind mystic of Marseilles, speaks of it in the same terms as Fr. 
Baker. 

This contemplation was, however, followed by the desolation inevitable 
in the higher mystical way. Fr. Baker, having no experienced director, 
and not having yet studied the mystical theologians who treat of it, 
did not understand its nature or the attitude he should adopt. Per- 
plexed and discouraged, he again abandoned interior prayer at the 
threshold of the Night of Spirit, as he had abandoned it before when 
faced with the Night of Sense. Years of life followed with no practice 
of mental prayer, the spiritual void being covered by legal activities, 
in themselves valuable and largely charitable, but not in conformity 
with Fr. Baker's profound call. About the year 1613 he was ordained 
priest. 



/7 5 GREAT CATHOLICS 

After twelve years he returned to mental prayer, never again to 
abandon it. This was his third, in the Secretum he calls it his " second, 
conversion ". Though he attained a high degree of what he terms 
active contemplation, he had not been raised again to " passive " when 
he composed his works. 1 A simple prayer of aspirations, acts of love, 
elicited *by God in His higher will, became his usual prayer, increasingly 
simplified and abstracted from all sensible images or even mental 
concepts. At the beginning of this renewed spiritual life he was in 
Devonshire, chaplain to Mr. Philip Fursden. Here, by avoiding 
controversy and recommending a prayer of humble resignation, he 
converted Mr. Fursden's mother-in-law, a staunch Protestant, whom 
the arguments of other priests had merely irritated. 

From 1621 to 1624 oe was * n ^ on don engaged, by his superiors' 
command, in antiquarian research into the history of English Bene- 
dictinism. It is interesting and pleasant to notice that in these 
researches he had the assistance and sympathy of Protestant antiquaries. 
To mobilize scientific research in the service of a state ideology has 
been reserved for the modern totalitarians, Communist, Nazi or Fascist. 

In 1624 he went to Douay but was at once sent to Gambray as a 
spiritual director to the English Benedictine nuns who had just founded 
a convent there, the present Stanbrook. A most influential nun was 
the great-great-grand-daughter of St. Thomas More, Dame Gertrude 
More. In fact, the convent could not have been founded without the 
financial support of her father, Crisacre More. She had inherited a 
good measure of her ancestor's humour, love of learning, critical 
intelligence, and mental curiosity. To this she added a strong will. 
All these qualities, reinforcing her position as the daughter of the 
practical founder, had made her a dominant influence in the convent. 
Moreover, they turned her away from the interior life to external 
interests., in Baker's terminology to extroversion rather than intro- 
version. Even her religious vocation was not perfectly clear to her. 
It was, in part at least, a distaste for marriage, the only practical 
alternative, and she had made her profession half-heartedly. 
However, she had also what Fr. Baker calls "a wonderfully strong 
propensity in her rational will to seek after God and eternal felicity 
and a discs teem or contempt for all the transitory things of this life." 
This propensity, in which also she resembled her martyred ancestor, 
drew her inwards to seek God in the soul, towards introversion. 
Indeed, it was no doubt the true motive of her religious vocation, as it 
had drawn St. Thomas to make trial of the Carthusian life. Torn 
between these two conflicting tendencies and moreover harassed 
by the disease of scruples. Dame Gertrude was unhappy, restless, and 
in consequence rather bitter and very critical. At first, therefore, she 
1 See, however, below, page 227. 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER ijg 

would have nothing to do with this new director to whom she was 
not bound to go, since he was not the nuns' official confessor. Indeed, 
we may suppose that it was to give the nuns the choice between two 
types of direction that he was not appointed confessor. At last, 
however, she came to him, for the first time, eleven months after her 
unconsoled profession. A few months later she returned to him and 
became his most enthusiastic disciple, as also was the Abbess Dame 
Catherine Gascoigne. He put her into a course of affective prayer, 
acts of love in which her propensity to God could find expression and 
exercise unhampered and unretarded by the multiplicity of images 
and concepts involved in meditation. This course proved most 
beneficial, and its fruits are embodied in the outbursts of affective 
prayer known as Confesswnes Amantis, a lover's confessions. Fr. Baker 
left her at liberty to follow the inner guidance of the Holy Spirit 
both in regard to her prayer and those external matters not regulated 
by her rule. Though her weak health made her unable to under- 
take extraordinary mortifications, she could not indeed fulfil the 
rule completely, and she found it necessary to continue a measure 
of secular reading and conversations and to engage in a large number 
of external activities, since these things were regulated by the guidance 
of the Holy Ghost obtained by prayer and subordinated to a unifying, 
because simple contemplation, Dame Gertrude advanced rapidly. 
Her prayer was directed to the incomprehensible Godhead apprehended 
by faith. And although affective it was not sensible devotion, but 
an exercise of the spiritual will aspiring and adhering to God. Any 
sensible affections were secondary, the concomitant, and so to speak, 
by-product of the exercise of will. Indeed, Dame Gertrude was tried 
and purified by much sensible aridity, the Night of Sense. 

Fr. Baker remained at Gambray nine years, 1624 to x ^33- I* was 
during this period that he began to compose the host of treatises with 
translations and adaptations in which his doctrine is contained. In 
the Secretum he tells us of some peculiar psychophysical results of his 
prayer, motions of arms or legs and an apparent drawing of his prayer 
activity upwards to the head. Finally on Mid-Lent Sunday, 1627, 
" there happened upon his head and body such an alteration that he 
greatly wondered at it nor could he tell what to make of it." Of the 
phenomenon itself we hear no more. But whereas before he had 
suffered from a mental dullness due to the drawing of his spiritual 
activities into the centre of his soul, though it left him capable of all 
his duties, he now ce had free use of his wits and senses in greater 
clearness and perfection than ever before. 55 He " found himself 
enabled to write or discourse of spiritual matters." In the strength 
of this new light he produced all his writings. As we have seen, 
Sancta Sophia was compiled out of more than forty treatises. And the 



r go GREAT CATHOLICS 

bibliography appended to Dom Justin McCann's edition of the 
Salvin and Cressy lives enumerates no less than 68 items. Of these, 
however, some are translations or adaptations, others fragments. 
Nevertheless, it was a most prolific output. Indeed, it would seem as 
though many mystics, knowing that they cannot adequately convey 
their sublime spiritual apprehensions, yet under a strong urge to 
impart their knowledge for God's glory and the benefit of others, 
cannot refrain from expatiating on the same topics, repeating them- 
selves in the vain effort to express themselves to their satisfaction. 
Moreover, the instruction of the Cambray nuns was a powerful induce- 
ment to composition. 

As always, a novelty or apparent novelty, however good, provoked 
opposition. The opposition at Cambray was headed by the nuns' 
regular chaplain, Dom Francis Hull. Though personal jealousy ^may 
have played a subconscious part, the liberty left to the individual 
by Fr. Baker, the seeming illuminism of his insistence upon Divine 
calls and inspirations, the very subordinate place assigned to medita- 
tion, then widely regarded as the ideal form of mental prayer, and 
above all his denial that Superiors had a right to prescribe their 
subjects' method of prayer were grounds for genuine though mistaken 
alarm. Moreover, Dame Gertrude's enthusiasm and her naturally 
assertive temper which, though subdued by prayer, could not have 
been wholly eradicated, may well have made her tactless and a trifle 
overbearing in defence of the doctrine which had liberated her soul. 
Fr. Hull, on his deathbed, declared to Dom Salvin that he had not 
opposed Fr. Baker's doctrine in itself but merely the abuse made of it 
by indiscreet disciples. In any case, the controversy produced two 
good results. It effected a final purification of Dame Gertrude's 
soul in view of her holy death from small-pox in August, 1633, at the 
early age of twenty-seven. Not only did she bear the pain and the 
loneliness of her disease with exemplary courage, as also the lack of 
viaticum, since she could not swallow the Host ; but she proved 
how thoroughly she had assimilated Fr. Baker's teaching by refusing 
to see him, since it was unnecessary, and she would be left alone with 
God. 

The other good result was the formal examination of Fr. Baker's 
writings by order of the General Chapter of the congregation. For it 
resulted in their unreserved and wholehearted approbation. In fact, 
if the English Benedictines can be said to possess any official body of 
spiritual doctrine, as the Jesuits the Exercises of St. Ignatius, surely 
it must be the doctrine of Fr. Baker. I hasten to add that although in 
his writings Fr. Baker had primarily in view the monks and nuns of 
his order, he expressly points out that mutatis mutandis, his doctrine is 
applicable to all, whatever their state of life, who are called to seek 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER 181 

God by the practice of contemplative prayer. In fact, when we 
remember that of the sixty-five years he lived, Fr. Baker spent less 
than six in a monastery, and during his five years at Douay took 
no part in the choir, it is clear that he was a monk rather in the spirit 
than in the letter. But the spirit alone has any intrinsic value. For 
souls surrendered to God, Fr. Baker tells us, all employments under- 
taken by a Divine call are equally valuable, " even labouring for 
the conversion of souls is of no greater price with God than is the 
keeping of sheep. 5 ' 1 

To return from this digression. Though the General Chapter 
approved Fr. Baker's doctrine it was thought wiser to remove both 
protagonists in the controversy from Gambray. Fr. Baker therefore 
now spent five years at Douay. Except for his daily Mass and his 
meals he confined himself almost entirely to his room. This soon 
became a centre of spiritual guidance, not only for members of the 
house but for outsiders, for example, the English Franciscans and the 
students and teachers at the seminary for secular priests. It may, 
therefore, be said that during these years Fr. Baker was spiritually 
forming the confessors and martyrs of the English mission where the 
Civil War would shortly rekindle the persecution relaxed under 
King Charles. 

This unofficial influence, with the body of enthusiastic disciples 
it brought into being, alienated from Fr. Baker a powerful theologian 
who had hitherto supported him, but who was of too active and 
dominating a temper to practise his doctrine himself, Dom Rudisind 
Barlow. Even so the trouble would not have come to a head had 
Fr. Baker not felt himself obliged to compose a treatise on the 
conventual life, aimed under the thinnest of disguises at Dorn Rudisind. 
This error of judgment exasperated Dom Rudisind, to whom Fr. 
Baker had actually presented in person the attack upon himself, and 
though infirm, Fr. Baker was sent to England in 1638. 

We are not, however, entitled in Dom Rudisind's case, any more 
than in Fr. Hull's, to charge Fr. Baker's adversary with deliberate 
and conscious jealousy. As Fr. Baker himself points out, the good 
are often permitted by God to oppose the good for their spiritual 
profit without wilful fault, but from lack of light withheld by God. 
In this instance Dom Rudisind may well have regarded Fr. Baker 
as a centre of dissension in the house and as encouraging by his 
personal criticism of himself an undesirable spirit of criticism and 
insubordination. Any personal jealousy or pique at work as a motive 

1 1 cannot altogether agree with this. No doubt all employments performed in 
obedience to God are equally sanctifying. It does not follow that they are equally 
valuable in themselves, therefore in God's estimate, Who must judge values as 
they objectively are. 



l8s> GREAT CATHOLICS 

may well have been completely hidden from his conscious knowledge 
for want of the light to discover it, obtainable only by prayer. 

In England, Fr. Baker spent the last years of his life partly in Bedford- 
shire, partly in London. Towards the end he had often to change his 
lodgings to escape arrest. For the Long Parliament was bent on 
extirpating Popery. But this banishment from Douay, which he could 
have avoided by accepting an offer to reside at the seminary, and its 
consequent sufferings were the final detachment enabling Fr. Baker 
to receive the higher " passive " contemplation which he had lost 
so long. Since he had ceased writing we know nothing of his final 
prayer. We may perhaps console ourselves by reflecting that the 
practical utility of his work is, as we have seen, partly conditioned by 
its confinement to the lower slopes of the mystic Garmel. There are 
others to speak of the summits, notably the doctor of mystical theology, 
St. John of the Cross. Fr. Baker's silence is thus profitable for us as 
well as his speech, and like the latter the result of his Divine call. ^ All 
we know is a revealing phrase in a letter that he was totus in passionibus, 
wholly in a passive state. When his correspondent misinterpreted 
these sufferings as privations and was arranging for a supply of money, 
Fr. Baker explained that the sufferings he meant " were the greatest 
tastes of heaven that this life is capable of, his prayer being now 
become wholly passive." He died of a pestilential fever in the house 
of a Mrs. Watson, who described his peaceful and resigned death in a 
letter to her daughter. " His body was weak but his sickness violent 
and the pangs of death extreme strong ; but perfect resignation and a 
total subjection to the will and good pleasure of Almighty God was 
plainly seen to be performed by him to his last breath. The day 
before he died he took a leaden pen and wrote thus : c Abstinence and 
Resignation I see must be my condition to my very expiration.' His 
happy departure out of this world was on the ninth of August, 1641, 
upon St. Laurence's Eve." He was buried in St. Andrew's, Holborn. 
But no doubt his grave is as unknown to-day as that of his disciple 
Dame Gertrude More, buried somewhere in what was the Convent 
cemetery and is now a private garden. 

Sixteen years later his enduring monument was to be erected by 
Dom Cressy, Sancta Sophia. 

Fr. Baker's method of prayer was essentially one of the will. Acts of 
will at first deliberately elicited, " forced acts " become gradually more 
affective and under the operation of grace ultimately become " aspira- 
tions ", acts elicited by the Holy Spirit and produced, therefore, with 
greater facility and more spontaneously, also fewer, since each continues 
longer. And there is a corresponding progress In their spirituality 
and simplicity. Moreover, these acts and aspirations are predominantly 
addressed to the incomprehensible Godhead apprehended by faith. 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER 183 

The substance of this method can be found already In the Cloud of 
Unknowing, on which, as we have seen., Fr. Baker commented. But 
it is worked out in greater detail and divided into stages. Although 
it was no novelty, it ran counter to the method of mental prayer 
then most popular, though not so universal as it became after the 
Quietist controversy had brought mysticism into discredit and 
suspicion. This method was that of discursive meditation, of which 
SL Ignatius** Exercises were the most important example. Fr. Baker 
himself agreed that for many souls of active and extroverted temper 
meditation is the best form of mental prayer, indeed probably the only 
form of which such souls are capable. And all souls, he thought, 
should begin with meditation, even if they continued it no more than 
a few months, before they were called to replace it by acts of will. 

There can be no doubt that meditation or some equivalent exercise, 
such as deeply pondered reading, is indispensable. For its object is 
to transform an exclusively or predominantly notional assent to the 
truths of faith into the real assent by which alone they are assimilated 
into our mental and spiritual life and move the will. Indeed, if our 
spirituality lacks the foundation of such realised doctrine, the exercise 
of the will elevated to the incomprehensible God which Fr. Baker 
recommends, may prove too empty of content, the vague undenomina- 
tional and undogmatic worship of a God not only above knowledge 
but wholly unknown, in fact agnostic. When Fr. Baker wrote, 
however, there was a tendency to treat meditation not, as what it is, 
the foundation of mental prayer but as being itself mental prayer, 
though as he shows, prayer is an act of will, not of understanding. 
Indeed it was widely regarded as the sole mental prayer. 1 This 
was due, I believe, to the fact that the Reformation had disclosed 
a widespread ignorance and at best lack of effective realisation 
of Catholic truth. Because Catholic doctrine had too often not been 
assimilated by Catholics, vast numbers had yielded to the assault of 
a heresy whose doctrine was the vital conviction of its adherents. 
The most urgent need, therefore, was to replace a formal and 
customary Catholicism by an intelligent and living understanding 
of the Catholic faith. For this there could be no better instrument 
than the methodical meditation practised and preached by the Jesuits, 
who set the tone of counter- Reformation spirituality. 

But however valuable and indispensable this method might be, 
if it is regarded as the sole or even the best method of prayer, it must 
prove a fatal hindrance to the soul's Godward ascent. In fact, the 
mystics had never ceased to protest against meditation when pursued 

1 Where meditation is and must be a soul's prayer to the end the strict prayer 
is not the meditation itself but the resolutions and other acts of will which the 
meditation produces. 



184 GREAT CATHOLICS 

beyond the point up to which it is necessary. Fr. Baker had many 
predecessors and contemporary writers to support him. It was an 
uphill fight all the same and destined to a lengthy, though not complete 
or final defeat. 

Fr. Baker's doctrine, never more than a rough sketch, of passive 
contemplation, is less satisfactory. It seems to me clear that the prayer 
he describes as active contemplation, aspirations as opposed to forced 
acts, and in particular the prayer of interior silence, corresponds with 
St. Theresa's Prayer of Quiet and its highest stage probably with her 
prayer of Full Union. These, however, are states of infused or passive 
contemplation. Fr. Baker tells us that aspirations as opposed to the 
immediate acts produced by our own effort are elicited by the Holy 
Spirit. Is not this a passive rather than an active prayer ? Since the 
entire development of prayer in the state of grace is the supernatural 
operation of God, we should not expect any very clear line ^ of de- 
marcation between the lower states, in which the Divine action is more 
or less concealed behind the action of the subject, and the higher,^ in 
which the conscious relation between these factors is reversed. Active 
contemplation passes gradually into passive, as spring into summer. 
Moreover the only passive prayer which Fr. Baker has described was, 
as he says himself, " rapt ", ecstasy. This, however, follows in St. 
Theresa's scheme, two states of passive prayer, Quiet, and Full 
Union. 

The persuasion that passive contemplation differs essentially from 
active and is clearly distinguishable from it even in its lowest form 
arises, I believe, from a confusion between the substance and common, 
but not universal, concomitants of mystical prayer. These con- 
comitants are vivid apprehensions of Divine Truth, e.g. the evident 
conviction of Catholic truth of which Fr. Baker speaks, or illuminations 
of the Divine Glory. These communications are so vivid that they 
are sometimes described as a sight, a vision, or as by Fr. Baker in 
his Secretum, a speech of God. We may well believe that the medium 
of these communications, since open vision is impossible on earth, 
are in fact the " infused species " of which Fr. Baker speaks. Abbot 
Butler, who disagreed with Fr. Baker on this point and rejected his 
theory of infused species, had in view the substantial mystical prayer : 
Fr. Baker, I think, the concomitant. In fact, they were speaking 
of different things. 

Moreover, since these concomitant apprehensions are transitory 
acts, Fr. Baker having in mind such a concomitant experience, denied 
that passive prayer could be a state. Later on, however, he was 
himself to enter a permanent state of high passive prayer. But as he 
had ceased to write he could not modify his former statement. 

We may also observe that the text on which Fr. Baker comments, 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER 185 

the Cloud, speaks of the highest prayer in such terms as suggest an 
apprehension of God's glory of this type and which is in fact the 
concomitant, not the substance, of mystical prayer. " Then will He 
sometimes peradventure send out a beam of ghostly light, piercing this 
Cloud of Unknowing that is betwixt thee and Him and show thee 
some of His secrets." (Ch. 26.) Such an experience, while corres- 
ponding to that described by Fr. Baker as God's speech in his soul, 
and justifying his belief that the medium is infused species and that 
the experience cannot be an abiding state, is, as certainly, not the 
substance or essence of mystical "passive" prayer. 

The substance of mystical prayer, even in its highest degree, the 
transforming union, is not any kind of illumination. It is the soul's 
conscious union with and occupation by the incomprehensible 
Godhead. As the union is a high degree of charity, the reception 
of God's will, the intuition of it is a high degree of faith, the reception 
of God's self-knowledge. And the seat of the union-intuition is 
the centre or ground of the spirit, the root of will and understanding 
alike. The union-intuition in which this prayer consists is thus the 
direct continuation of the union with the Godhead apprehended by 
faith, which is Fr. Baker's active contemplation. Fr. Baker was 
obliged by his authorities to make room for this dark adherence to the 
Godhead in passive prayer, side by side with the illuminations often 
concomitant upon it. But whereas he could clearly distinguish and 
demarcate the latter from his lower active contemplation, it is hard 
indeed to distinguish his account of the former (Sancta Sophia^ Sec. IV, 
Chap. IV, paragraphs 5, 6) from his account of active contemplation 
(ibid., Sec. IV, Chap. I, paragraphs 14-17). That he places the 
former prayer in the will, the latter in the centre beyond will and under- 
standing is not a significant distinction. For the centre is pre-eminently 
the root of the will which is the actuality of the soul ; nihil aliud sumus 
quam voluntates. 1 And as the union advances and deepens, the union 
becomes increasingly central, in this ground rather than in any more 
superficial actuition of the will. 

Moreover, active contemplation is described in terms applicable 
only to a high degree of infused prayer. cc In which union (above all 
particular images) there is neither time nor place, but all is vacuity 
and emptiness, as if nothing were existent but God and the soul ; yea, 
so far is the soul from reflecting on her own existence, that it seems to 
her that God and she are not distinct but one only thing ; this is called by some 
mystic authors the state of nothingness, by others the state of totality ; 
because therein God is all in all, the container of all things." This 
absorption of self-consciousness by God-consciousness is evidently a 
sublime effect of the Divine operation and a very high degree of union, 

i ^y e are no thing but wills " St. Augustine. 



l86 GREAT CATHOLICS 

far above any active contemplation in which the soul is the conscious 
agent and the conscious source of her acts. It is unfortunate that we 
cannot tell whether this passage was written from personal experience 
or taken from mystical writers. If written from experience, Fr. Baker 
must have been raised to a completely infused contemplation already 
but failed to recognize the fact because there was no ecstasy and no 
concomitant illumination, such as he had received on his second 
conversion. 

In so far as we can distinguish between acquired and infused, 
active and passive contemplation, and it is a distinction of degree, 
not of kind, I believe that the forced acts of will, even when, as in 
Dame Gertrude's case affective, since they are enforced, that is 
consciously elicited by the will are acquired contemplation, aspirations 
on the other hand being consciously elicited by the work of the Spirit 
are infused or passive contemplation, corresponding to the prayer 
of Quiet. If Fr. Baker, though distinguishing aspirations from enforced 
acts, precisely by the conscious Divine production of the former, 
nevertheless terms them an active contemplation, it is because he was 
misled by his ecstatic illumination into the belief that such illumination 
always accompanies passive prayer, as in fact, we may suppose it did 
during those final years when Fr. Baker recognized his prayer as 
passive. And these illuminations may well have accounted for his 
abstinence from writing, as an illumination of Divine Truth made 
St. Thomas unable to continue his unfinished Summa. Like St. 
Thomas, Fr. Baker may have been impressed with the impotence of 
human language and thought to convey the Infinite Reality of Divine 
Truth. 

That it was in fact for the profit of souls, the vast majority of con- 
templatives, called only to a lower degree of mystical union, probably 
the Prayer of Quiet or Full Union which illuminations do not normally 
accompany, that Fr. Baker kept silence about the higher degrees of 
prayer and their concomitant illuminations and, therefore, also of the 
desolation, the Night of Spirit bound up with them, we have already 
seen. His motive, however, was more probably the sense of impotence 
to express them. 

It is interesting to observe that Fr. Baker had already recognized 
that these illuminations of Catholic truth apprehended from within in 
mystical prayer, are identical in nature, though not in authority, with 
the illuminations, in which God conveyed truth to the original organs 
of His public revelation, prophets and apostles. 

In his teaching on mental prayer and the degrees of its progress 
Fr. Baker does but expound with a peculiar felicity, clarity, discretion 
and practical usefulness what had been said by others. The most 
distinctive and most valuable element in his spiritual teaching is his 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER i8j 

doctrine of Divine calls and inspirations. Here also he can and does 
appeal to authority. Holy Scripture, the liturgy, the Fathers of the 
Desert, Cassian and his own Patriarch St. Benedict have much to say 
of Divine guidance obtained by prayer. Nevertheless, during the 
reaction against Protestant individualism, to insist upon the necessity 
for spiritual progress of seeking and obeying the inspirations of the 
Holy Spirit must have seemed dangerous. Was it not the doctrine of 
the Spanish illuminists and in contemporary England of the Quakers, 
who, moreover, had not yet acquired their reputation for impeccable 
respectability and harboured a number of enthusiasts who alleged 
Divine inspiration for such vagaries as walking nude through the 
streets ? Did it not refuse obedience to superiors and directors in 
favour of selfwill masked as Divine inspiration ? In his preface to 
Sancta Sophia, Dom Serenus Cressy is obliged to refute such objections 
and in particular the assimilation of Fr. Baker's doctrine to heretical 
illuminism. This doctrine is in fact, as Fr. Baker pointed out, con- 
tained in the Collect which asks God to prevent our actions by His 
inspiration and does but explain St. Paul's text " as many as are led 
by the Spirit, they are the sons of God." It is a doctrine of spiritual 
liberty without the least taint of licence. Every heresy, it is said, 
is the revenge of a neglected truth. And the unguarded and exclusive 
emphasis laid by the Quakers on immediate inspiration was the revenge 
of the long neglect into which the genuine Catholic doctrine of 
inspirations, as Fr. Baker expounds it, had been suffered to fall. Indeed, 
precisely by meeting and satisfying what was true in the Quaker 
doctrine, it was the best antidote and remedy for what was false in it, 
though it must be admitted, that, as far as contemporary Quakers 
were concerned, the language used about them by implication both by 
Fr. Baker and still more by Fr. Cressy was not calculated to make this 
remedy applicable in practice. 

In our time the doctrine of Divine inspirations has become the 
distinctive and most essential tenet of an important contemporary 
religious movement, the Oxford Groups. According to them every 
action of the day, however trivial or secular, even the choice of a tailor 
or a train must be decided by Divine guidance, to be sought by and 
expected from daily silent prayer. And it is no doubt the truth and 
value contained in both practices, regular mental prayer, and seeking 
Divine guidance, which has attracted so many to the movement and 
given it so much strength and vigour, in spite of the exaggeration and 
onesidedness with which they are presented. For the former practice 
has been neglected by the majority of Protestants, the latter by almost 
all modern Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic. Fr. Baker's 
doctrine, which safeguards and duly incorporates in the entire body of 
Catholic truth the practice of seeking and following individual guidance 



j88 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Is thus our best answer to Group excesses, because it recognizes the 
truth they contain. 

As against all Illuminlsm Fr. Baker denies that we are to expect 
Divine illumination on matters already made known by public 
religious authority, such as the doctrines of faith and moral laws. 
The Illuminations of passive prayer are extraordinary, not to be sought, 
and always confirmations of truth already declared by ^the ^ public 
revelation In the Church's custody. Nor do the Divine inspirations 
concern actions already prescribed or forbidden by the duties of our 
vocation or the command of lawful superiors. They are confined 
to actions In themselves indifferent which can without sin be performed 
or omitted. For although such actions or omissions are In their 
matter indifferent, they are not so in the concrete. A good Intention 
makes them positively good, and a bad Intention correspondingly evil. 
Moreover, It requires that we should do or omit, as is, not necessarily 
in itself, but for us here and now, the most perfect course. How are 
we to secure this pure Intention, and the choice of the more perfect 
course for us to adopt? Only the inspiration of the Holy Spirit will 
cleanse our motive from the Impurity of self-seeking and enlighten us 
to choose rightly, where from the nature of the case no external rule 
is applicable. Indeed, we shall need the inspiration of the Holy 
Ghost to perform even obligatory actions and omissions with a pure 
intention and in the best way. Unlike the Groups, Fr. Baker does not 
extend inspirations to secular matters in so far as they have no 
spiritual relevance. For example, though we might ask and expect 
Divine guidance in choosing a morally unobjectionable Investment, 
we could not expect it, to find the most profitable investment. Perhaps, 
however, Fr. Baker, writing as he does, primarily for religious, does not 
sufficiently allow for cases In which success in a secular undertaking is 
necessary for subsistence. For example, though I could not expect 
Divine inspiration to enable me to make a fortune on the stock exchange, 
I might surely ask for it to prevent my losing my savings by a bad 
investment. 

This, however, Is a side Issue. The object of the Divine calls and 
inspirations is our spiritual progress, our gradual emancipation from 
selrWill and attachment to creatures, to detachment from self and 
creatures and abandonment to the will of God. It is in this spiritual 
progress that every soul must observe her individual calls, follow the 
inspirations obtained by mental prayer for her spiritual guidance. In 
contrast with the Groups Fr. Baker tells us we must not expect the 
inspiration and guidance to be given in our prayer itself. To expect it 
then would tend to distract our prayer from God to our needs and 
problems. Having laid our problem before God in prayer, we must 
banish it from our thoughts till our prayer is finished. Then the 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER i8g 

guidance will be given either by an enlightenment of our reason or, if, 
after careful consideration of the arguments in favour of both courses, 
the mind remains doubtful, by a blind impulse of the will. If neither 
form of guidance is received, we may choose at random, even by lots* 
tossing up as we should say, and take the result as God's wilL But no 
doubt Fr. Baker would have regarded this solution as applicable only 
where the pros and cons are balanced so evenly that there really is very 
little to choose between the alternatives and the sole spiritual value of 
the choice made consists in the desire to obey God, to discover and 
perform His will. Indeed, as we have seen, Fr. Baker thought that 
all lawful actions are spiritually indifferent and receive their value 
solely from our obedience to God's will in performing them. 

This indifference as to the matter of these acts and omissions is pro- 
bably bound up with the most important difference between Fr. Baker's 
teaching and illuminism. Illummism claims that if we follow Divine 
inspirations we shall always choose the course in itself the best and 
the wisest, i.e. it promises infallible guidance. Fr. Baker admits that, 
even when we have sought Divine Guidance in the way he prescribes, 
we may still make a mistake in the matter of our choice. God may 
nevertheless allow us to choose what will prove the wrong or the less 
wise course. But the mistake thus permitted, if not indeed apparently 
inspired by God, will be the best for our spiritual advancement. A 
choice itself an error and more or less a failure, for our soul will be more 
advantageous and more successful than would have been the choice 
in itself better and more successful. We may, therefore, say that 
whereas illuminism promises infallible guidance, Fr. Baker promises 
only infallibly profitable guidance, profitable, that is to say, for our 
soul's progress to God. And it is obvious that (objectively) infallible 
guidance would not be infallibly profitable guidance. For constant 
objective success would be inconsistent with the mortification and 
humiliation necessary for spiritual progress, and Would in fact tend to 
foster the attachment, self-satisfaction and pride from which it is the 
object of prayer to deliver us. It would also make religion a means 
to worldly success. On the other hand such measure even of objective 
success as is good for the individual under his particular circumstances 
itself, of course, a most varying and unpredictable measure is guaran- 
teed by the infallibly profitable guidance taught by Fr. Baker. 

Fr. Baker's life affords, I believe, an instructive example of infallibly 
profitable, as opposed to infallible guidance. His well intentioned 
but tactless criticism of Dom Rudisind which led to his leaving Douay 
was no doubt written only after prayer for light and in accordance 
with what he believed to be the Divine Will. In itself his action was, 
so far as we can judge, mistaken. Nevertheless, it procured him that 
final purification of his journey to England which was, it would seem, 



igo GREAT CATHOLICS 

Indispensable for his advance to a higher degree of prayer. It was, 
therefore, by God's infallibly profitable guidance, that he was permitted 
to make what appears to have been the objective mistake of attacking 
Dom Rudisind. We may, however, wonder whether in the end the 
latter, however indignant at the time, did not profit by Fr. Baker's 
rebuke. 

It should be observed that according to Fr. Baker, the Divine 
inspiration inclines in case of doubt to omission rather than positive 
action. For a multiplicity of activities not demanded by the duty of 
our state hinders contemplation and the simplicity it induces. It 
turns us outward, makes us extroverted, instead of inwards to the soul 
where God dwells and works. This passivity contrasts strikingly with 
our modern worship of activity, the hustle and bustle of constant 
business and exciting amusement. But it is precisely what the modern 
world needs, if the spiritual life is to revive and the voice of God to 
be heard. Modern psychology tends to regard the introvert as a 
pathological case. He is in fact the man who alone lives a worthy 
human life, possessing his own soul and finding there his God. It 
must, however, be admitted that introversion without prayer is indeed 
pathological. For the irreligious introvert finds only his empty self 
with its illusions and daydreams. It is the road to madness and a 
state even more unhealthy than that of the extrovert. The introversion 
preached by Fr. Baker is Godward, not selfward. Moreover, all works 
of obligation must be punctually performed, however many and 
however distracting and, if performed with the right intention, cannot 
hinder union with God, though they will, I think, hinder the conscious 
awareness of that union. And in the higher degrees of contemplation 
external activities no longer interfere with contemplation in the apex 
of the spirit above their tumult of images and thoughts. For there 
is no longer any attachment to them. 

As regards the Sacraments, Fr. Baker keeps the happy mean between 
the excess which believes that their use automatically produces a 
high degree of holiness and their depreciation, if not disuse, by many 
Protestants. For, while duly valuing the Sacraments, he warns us 
that without interior prayer they will not enable us to overcome our 
faults and advance far on the road towards God. Only the assiduous 
practice of mental prayer enables the grace they confer to operate 
effectively. 

His doctrine of Divine guidance diminishes the role assigned by Fr. 
Baker to the human director. It is not for him to prescribe the details 
of prayer and conduct. For he cannot have sufficient knowledge of 
the soul's state and call. He can but supply general instructions 
whereby his penitent or directee can enable himself to receive the 
guidance of the inner Director. Hence for contemplatives following 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER 191 

the way of prayer through the will, he is opposed to the constant 
self-examinations and repeated confessions of the same faults then so 
popular in many quarters, though he does not deny that they may 
be useful in awakening and maintaining a tender conscience in those 
active souls whose consciences are not enlightened and cleansed by 
God in contemplative prayer. 

It must, I think, be admitted that Fr. Baker undervalued the Divine 
Office as a means of sanctification. He was, indeed, well aware that in 
primitive monasticism the vocal recitation of the Psalter was the 
prayer of the monks. He also recognized that it is possible to say the 
Office, as a prayer of aspirations, if the Holy Spirit so enables and moves 
an advanced soul. He had in fact prayed it himself thus. He 
even says that such vocal-mental prayer is the safest, being least liable 
to harm the head and spirits, in modern language strain the nerves. 
But he thought that under contemporary conditions the Office could 
not ordinarily be used as mental prayer. 

If, however, the Office can be prayed aspiratively why can it not at 
a lower stage be prayed as a prayer of forced acts ? It would seem 
eminently adapted for this. Some modern representatives of the 
Bakerite tradition maintain that the function of the Office is not 
to be a mental prayer, but solely to fulfil man's obligation to worship 
God. But in the last resort what is worship, if it is more than external, 
but the raising up of the soul to God, and its surrender to His Majesty ? 
Does not the Gloria Patri involve in principle the complete abandon- 
ment to God which the spiritual ascent with its degrees of prayer 
progressively realises ? And what is the i i8th Psalm, recited on so many 
days of the year, but a series of acts of submission to, and aspiration 
after, the law, that is the will, of God, the essence therefore and object 
of the immediate acts recommended by Fr. Baker ? Certainly where 
the Office is recited in choir at a pace allowing no return upon dis- 
tractions or slowing down and the regular life admits them, there 
will and should be set times for mental prayer apart from the Office, 
though, even so, a portion of the latter might well provide the material 
of acts. Where, however, circumstances do not allow more time for 
prayer, the Office recited in whole or part is surely the best form of 
prayer. For its acts are made in unison with the Church and guided 
by her appointment, in accordance with the scheme of redemption 
celebrated in her liturgical year. Even Fr. Baker was not unaffected 
by the liturgical decay which had already begun. 

These differences on points of detail do not affect my conviction that 
Fr. Baker's spiritual doctrine is the most practically valuable that 
I am acquainted with for all who desire a life inspired and guided by 
prayer. Many writers hold up a very high and difficult ascetical ideal, 
without showing how it may be attained, others are too emotional 



IQ2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

If not sentimental, others are rather theoretical than practical., others 
take our devotion no further than the Saints and the Sacred Humanity, 1 
and others describe summits to which only a minute number are 
called. Fr. Baker, especially if read together with the Cloud on which 
he commented and illustrated by the inner life and devotion of his 
great-hearted disciple, Gertrude More, leads us with gentle yet firm 
guidance towards God. He asks us to correspond with, not to out- 
step grace, to observe our individual call instead of burdening our 
souls with the practices and prayers of others, even if in themselves 
more perfect than ours. Though he does not hide from us that the 
ascent Is rough and steep, he assures us that we shall be guided and 
supported by a Guide who will not ask for any exertion beyond the 
strength which He alone can accurately gauge, since He gives it Himself. 
The principles of what was known in Fr. Baker's lifetime as Bakerism 
can be taught to all of ordinary intelligence, while inexhaustible by 
the most Intelligent. They can and should be the foundation of the 
spiritual education of Catholic children. If this were the case there 
would not be such a lamentable tale of lapsed Catholics. Those 
trained in the school of the Spirit will have received the best security 
against the materialism of the modern world and its human idolatries. 
The conversion of Mr. Fursden's mother-in-law would be repeated 
time and again by the employment of the same Bakerite method. 
No one to whom Catholicism had been presented, as Fr. Baker presents 
it, could possibly imagine that priest, director or saint, not even Our 
Lady or the humanity of Our Lord came between The Catholic and 
God, or interfered with his direct access to the Triune Godhead, 
incomprehensible in His transcendence yet apprehended by faith 
and intimately present in the soul, as nothing created can be, however 
holy. 

Fr. Baker's doctrine is so simple, so discreet, so replete with sanctified 
commonsense, that it is difficult to convey its distinctive quality, 
traditional originality if the oxymoron may be excused and homely 
sublimity. The Abbe Bremond might have done justice to Fr. Baker 
and Bakerism, though he would perhaps have over-refined and subtilised 
them, I can but implore any readers who do not already know their 
Baker to make his acquaintance. If Sancta Sophia seems too large a 
mouthful to begin with, though selections could easily be made, there 
is his own abridgment of Bakerism in his Inner Life of Dame Gertrude 
More. Or if we would begin with his biography, there are the auto- 
biographical portions of the Secretum excerpted and arranged by 
Dom Justin McCann under the title The Confessions of Father Baker 
and the two longer lives by Salvin and Cressy, edited together by Dom 

1 Like the author of The Cloud, Fr. Baker observes the Augustinlan rule per 
Christum Hominem ad Christum Deum. 



DOM AUGUSTINE BAKER 193 

McCann. Finally, there is the book to which Fr. Baker owed so much 
and which we cannot separate from him, a book which has lately 
attracted, though not without serious misconception, Aldous Huxley. 
I mean the Cloud of Unknowing^ now published with Fr. Baker's 
commentary. Those who desire to practise Fr. Baker's prayer 
of acts, assuming of course they have the requisite call, will find his 
own collection at the end of Sancta Sophia. And there are the acts 
from which he partly derived them, those compiled by Blosius. Or 
there are the longer affective prayers by Dame Gertrude More, 
published in a special volume. Her Idiot's Devotions, however, are not 
hers but Fr, Baker's, consisting in the main of the acts appended to 
Sancta Sophia. In one way or another come to Fr. Baker. The result 
will not fail to be a large addition to the Bakerites. And I know no 
better, wiser or safer school of prayer. So I end by echoing Fr. 
Baker's petition : 

"The blessed spirit of prayer rest upon us all." 



REV. J. LEONARD, C.M. 



ST. VINCENT DE PAUL 



A.D. i 81-1660 

A FEW YEARS AGO, at the annual meeting of The Mental After-Care 
Association, the Chairman, in the course of his report, after 
pointing out that this work cc for poor persons convalescent or removed 
from institutions for the insane " calls for the highest qualities and 
energies of a staff as it demands patience, knowledge, tact, ability 
and personality, went on to say : "in its work the Association is 
carrying out the injunction of the almost forgotten but great and 
farseeing Vincent de Paul who was certainly the first to proclaim that 
mental disease was not different from bodily disease and that 
Christianity demanded of the humane and the powerful to protect 
and the skilful to relieve the one as well as the other," And Lord 
Wakefield of Hythe, in his opening address at this meeting (1933) 
declared that ce there can be no finer task than that which seeks to 
lighten the darkness of night in mortal minds." 

It is true, no doubt, that the name of Vincent de Paul is almost 
forgotten, if indeed it was ever remembered, outside Catholic circles 
in the English-speaking world, but in those circles the name of " this 
great and far-seeing man " has been for over three centuries a household 
word, and his long life was devoted in a wider and nobler sense than 
perhaps Lord Wakefield intended " to lighten the darkness of night 
in mortal minds." 

Vincent de Paul was born on April 24th, 1581, in the hamlet of Pouy, 
a few miles from the town of Dax in the old French province of Gascony. 
Both his father and mother, Jean de Paul and Bertrande de Moras, 
were of yeoman stock and he was the third of their six children, three 
boys and three girls. Like all country lads he helped in the work of 
his father's farm and was never tired of telling his noble friends 
in later life that he had herded swine in his youth. As he was both 
industrious and intelligent, his father sent him, whilst still quite a 
child, to a College directed by the Friars Minor in Dax where he made 
such a good impression that he was to all intents and purposes adopted 
by the resident magistrate of the district, a certain M. de Comet. 
When he had finished his classical studies, he proceeded to Toulouse, 



ST. VINCENT DE PAUL 795 

then second in the estimation of the learned to the great University 
of Paris, to pursue his studies in philosophy and theology which lasted 
for seven years. He was ordained sub-deacon and deacon in 1598 
and, two years later, on September 23rd, 1600, was raised to the 
priesthood. He opened an " Academy for the sons of the nobility and 
gentry " and in 1605 was summoned to Bordeaux to the Duke of 
Epernon, a relative of one of his pupils, who wished to nominate him 
to a bishopric. Nothing, however, came of this for, on his journey 
homewards, whilst travelling from Marseilles to Narbonne by sea, 
he was captured by Barbary pirates and then began a series of 
adventures which the late Abbe Bremond described as " the last of 
the Arabian nights." He was first sold to a fisherman and then to an 
old alchemist who employed him as an assistant in the pursuit of 
" the philosopher's stone." He was subsequently purchased by a 
renegade Savoyard on one of whose three wives, a Greek schismatic, 
he made such an impression by his conversation that she reproached her 
husband for having abandoned the religion professed by his slave. 
The renegade resolved to attempt an escape from Barbary, and 
accompanied by Vincent they succeeded in reaching Aigues-Mortes 
in the summer of 1607. They went on to Avignon where they were 
welcomed by the Papal Vice-Legate who shortly afterwards took them 
along with him to Rome. Two letters written by the Saint to M. de 
Comet have been preserved in which he gives a vivid, racy and amusing 
account of his adventures. The reader can see from them that at 
this time Vincent de Paul was a young man, anxious to acquire 
information of every description, especially scientific, easily able to 
make friends, kind-hearted, generous, anxious to please, adventurous, 
ambitious for preferment and withal devout and possessed of an 
unlimited trust in Providence. After a year and a half in Rome, he 
was entrusted with a diplomatic mission to Henri IV and arrived in 
Paris towards the end of 1608. After some time, he obtained the 
post of chaplain to Queen Marguerite of Navarre. In 1610 he passed 
through a severe spiritual crisis which determined the course of the 
remaining half century of his life and set his feet definitely on the 
road to sanctity from which they never subsequently wandered. 

One of his fellow-chaplains, a learned and distinguished theologian, 
suffered from such violent temptations against the faith that he 
contemplated suicide. He poured out his troubles to Vincent who gave 
him good advice which, however, proved unavailing and, in the end, 
moved by the wretched theologian's mental agony, Vincent prayed 
to God to be allowed to bear the other's burden. His prayer was 
answered and for four or five years he was the victim of appalling 
doubts not only concerning the Christian religion but even the existence 
of God. Those doubts were subsequently overcome but not until after 



igS GREAT CATHOLICS 

he had resolved " to honour Jesus Christ more fully and to imitate 
Him more perfectly " than he had hitherto done by " devoting his 
whole life, for the sake of Jesus Christ, to the service of the poor. 55 
Up to this time he does not seem to have lived a life any way different 
from that of the average, contemporary, devout ecclesiastic, but 
from then onwards he set out determinedly to imitate as closely as he 
could the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ. 

He was then thirty years of age, " of medium height, well-built 
and well-proportioned. 5 ' His hair was black, his complexion olive 
and he wore the slight moustache and closely-cropped beard then usual 
with the French clergy. He had a remarkably fine head ; the brow 
was high, broad and " majestic," the nose large and fleshy, the jaws 
clean-cut and determined, the chin square and strong, the mouth 
wide and close-lipped. But the most striking feature of his counten- 
ance were the eyes " which were dark, deep-set, and twinkling with 
humour, mischief and irony." All his life long he bore the marks 
of his race and early environment and though his natural gifts and 
qualities were purified and ennobled as he advanced in holiness, he 
never utterly ceased to be a Gascon son of the soil. Even as a young 
man, he was possessed of a remarkable fund of good sense and he 
could not easily be imposed on by even the greatest and most learned. 
He had indeed a profound respect for the powers that be in Church 
and State, great prudence and powers of discrimination, a marked 
reserve of manner with a tendency to secrecy and self-communing. 
He spoke easily and well and his conversation was enlivened by a 
spice of mischief which revealed at times that not only was he a man of 
undoubted originality but that he had never fully lost his Gascon 
sense of humour and love of adventure. 

When he had set out on the road to Christian perfection he was 
enlightened and guided by two remarkable men, Cardinal de B6rulle 
and St. Francis de Sales. B6rulle, according to St. Vincent, u was 
endowed with such solid learning and holiness that his like could not 
be found." His powerful and original mind, after long meditation 
on the Scriptures, set forth a body of doctrine that was to prove of 
lasting importance to the Church of France. " He saw God in 
everything and everything in God and taught a lesson of utter self- 
renunciation, absolute detachment from creatures and an entire 
immolation of self, combined with a continual absorption in God and 
an unceasing reference, not only to the example but to the * states ' 
of the Incarnate Word." The essentials of his mystical teaching were 
subsequently translated into simple language by St. Vincent for 
the benefit of his disciples, both men and women, but much more 
effectively and strikingly in his own daily life. In 1619 he became 
acquainted with St. Francis de Sales and was soon on terms of intimate 



ST. VINCENT DE PAUL IQJ 

friendship with " the blessed bishop of Geneva." There can be little 
doubt that the example and writings of St. Francis exercised a 
stronger and more lasting impression on St. Vincent than did those 
of any of his contemporaries. According to Pope Pius XI, the great 
truth for which St. Francis de Sales stands is that holiness of life is 
not a privilege of the few to the exclusion of the many but that all 
Christians are called to it and the obligation of arriving at it is 
incumbent on all. He combated " the prejudice that true holiness 
appears to be surrounded by so many difficulties that it cannot be 
attained by those living in the world/' and, " set out to show how 
holiness is perfectly reconcilable with every kind of duty and every 
condition of civil life." It may be said that in these words Abbot 
Butler summarises the history of St. Vincent's propagation and 
extension of the fundamental doctrines of St. Francis de Sales. 

In 1613, Vincent, guided by Berulle, accepted the cure of souls in 
the parish of Glichy, than a suburb of Paris, and this, according to 
himself, was the happiest time of his life. However, he did not enjoy 
it long for, again acting on Berulle 's advice, he took up the post of tutor 
to the children of Philip Emmanuel de Gondi, General of the Galleys, 
and chaplain to his household. St. Vincent was destined to spend 
twelve years with this family, save for a brief interval when he acted 
as parish priest of Chatillon-les-Dombes, and it was through the 
influence of the General and his wife that the Saint was enabled to 
begin a number of those great works of charity for which he became 
famous. The first of these was begun in a very small and simple way 
and the same holds true of all St. Vincent's enterprises. At Chatillon, 
he established an association of ladies to look after the material and 
spiritual needs of the poor In their own homes. The venture, thanks 
to the wise regulations he drew up for its guidance, proved successful 
and, on his return to Paris, he founded a " Confraternity of Ladies of 
Charity " In several parishes In the city and also In towns and villages 
on the de Gondi estates. He also established similar Confraternities 
for men with this difference, that while the women's associations were 
primarily concerned to serve the sick poor In their own homes, the men's 
were concerned with poor persons who were able to work. It was 
on this model that Frederick Ozanam, two centuries later, established 
" The Society of St. Vincent de Paul " which now has branches 
throughout the whole world. 

One winter's night in 1625 whilst: Vincent was staying with the 
de Condi's in their chateau at Folleville In Picardy he was summoned 
to hear the confession of a dying man. On the following day, the 
man declared in the presence of Madame de Gondi that he had been 
making sacrilegious confessions for years and that, if he had not had the 
opportunity of confessing to St. Vincent, he would have died in his sins. 



198 GREAT CATHOLICS 

This incident made a profound impression on the lady, who conceived 
the idea of inviting members of religious Orders in Paris to go round 
her estates, instructing the peasants on the principal mysteries of 
religion and on the benefits of making general confessions. She laid 
aside for this purpose the sum of 20,000, the interest on which was 
calculated to defray all the expenses of these missions, but as none of 
the Orders approached were able to undertake the work she turned to 
her chaplain and prevailed on him to make a beginning. With a few 
friends he took up his residence in an old College of the University of 
Paris called Les Eons Enfants, of which he had been made Principal, 
and in this way the Congregation of the Mission came into existence. 

De Condi, as General of the Galleys, was responsible for the lot 
of the convicts condemned to man the galleys and the state of physical, 
moral and religious degradation in which the wretched men were 
compelled to live was appalling. St. Vincent reminded the General of 
his obligations and a serious attempt was made to better their condition. 
Hospitals for sick convicts were provided in Paris and Marseilles, 
and the Saint's untiring efforts for the material and spiritual welfare 
of those wretched men resulted in his being appointed Chaplain 
General of all the King's Galleys by Louis XIII in 1639. In his old 
age he once remarked : " If God has been pleased to make use of the 
most miserable of men for the conversion of some heretics, they them- 
selves declared that this was due to the patience and kindness that 
were shown them. Even the convicts with whom I lived were won 
over by no other means and if I chanced to speak coldly to them I 
spoiled everything ; on the other hand, when I praised their resigna- 
tion, sympathised with them in their sufferings and kissed their chains, 
then it was that they listened to me." 

After the death of Madame de Gondi, Vincent went to reside 
permanently in the College des Bons Enfants. In 1632, he moved 
to the ancient and extensive Priory of St. Lazare which became his 
headquarters and the centre of all his activities until his death on 
September 27th, 1660. 

The preaching of missions in country districts made him realise 
that if this work were to prove permanently fruitful it was essential 
to provide the people with a zealous and devout pastoral clergy. He 
knew from experience that the clergy and especially the country clergy 
were, in general, ill-fitted for their duties. The first step he took for 
their reformation was to bring together candidates for ordination 
before they received Holy Orders and, whilst arousing their fervour 
by means of a spiritual retreat, to supply them with a brief course of 
pastoral theology. This experiment was begun at Beauvais and 
proved to be a success. Subsequently, thanks to the generosity of 
his friends, he was able to supply free board and lodging for all 



ST. VINCENT DE PAUL 199 

ecclesiastics who made a retreat at St. Lazare and this work was 
developed and extended during his life-time to other European 
countries. In the course of time, gratuitous retreats for laymen were 
also given at St. Lazare and, within the period that elapsed from 
their institution until his death, more than twenty thousand laymen 
had made a spiritual retreat within the walls of the old Priory. 

The spiritual welfare of ecclesiastics, however, was Vincent's work 
of predilection and in 1633 he established an association of priests 
who met every Tuesday at St. Lazare to confer on moral, religious 
and spiritual topics and from this body some of the most eminent 
bishops of the Church of France in the XVI I th century were drawn. 
Bossuet, who had been a member, wrote : " When raised to the 
priesthood, we were associated with this group of ecclesiastics who met 
weekly to treat together on divine matters. Vincent was its author 
and its soul. Whilst we listened hungrily to his instructions, there 
was not one of us who did not feel that the words of the Apostle were 
being fulfilled : ' If any man speak, let his speech be that of God V 

A further extension of the training of the clergy and one destined 
to be more fruitful and permanent than any yet attempted by St. 
Vincent was the establishment of seminaries. The Council of Trent 
had called for the erection of clerical seminaries but up to this time 
the few and scattered attempts to carry out its recommendations had 
proved of little avail, especially in France. In 1635, a ft er Vincent 
had moved to St. Lazare, he started what would now be called 
a " petty " seminary in the Bons Enfants where the boys received a 
semi-literary, semi-religious education with a view to the priesthood. 
He was dissatisfied with the results, transferred the seminary to a 
building in the grounds of St. Lazare and, in 1642, established 
a " major " or " great " seminary in the College des Bons Enfants. 

As his Congregation increased in numbers its activities were 
multiplied. He was asked by Rome to send his missionaries to various 
European countries, including Scotland and Ireland, and willingly 
did so. Mr. Compton Mackenzie says that the preservation of the 
Faith in the Hebrides and portions of the Highlands was mainly due to 
the efforts of those priests and that St. Vincent de Paul deserves to be 
known as " The Apostle of the Hebrides. 5 ' As time went on the 
missionaries were sent to preach the Gospel in pagan and infidel 
lands and the history of their apostolic labours in Barbary and 
Madagascar is one of the brightest pages in the annals of the propaga- 
tion of the Faith in the XVIIth century. 

Whilst all this work was going on for the reform of the clergy and 
the preaching of the Gospel, St. Vincent never ceased for a moment 
to look after the spiritual and temporal welfare of the poor and 
afflicted. The Confraternities of Charity were intended to provide 



200 GREAT CATHOLICS 

opportunities for women of wealth and position to manifest their love 
of God by the exercise of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. 
It soon became evident that, partly owing to inexperience and the 
legitimate demands of their family and social obligations, their efforts 
needed to be supplemented by some regular, trained, permanent 
body. It was this that led to the foundation of the Company of 
Daughters of Charity who were intended to co-operate with and 
complete the work of the Ladies. The beginnings of this new Society, 
at the present day the most numerous and widespread Order in 
the Church, were very simple. In 1634, one of the most active and 
experienced of the Ladies of Charity received four or five devout 
country girls into her home and undertook to provide for their mainten- 
ance and their spiritual and professional training. This lady was 
Louise de Marillac, a niece of Marshal de Marillac and his brother 
the Keeper of the Seals, who was by now the widow of Antoine Le 
Gras, the private secretary of Marie de Medici. Louise was of an 
ardent and generous disposition but of a rather restless, unhappy and 
scrupulous temperament. Under the guidance of St. Vincent she 
learned to be calm, serene and even gay and ultimately attained to such 
heights of heroic virtue as to be canonised by Pope Pius XL 

The Daughters, or Sisters, of Charity began with visiting and 
nursing the sick poor in their homes but as their number increased, 
they gradually extended their ministrations until these embraced nearly 
every form of Christian charitable endeavour. In 1638 they opened 
a Foundling Hospital. For many years those unfortunate babies had 
been allowed to die of hunger and neglect ; they were even sold to 
beggars who mutilated their limbs to arouse the sympathy of the 
public and extort alms. It is estimated that, during the first quarter 
of a century after the foundation of the Hospital, more than forty 
thousand children had been rescued from starvation or death. In 
1653 they undertook the management of a Hospice of the Name of 
Jesus which afforded a home for forty poor men and an equal number 
of women who were saved from a life of mendicancy, and this institution 
proved to be the forerunner of many similar establishments. Three 
years later, St. Vincent was asked to undertake a much more difficult 
task. The streets of Paris swarmed with able-bodied beggars whose 
numbers were estimated at not less than forty thousand and whose 
ranks were filled with thieves, prostitutes and criminals of every kind. 
The Government determined to open a General Hospice for all 
beggars who would be compelled to clear off the streets and go there. 
The idea of compulsion was utterly distasteful to St. Vincent. He 
wished to begin with a couple of hundred volunteers who, by showing 
that they were content with the way they were being treated, might 
induce others to enter the Hospice freely. Though his proposal was 



ST. VINCENT DE PAUL 2OI 

rejected, he did his best to make the lot of the inmates more tolerable 
by sending the Sisters of Charity to manage the institution. The 
manifold labours of these devoted women were not confined to Paris. 
Before their founder's death they were at work in many cities of France 
and had even gone as far afield as Poland. 

The establishment of the Company of the Daughters of Charity 
was a daring experiment. Hitherto, devout women who wished to 
devote their lives to the service of God had had to retire within the walls 
of a monastery and Vincent de Paul was now sending them out not only 
into the streets and slums of great cities but also to the battlefields of 
Europe. The success of this experiment was due to the fact that, in 
conformity with his principles and ideals of government, he was 
prepared to allow vital concepts to develop without undue interference, 
that he was always ready to learn from experience and never in a hurry 
to promulgate fixed sets of rules and regulations. He was fond of 
quoting St. Luke's statement: " Jesus began to do and to teach" 
and based his methods on that text. When he did set down rules in 
writing it was only after they had been tested by years of experience 
and even then he allowed them to be modified by local conditions 
and needs. He was prepared to face any contingency and had learned 
the secret of turning obstacles, in which he recognised the guidance 
of divine Providence, into means of action. 

On the death of Louis XIII in 1643, the Queen Regent, Anne of 
Austria, established a council to deal with the ecclesiastical affairs 
of the kingdom and summoned Vincent to take his place at the 
" Council of Conscience," as it came to be known. Despite his 
reluctance, for he had made it a principle never to discuss, still less 
to intervene in, affairs of State, he was forced to accept the honour and 
remained a member of the Council for ten years when he was dismissed 
by Mazarin whose policy and statecraft were antipathetic to all that 
St. Vincent held most dear. 

The bulk of the work of the Council fell on the Saint's shoulders 
and he laboured courageously and untiringly for the welfare of the 
Church of France. He co-operated with the men and women who were 
bent on restoring the primitive fervour of their respective Orders by 
securing the nomination of Abbots and Abbesses who were worthy 
of their position. He endeavoured to have devout and learned 
ecclesiastics appointed to vacant benefices and especially to bishoprics. 
In this he was not always successful for he had constantly to with- 
stand the open or concealed opposition of Mazarin who looked on a 
valuable benefice or great bishopric as a means of securing supporters 
of his political schemes. Vincent de Paul had also to see that the 
provisions of the Edict of Nantes were observed and although he did 
not love heresy he certainly did not hate heretics. " He acted firmly 



202 GREAT CATHOLICS 

but never bitterly ; it was always evident that it was never his intention 
to wound Christian charity and that he well knew how to discriminate 
between men and their religious opinions. He was fully convinced 
that persuasion and not force is not only the better but the more 
successful way of leading men's minds back to the truths of religion 
and never failed to render justice to his Huguenot fellow-countrymen." 
As a member of the Council he had to oppose Jansenism and no 
episode of his career does him greater honour. He had known the 
leaders of the party intimately and had for years been on terms of 
close friendship with the " patriarch of Port-Royal " the enigmatic 
Abbe de Saint-Cyran, whose life he saved when threatened by 
Richelieu's suspicions. As a man of action he had a natural antipathy 
to subtle theological controversies and was convinced that the energies 
and abilities of " the gentlemen of Port- Royal " might have been 
more profitably expended in labouring for the salvation of souls. 
Pascal, indeed, in the last months of his brief life, would seem to have 
reached the same conclusion. 

Finally, he was called to play a part in the civil wars of the Fronde 
and here he adopted the ungrateful role of " honest broker." In 
January, 1649, ^e ma -d e an attempt to secure peace that nearly cost 
him his life when he left Paris to persuade Mazarin to retire at least 
for a time from public life. He failed and characteristically laid the 
blame on himself. The civil wars were carried on for three years 
and during this dreadful time, one of the darkest in the history of 
France, he worked unceasingly to provide the unfortunate people, 
harried by the troops of both parties, with the consolations of religion 
and with supplies of money, food, clothing, seeds, agricultural 
implements and tools. The Lieutenant-General of St. Quentin, in a 
letter thanking him for having saved the lives of hundreds of thousands 
of poor men and women, saluted him with the title of Pater Patriae, 
and surely no man ever better deserved the noble title of Father of 
his country. 

It surely can be no matter of surprise that the character and career 
of Vincent de Paul has aroused feelings of sympathetic admiration 
even in the most unexpected quarters. Voltaire, for instance, in a 
letter to the Marquis de Villette, writes : " Vincent de Paul is my 
saint ; he is the patron of founders. He has left more useful monu- 
ments behind him than did his sovereign Louis XIII. Amidst the 
wars of the Fronde he was equally respected by both sides. He alone 
could have prevented the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He desired 
to have the infernal bell that gave the signal for the massacre 
demolished. He was so humble of heart that he declined to wear, 
on the feasts of the Church, the vestments that had been presented to 
him by the Medicis." 



ST. VINCENT DE PAUL 203 

St. Vincent de Paul's love for his fellow-men was, however, based 
on more noble and enduring principles than those dreamed of by the 
philosopher of Ferney and his associates. He had realised, like every 
Catholic saint, that the great fundamental truth of the Christian 
religion is the Fatherhood of God Who, because He is Father, loves 
His divine Son and, in Him, all men. St. Vincent showed by words 
and example that men are bound to love one another with the same 
love with which God loves them and that if men will not love their 
brethren in Jesus Christ neither do they love God nor does God love 
them. This was the truth that guided and inspired his life and that 
earned for him the glorious title of Patron Saint of all works of charity 
in the Catholic Church, which was conferred on him by Pope Pius X. 



MONTAGUE SUMMERS, M.A., F.R.S.L. 



JOHN DRYDEN 



A.D. 1631 1700 

THERE ARE FEW, if any, among the greatest names in the annals 
of our native literature who during past centuries have suffered 
more reverses from the ebb and flow of time than John Dryden. His 
genius was amply recognized by his contemporaries. He was honoured 
and rewarded by two kings ; indisputably he dominated, and justly 
dominated living and dead the whole field of English letters, 
criticism, poetry, the drama, for full a hundred years. Yet even 
during his own life his creed and politics were detested : he was 
insulted and deprived by a usurper ; amid the ribald laughter of a 
turncoat town he was held up to scorn and reprobation in libels of 
almost unexampled foulness and brutality. Among the professed 
critics, the phlegmatic Addison, as we might have expected, at once 
proved niggling, spleenful and unfair. Jacob Tonson used to 
attribute this ugly caprice to sheer jealousy. He was " so eager to 
be the first named " himself, said the shrewd old publisher, but at the 
same time it is also clear that his rigidity and narrowness could not 
endure the splendid glow of Dryden's faith. In conversation too 
Addison's tongue was that of a common backbiter, so " that he and his 
friend. Sir Richard Steele, used to run down even Dryden's character 
as far as they could," to the loudly expressed indignation of Pope and 
Congreve who warmly championed the friend they had so dearly 
loved. Alexander Pope, indeed, and Pope's mighty school hailed 
Dryden as the Master ; to the Augustans his " energy divine " was a 
ceaseless inspiration. Dr. Johnson eloquently argued his supremacy, 
but did not set himself to solve the secret of that supremacy. Barely 
two generations later T. B. Macaulay shows himself (as his wont) 
insolent and currish and dull in his attacks which are plainly begotten 
of bigotry or prejudice. Not a few Romantics (and Gray who should 
have known better is but lukewarm) even from Joseph Warton's day 
had been eyeing Dryden with a certain grudging, a certain ungenerous 
suspicion. The personality and influence of " our immortal bard " 
to use the phrase of Scott, a passionate admirer, they were perforce 
bound to recognize, but curiously such men as Wordsworth, Southey, 

204 



JOHN DRYDEN 205 

Coleridge could not see that Dryden is essentially a romantic poet 
and yet one would have thought this must be self-evident to a reader, 
however casual, of those glorious tragedies " Tyrannick Love, 5 * " The 
Conquest of Granada," " Aureng-Zebe," " Don Sebastian," or the 
St. Cecilia Odes, the songs, " The Hind and the Panther," the " Fables " 
to cite no more. That Dryden is a romantic poet was plain enough 
to Dr. Johnson when he wrote : " Dryden's page is a natural field, 
rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of 
abundant vegetation ; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, 
and levelled by the roller." " Do you wish for invention, imagina- 
tion, sublimity, character? Seek them," bids Lord Byron, "in the 
Fables of Dryden, the * Ode of Saint Cecilia's Day, 5 and c Absalom 
and Achitophel.' " 

If the Surrealists of to-day were gifted with real penetration instead 
of lamenting over Dryden as an artist who was hampered and 
repressed by the conventions of education and social environment 
they would appreciate that in Dryden we have a striking figure of 
the man who so far from conforming to any stale academic tradition 
or accepting the current norms of taste had a power of intellectual 
strength to rise above his age, towering like a Titan, that he was the 
man who moulded his age, not only deciding questions of literature 
and art but guiding it along subtlest lines of philosophical inquiry 
and above all directing it in religious debate. Those of that following 
who are blind to this confess themselves self-betrayed. 

By common consent the position of Dryden is at last stabilized. 
It is conceded by all (a few eccentrics except) that he has his place 
in the very front of English literature. He is to be named with the 
greatest, with Chaucer and with Shakespeare. To my mind it is 
neither fanciful nor impertinent to emphasize that all three were 
Catholics, for Dryden achieved his noblest and most thoughtful work 
after his conversion. Inevitably their Catholicism gave these three 
poets a broader outlook, a deeper understanding, a more determined 
and steadier standpoint. ; 

John Dryden was born on the gth August, 1631, at the residence 
of his maternal grandfather, the rectory of Aldwincle All Saints, a 
Northamptonshire village of small size or note. It lies rather more 
than a league from the market-town of Thrapston, which Is to say, 
that it is distant five-and-twenty miles from Peterborough. In 1931 
the population of the two parishes, Aldwincle All Saints and Aldwincle 
St. Peter's, only numbered 316. Concerning Erasmus Dryden, the 
poet's father, whose seat was at Titchmarsh, nearby, little is known 
save that he was regarded as a person of considerable importance 
during the Commonwealth, being spoken of as * c a zealous committee- 
man " on one of the abominable Sequestration Boards, and that he 



2o6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

was long a busy Justice of the Peace for the county, activities which 
in those dark days are only too sadly indicative of his views. Mary 
Dryden, his wife, was the daughter of the Rev. Henry Pickering, a 
divine of the starch Genevan opinion, who served the ministry of 
Aldwincle All Saints for forty years, dying in 1637. The poet in 
fine came of dour Puritan stock, as indeed his rabble of opponents 
never missed to remind him and generally in very scurrilous language, 
although it was a circumstance for which he quite clearly was not 
responsible, and which he could neither alter nor avoid. It is worth 
remarking, however, that there are absolutely no grounds, save for 
the accident of the Parish Registers of 1631 being lost, for the canard 
that Dryden as an infant was never baptized, since the baptisms of 
nine of his brothers and sisters, including his sister Agnes who was 
carried to the font only fifteen months after his own birth, are duly 
recorded at Titchmarsh. 

The boy Dryden received part of his earlier education at Oundle 
Grammar School whence about the time of the Civil War's breaking 
out he was admitted a King's Scholar at Westminster under the 
regimen of our English Orbilius, the celebrated and plagosus Dr. 
Richard Busby. On the nth May, 1650, he proceeded, a Westminster 
Scholar, to Trinity College, Cambridge, and here he matriculated 
on the following 6th July. His Cambridge career was interrupted 
for a month or two at least by the death of his father from whom he 
inherited a small estate. He took his B.A. in 1654, after which we 
lose sight of him for a short while, and it is uncertain, perhaps un- 
important, whether he continued to keep terms at Cambridge or resided 
in the country on his own holdings. 

Of one thing we are very sure, he occupied those formative years 
in study, not only of books, but of systems, living ideals and men. 
** For my own part who must confess it to my shame . . ."he cries 
in his Life of Plutarch (1683), " I never read anything but for pleasure." 
Now pleasure for Dryden did not imply a mere passing and easy 
entertainment, it meant the permanent and abiding satisfaction of an 
intellect of the first order, which was always vivid, always eager and 
inquiring, always consciously or unconsciously on the quest for beauty 
and the ultimate truth. Immortalitatem sapientice concupiscebam astu 
cordis incredibili says the great Doctor of Hippo, and in his degree, 
surprising as the parallel may appear, Dryden nearly resembled the 
student St. Augustine. 

" A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a 
reasonable, philosophical, and in some measure a mathematical head, 
to be a complete and excellent poet ; and besides this, should have 
experience in all sorts of humours and manners of men. 35 Such was 
Dryden's considered judgment. A Cambridge contemporary bears 



JOHN DRYDEN 207 

witness how whilst yet an undergraduate he had " read over and 
very well understood all the Greek and Latin poets. " Let modern 
educationalists so called assert what they will, there is no surer 
foundation of a complete and universal culture than a knowledge of 
the Greek and Latin classical authors. It is a significant detail that 
Dryden preferred Rome to Hellas ; he was more at home with Vergil 
and Lucretius than with Homer and Theocrite. 

He did not aspire to the immense erudition of a Burton, nor was 
he prepossessed by the precise pedantry of Thomas Farnabie. On the 
other hand he was perfectly familiar with the great critics, Longinus 
and Aristotle, together with the Italian Commentators on Aristotle, 
Vettori, Robortello, Castelvetro, Minturni, Vida, Father Tarquinio 
Galluzzi, S.J., Beni, Archbishop Piccolomini, and the rest. Congreve, 
himself no mean scholar, used to express his wonder at Dryden's 
unfailing memory. He is indeed never at a loss for the happiest 
illustration from Persius, or Seneca or Claudian or Plutarch to under- 
score the point he makes. Very beautifully and elegantly he can 
turn a passage from a Latin poet for one of his heroic dramas, such 
for example as the admired soliloquy of Cortez in Act III of " The 
Indian Emperour " : 

All things are hush'd, as Nature's self lay dead, 
The Mountains seem to nod their drowsie head ; 
The little Birds in dreams their Songs repeat, 
And sleeping Flowers, beneath the night-dew sweat ; 
Ev'n Lust and Envy sleep, yet Love denies 
Rest to my Soul, and slumber to my Eyes. 

The ideas are suggested by Statius, in the ode " To Sleep " in the 
" Sylvas." True, Dryden is often careless enough in the letter of his 
quotations. But what matter if recalling a line from the " Georgics " 
he writes quamvis sit rustica instead of quamvis est rustica, or has nee 
linger et for neque linger et in the seventh " ^Eneid " or varies Martial's 
Qua possis melius to Ut melius ? His was the true spirit of the finest 
classical scholars, not the grammarians, not the academies, old and 
new, so nicely correct, so dull and dead, but the spirit of those whose 
hearts burn with the loveliness and who are ennobled by the dignity 
of Latin literature, which the modern hectic world is so fast learning 
to forget. In one place Dryden says that when reading some poet 
or historian, or to use his own vivid phrase when he hears his author 
speaking, he is ready to think himself engaged in actual conversation 
" with the greatest heroes and most prudent men of the greatest age," 
and, he adds, " This sets me ... on fire "... astu cordis incredibilL 

He was for ever turning over and over the Latin poets, ever finding 
some new beauty, ever lighting upon some vein of thought he would 



2 o8 GREAT CATHOLICS 

work deep to enrich our native English tongue, and from the poets, 
from Virgil chlefest of all, he absorbed in his own character something 
of the true Roman virtue, virtus in its highest and completest sense, 
that quality which was to stand him in good stead when against 
overwhelming odds conscience called upon him to make and to 
maintain the most momentous decision that it is given for men to cast. 
That he often stumbled on his road, early and late ; that he often 
fell far below his own ideals ; that he even seemed to contradict 
himself and was indeed inconsistent, is not to be denied. Dryden's 
admirers have often deplored these vagaries. I would emphasize the 
fact that so soon as he became a Catholic they ceased to exist. Even 
ten years previously in the Dedication of his tragedy " Aureng-Zebe," 
published in 1676, he gives a pretty good account of himself: " I 
will not be too positive. ... As I am a Man, I must be changeable : 
and sometimes the gravest of us all are so, even upon ridiculous 
accidents. Our minds are perpetually wrought on by the tempera- 
ment of our bodies, which makes me suspect : they are nearer alli'd, 
than either our Philosophers or School-Divines will allow them to 
be. ... An ill Dream, or a Cloudy day, has power to change this 
wretched Creature, who is so proud of a reasonable Soul, and make 
him think what he thought not yesterday." 

When the crucial moment was reached Dryden was not found 
wanting, he embraced what he knew to be Eternal Truth, he made 
his submission to the Holy See, and his duty once plain to him, his 
word once given, suffer as he might he never for a moment wavered, 
he never looked back from that allegiance. There was much of the 
spirit of heroic virtue I use the term in its strict theological 
signification in John Dryden. A little later we shall see something 
of what his conversion entailed from a purely temporal point of view. 

The most striking feature in the development of John Dryden's 
ideas is the man's sheer intellectual honesty. His was an argued 
conviction, arrived at logically step by step, that a certain course was 
the right and hence the only course, and that course he adopted, 
regardless of consequences. There were, in a sense, no half-measures. 
Before he was convinced, whilst his religious views were still 
indeterminate he had no scruple about writing " The Assignation," 
a comedy which in spite of many brilliant passages and scenes of 
some considerable beauty it is hard to excuse from the charge of 
profanity, and he had dedicated " The Spanish Fryar " " a Protestant 
Play to a Protestant Patron." Once convinced, he was capable of 
rising to heroic heights of sacrifice. Nor was he supported by that 
passionate enthusiasm, which seems to sweep some happy souls with 
irresistible force. His conversion was so to speak absolutely 
cold-blooded, absolutely sincere. 



JOHN DRYDEN sag 

There were no easy transitions for a convert in the days of Charles 
II. When a man became a Catholic he must indeed have felt himself 
a stranger in a strange land. Furiously hated and attacked by those 
whom he had left, he was too often a suspect in the eyes of those whom 
he had joined, since the older folk for the most part showed themselves 
anything but cordial to new-comers, and they are hardly to be blamed 
inasmuch as they were surrounded on all sides by feed falsehood and 
the most murderous treachery. The convert had to learn new ways, 
a new language, to acquaint himself with a multitude of observances 
which must for a while at any rate have perplexed him as alien and 
unknown, Pepys records how one Christmas midnight curious 
sightseers, and he among them, crowded the Queen's chapel at 
Somerset House for the High Mass, agog to gape at the fantastic 
cradle and live infant that (rumour went) would be solemnly exhibited 
with all kinds of pageantry and theatrical show, rivalling Bartlemy 
Fair in full swing. Sadly mistaken and disappointed the good gossips 
proved to be. To-day there are High Anglicans who (as Father 
Woodlock said in Farm Street pulpit), bating one great essential, 
preach and practice nine-tenths of the Faith. In her recent intimate 
biography. Three Ways Home, Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith observes that 
although her allegiance has been transferred from Canterbury to 
Rome, from shifting sand to the Rock of Peter, her beliefs and religion 
have never changed. Such a statement would have been impossible 
in Stuart England. We may instance as a typical High Anglican of 
the most advanced school the pious Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, 
the cc Protestant Nunnery " as it was generally dubbed. Ferrar 
was a learned and devout recluse, an ascetic much given to good 
works, something of a mystic, the author of Contemplations on Death 
and other serious treatises, commonly reputed to be a hot papist, 
and one who for his way of life and his opinions suffered much from 
puritan persecution and annoy. Yet Ferrar solemnly averred that 
if he knew Mass had been said at any time in a room of his house he 
would level that room to the ground and utterly demolish it. 

In the Preface to Religio Laid Dryden declared that he was cc naturally 
inclined to scepticism in philosophy," which is hardly to be surprised 
at since he lived during a critical period in the history of thought, 
that juncture when the new and supple experimental science was 
attacking the established scholasticism, a conflict of systems in which 
the latter, although on English soil seemingly worsted for a while, 
has signally triumphed in the end, as we are happy enough to bear 
witness to-day. Fortunately Dryden was well trained and exercised 
in the scholastic habit, and from first to last he shows himself a practised 
disciple of the schools in his method of distinguishing and ranging 
his thoughts and arguments. " He delighted to talk of liberty and 



210 GREAT CATHOLICS 

necessity, destiny and contingence," says Dr. Johnson, whilst Swift 
sarcastically summed up " The Hind and the Panther " as " a complete 
abstract of sixteen thousand schoolmen from Scotus to Beliarmine." 
It is interesting to note that in " The State of Innocence, or The Fall 
of Man " when Adam " as newly created " rises from " a Bed of Moss 
and Flowers," he cries : 

What am I ? or from whence ? For that I am 
I know, because I think. 

Which is, of course, the " Cogito, ergo sum " of Descartes. What is 
yet more significant is Eve's line : " The sin which Heav'n makes 
Happy in th' event." The theology is correct. In the Paschal 
Praeconium the Deacon sings : " felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum 
meruit habere Redemptorem ! " 

It must not be forgotten that Dryden was a keen student of and 
indeed an adept in astrology. His own nativity and that of his son 
Charles, very exactly cast, are preserved at Oxford among the papers 
of Elias Ashmole. Towards the close of his life we find him writing to 
his two sons, who were then at Rome and members of the Papal house- 
hold, to tell them that he has himself cast Charles's nativity, and so can 
assure the boy he will soon recover his perfect health, " and all things 
hitherto have happened accordingly to the very time that I predicted 
them." 

The one sad blot an early but a grave error that stains Dryden 's 
character is the poem " Heroick Stanzas," which he wrote on the death 
of Oliver Cromwell, 1658, and which appeared in print with two similar 
copies of verse by Waller and Thomas Sprat respectively in the 
following year. It is, of course, possible to exaggerate the significance 
of these unfortunate quatrains, and throughout after years his enemies 
were never tired of twisting and colouring his panegyric (for a panegyric 
it must be confessed to be) to their worst ends, but it is revolting to think 
that their malice should have professed to discover in these cc Stanzas " 
such enormities as an approval of the murder of King Charles I, 
although nothing of the sort is hinted at or intended. 

In 1657, Dryden who was then aged twenty-six, had been appointed 
secretary to his relation Sir Gilbert Pickering, than whom few stood 
in higher favour with the usurper. Sir Gilbert indeed had occupied 
many political posts of the first importance. Thus he served on 
each of the five councils of state of the Commonwealth, acted as 
" Lord Chamberlain " of the " Protector's " court, and cut a fine 
figure in the Cromwellian mock cc House of Lords." To what more 
useful patron could a young cousin from the country on the threshold 
of his career apply in the hope of advancement ? It was in these 
circumstances that Dryden wrote the " Heroick Stanzas." 



JOHN DRYDEN 211 

After this unhappy passage it is with relief that we pass swiftly to the 
ringing sincerity of the Astrcea Redux, " A Poem On the Happy Restora- 
tion and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second," 1660, 
and the right loyal rapture of " To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyrick 
On His Coronation." JBoth were published by Henry Herringman the 
leading bookseller of the day, for whom at this time Dryden was doing 
a good deal of work. It was through Herringman that he met a son 
of the Earl of Berkshire, Sir Robert Howard, who had till the eve 
of the King's return been lying a prisoner, and for a while under 
sentence of death, at Windsor Castle, since the Puritans hated and 
feared him as the most dangerous of malignants and a notorious 
" favourer of Roman Catholicks." Sir Robert, himself a poet, essayist, 
and with some capital plays to his credit, soon became intimate with 
Dryden, and the friendship of this " ingenious Person " who enjoyed 
considerable influence with the King proved of inestimable service 
to the younger author. On the ist December, 1663, Dryden married 
Sir Robert's sister, the Lady Elizabeth Howard. 

Sir Robert not only wrote comedy and tragedy with equal facility 
and success but he had financially interested himself in the Theatre 
Royal, the King's own playhouse. Charles II was a keen and 
discerning patron of the stage, and when after the theatre had been 
silenced for eighteen years by the rebels, two houses were opened under 
royal patent in London at the Restoration, the actors naturally called 
for new and up-to-date fare to entertain their audiences. In a very 
few years Dryden had won his position as the leading dramatist of the 
day, upon which Dr. Johnson aptly remarks that " the composition 
and fate of eight-and-twenty dramas " includes no small part of a 
poetical life. 

His ninth play, produced at the Theatre Royal in June, 1669, is 
particularly interesting, and (as I think) this exquisite tragedy gives 
us clear insight into his opinions at that time. " Tyrannick Love ; 
or, The Royal Martyr " was written in compliment to Queen Catherine 
of Braganza, and the plot which tells the history of St. Catherine is 
directly derived from the hagiography of Symeon Metaphrastes. 
The figure of the Saint is beautifully drawn and designed with the 
utmost reverence, her famous contention with the Pagan philosophers 
being treated with no ordinary skill. In her " apologia " for 
Christianity, the heroine, with the keenest dialectic, fearlessly employs 
argument and illustrations which the most solid apologist might 
study with profit and conviction. It is pleasing to know that 
" Tyrannick Love " proved a tremendous success, and during its run, 
which was something extraordinary for those days, this " godly out of 
fashion Play " drew crowded houses. Moreover, it remained in the 
repertory for more than thirty years. 



212 GREAT CATHOLICS 

For the splendid wedding festivities which celebrated the arrival 
In England of Mary Beatrice of Modena, the bride of the Duke of 
York, the laureate Dryden composed an Opera, " The State of 
Innocence : and Fail of Man/' which when printed, three years later, 
In 16775 he dedicated to that amiable Princess with courtly compliment. 
Here he treats of the profoundest religious and philosophical problems 
such as that which conciliates moral liberty In man, the liberum 
arbitnum of the Schoolmen, with divine foreknowledge. St. Raphael 
and St. Gabriel discourse with Adam who inquires : 

Freedome of will, of all good things is best ; 
But can it be by finite man possest ? . . . 

Grant Heav'n could once have giv'n us liberty ;1 
Are we not bounded, now, by firm decree, > 

Since what so e'er is pre-ordain s d, must be ? j 

The resolution briefly is that human responsibility cannot be explained 
to a limited intelligence. Actually Dryden in this " Poern of Paradise J9 
presents a defective and incomplete view of the problem since out of 
respect he omits from consideration the dogma of man's Redemption 
and grace. " The State of Innocence " was primarily designed for 
representation, and it would have been indecent and unbecoming to 
discuss the most sacred and profoundest truths of Christianity in a 
stage play. Yet the very nature of the subject which Dryden chose is 
sufficient witness how deeply his mind was preoccupied with and how 
keenly he debated the dogmas and mysteries of religion. 

From the time of his first comedy in February, 1663, Dryden had 
been intimately connected with the King's company, to whom he was 
bound by contract, so that the theatre, year in year out, provided him 
with a fairly steady Income of three or four hundred pounds, in those 
days no inconsiderable sum. He was naturally on friendly and familiar 
terms with the leading actors and actresses, and he is spoken of as a 
particular admirer of Anne Reeve, a lady who although unfortunately 
lacking in any remarkable talent was one of the most beautiful women 
on the boards. Little is known of her as she only appeared in very 
minor roles, waiting-women and the like. In the spring of 1675, 
Anne Reeve left the London stage to enter a foreign convent, probably 
Bruges, although this is uncertain. " She died a religious," says The 
Gentleman's Magazine, February, 1745. At the time her retirement 
and taking the veil caused an immense sensation, and the coarse- 
grained satirists of the town were not sparing of their gibes and sneers. 
Rochester, rough and ribald, mischievous and mean, in a biting pasquil 
bade Dryden, " turn Priest since Reeve is turn'd Nun." Obviously 
Anne Reeve would have discussed her vocation and her future with 
Dryden upon whom this event made more impression than he was 



JOHN DRYDEN 213 

immediately aware. I do not question that her prayers in her distant 
cloister were by no means the least powerful factor in his conversion. 
During the fevered frenzied years of Oates's plot, from 1678 to 1682, 
a time of revolutionary madness, of half-crazed hysteria, of murder and 
martyrdoms not a few, Dryden carried himself with singular dignity 
and restraint. A loyal supporter of the throne he was soon made a 
target by the savage foul-mouthed crew whom the villain Shaftesbury 
had hired to debauch and defile the country with their rancorous 
attacks upon King, law and order. The land was flooded with 
seditious fire-brand filth, ^and in consequence the world has been 
enriched with three masterpieces 3 the two -parts of " Absalom and 
Achitophel " and " The Medal." The portraits some damned to 
eternity in a line, some drawn full-length of Buckingham, of Lord 
Howard of Esrick, of Titus Gates, of lean Sheriff Bethel, and in the 
second part of " Absalom and Achitophel " (which was mainly 
entrusted to Nahum Tate) of Jack Hall, of Pordage " the Wizard's son,' 5 
of Shad well and Elkanah Settle are of the first order of things. Shad well 
received a second castigation in " MacFlecknoe," but the character of 
Titus Gates sketched again in " Albion and Albanius " is not so 
generally known as it deserves. This ruffian " for Mighty Mischief 
born " is described as : 

The basest, blackest of the Stygian band : 

One that will Swear to all they can invent, 

So thoroughly Damn'd that he can n'er repent : 

One often sent to Earth, 

And still at every Birth 

He took a deeper stain . . . 

One who has gain'd a Body fit for Sin ; 

When all his Grimes 

Of former Times 

Lie Crowded, in a Skin. 

The short sharp lines like strokes of a hammer drive home the point 
with irresistible force. The theology may not be correct after all 
we are quoting from an allegorical Opera, but the tout ensemble is exact. 

When in November, 1682, very soon after " The Medal " and the 
second part of C Absalom and Achitophel," the " Religio Laici " a 
Layman's Faith was published, even the most obtuse must have seen 
the logical outcome of Dryden's reasoning. He halts for the moment, 
it is true, but the event is sure. 

Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars 
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers, 
Is Reason to the soul. , . , 



214 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Where does truth lie ? It cannot be in a blind following of a printed 
page, the Bible, for since it was translated into our tongue ignorant and 
fanatic Protestants have used it so, as if their business was not to be 
saved, but to be damned by its contents. Better had it remained in 
the honest Latin of St. Jerome. If there were only some infallible 
authority to direct and decide ! 

Such an omniscient Church we wish indeed : 
'Twere worth both Testaments, cast in the Creed. 

What is the argument against the Catholic Church ? Merely a political 
notion. The Church will not teach the Divine Right of Kings as 
absolute dogma. Heretical and excommunicated monarchs are to 
be withstood on points of conscience. When Elizabeth banned Holy 
Mass and made the exercise of any priestly function a penal offence 
theologians taught she must be resisted and disobeyed. Mariana, 
Bellarmine, Emmanuel Sa, Campion, Parsons, and a score beside are 
agreed on that. So Dryden stays where he is for the moment. 

Less than three years later, shortly after, if indeed not before, the 
accession of King James II, Dryden, as the logical outcome of his 
philosophical and intellectual development was received into the 
Catholic Church. His wife and at least one of his sons had preceded 
him. It must be clear to any reader of his works that this was the 
inevitable and ultimate solution of the many debates he had loved 
to argue with himself his whole life long. To question his sincerity 
is not merely to show oneself ungenerous but completely lacking in 
perception. T. B. Macaulay wrote : " Finding that, if he continued 
to call himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he 
declared himself a Papist. The King's parsimony immediately 
relaxed. Dryden was gratified with a pension of a hundred pounds a 
year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and 
verse." To quote Dryden's own words on another occasion : *' Now 
there are three damn'd lyes crowded together in a very little room." 
A Treasury warrant of 6th May, 1684, directs the payment to the 
laureate Dryden of certain arrears since 1680 on a pension of 200 
a year, and of further arrears since the same date on "an additional 
annuity." The latter was approved by James II, and it is this which 
is declared to have been a new bribe, " the price of apostasy." 
Macaulay, to-day generally discredited in his role of literary critic and 
ignored in his role of historian, was probably quite deliberate in his 
misrepresentations. To apply his own phrases to himself : "he was 
perpetually acting against his better knowledge. His sins were sins 
against light." Dr. Johnson, Malone, Scott, and every honest critic 
recognize the absolute sincerity of Dryden's conversion. 

On i gth January, 1686, the sententious Evelyn who for all his good 



JOHN DRYDEN 215 

qualities was more than a bit of a prig gravely shakes his head : 
" Dryden, the famous play writer, and his two sons and Mrs. Nelly 

(miss to the late ) were said to go to Mass." So far as Nell Gwyn 

was concerned this bit of gossip proved utterly false. And Evelyn 
adds what seems to me an absolutely abominable comment : " such 
proselytes were no great loss to the Church. 55 The unction and 
smugness of Mr. Pharisee ! 

That Dryden upon his conversion was to be pelted with the most 
blasphemous and most libertine libels need not, I suppose, occasion 
any great surprise. There was not a paid Protestant pamphleteer 
in town who failed to throw mud and dirt helter-skelter, penning 
dialogue and tract and epigram, prose, and verse hardly to be 
distinguished from prose. We need not dwell on these things. They 
are forgotten utterly, and even in their day all decent folk regarded 
them as beneath contempt. 

King James shortly called upon his historiographer to reply to 
Dr. Stillingfleet, the Dean of St. Paul's, who had plunged headlong 
into controversy. The occasion was this : Anne Hyde, the King's 
first wife, left a paper which stated her reasons for becoming a Catholic. 
This was now published, and Stillingfleet, who no doubt according 
to his own lights was a very good man but who quite certainly according 
to any light was a very stupid man, essayed to answer it. It was 
necessary that there should be some rejoinder, a task authority very 
effectively entrusted to Dryden. 

As yet the great poet had given the world no reasons for his change, 
but feeling that some account was justly required of him he composed 
" The Hind and the Panther," 1687, that magnificent allegory in which 
the " milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged," the Catholic 
Church, so nobly and so convincingly argues against the Anglican 
Panther " the fairest Creature of the spotted Kind," and the hundred 
impure vagrom sects, the Independents, the Anabaptists, the Arians, the 
Freethinkers, the Latitudinarians, the Huguenots, the Brownists, 
typified as " the bloody Bear," " the bristled Baptist Boar," " false 
Reynard," " the buffoon Ape," and the rest. There are portraits too 
in the poem " The Buzzard, Bishop Burnet " " Invulnerable in his 
impudence." 

" The Life of St. Francis Xavier," which Dryden translated from the 
French of Fr. Dominic Bonhours, S.J., 1688, is a fine piece of work, 
and a notable contribution to our hagiography in English, a field of 
religious letters which is only too apt to be barren or hard. To this 
period also belong many of his versions of Latin hymns, lyrics of the 
first quality. It is probable that of the one hundred and twenty 
hymns which make up the Primer of 1706, all or nearly all were 
Englished by Dryden between the years 1685 and 1700. 



2l6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

At the Revolution of 1688 when ec a company of men perhaps as 
destitute of honour and as God-forsaken as any which history has 
record " succeeded in driving from his throne their King who was 
to die a Saint In French exile miracles were worked at his tomb 
and by his Intercession Dryden fell with his royal master. He 
refused with scorn to take the oaths to the Dutch usurper, and forth- 
with he was ejected from his posts of laureate and historiographer 
royal. He lost all for truth and conscience sake, and this surely is 
heroic fortitude. 

Having ceased his dramatic activities for the space of four years 
he was now obliged to turn once again to the stage for support. The 
first piece he produced after the Revolution, fi Don Sebastian/' has 
for a hero a truly romantic figure, that great and gallant Catholic 
knight Dom Sebastian of Portugal, and by many it Is esteemed his 
finest play. Indeed much of his best work was done during the 
twelve years when he was hated and persecuted for religion's sake. 
It was now that he wrote "Alexander's Feast " and the "Fables" ; 
that he translated Vergil. Old and weary, at a time when he had 
earned and had a right to expect independence and repose, he was 
bound to take pen in hand as busily as during the vigour of his youth 
and prime. He was tied to his desk until the last. " A Secular 
Masque 3> was finished and sent to Drury Lane early in April, 1700, 
and on the 30 th of that month " The Postboy " announced that " John 
Dryden, Esq., the famous poet, lies a-dying." On Wednesday, ist 
May, at three o'clock in the morning he died, fortified by the last rites 
of the Church, and u taking of his friends so tender and obliging a 
farewell as none but he himself could have expressed." 

John Dryden was not a Saint. He had too many human weaknesses 
and failings for that. But he also had some of the rarest and most 
difficult qualities which are essential to the character of the greatest 
Saints. He obeyed the dictates of conscience simply and sincerely, 
heedless of loss, heedless of the enmity of the world, and of whom 
else save such as he was it once said : Beati, qui persecutionem patiuntur 
pfopter justitiam : quoniam ipsorum est regnum coelorum ? 



MARGARET YEO 



ST. MARGARET MARY 



A.D. 1647-1690 

Je me consumais en Sa presence comme un cierge ardent, pour Lui rendre 
armour pour amour. 

THE FIFTH CHILD of Claude Alacoque, royal notary of Vevrosvres 
in Burgundy, and of Philibert, his wife, was born on July 22, 
1647, and baptised three days later. Margaret's godparents were her 
father's cousin, Antoine Alacoque, parish priest of the village, and 
Madame de Fautrieres, of Corcheval Chateau close by. Claude's 
business, as lawyer officially appointed to transact legal affairs in the 
district, brought him into contact with the landed gentry ; and in any 
case there was less distinction in the country in France between his 
class, noblesse de la robe, the legal upper middle-class, and noblesse de Fepe'e, 
the old feudal nobility. So it was not surprising that Madame de 
Fautrieres, without children of her own, should practically adopt her 
little goddaughter (1651), probably feeling it a pity that such an 
attractive child should be left to run more or less wild. Margaret 
spent most, if not all, of the next four years at CorchevaL She was 
full of life, loving gaiety, noise and movement, but sensitive, affectionate 
and responsive. In the middle of a wild, riotous game she would at 
once become quiet if told that such behaviour was not pleasing to God. 

Many children have a very vivid realisation of the presence of God 
but in Margaret's case this was phenomenal. Whenever she could 
not be found in the chateau or garden she was always to be discovered 
in the chapel on the terrace, kneeling still and silent before the 
Blessed Sacrament. Her godmother put her in charge of two women, 
who were to teach reading, writing and the catechism. One of these 
petted and cossetted the child, the other was bad-tempered and 
sharp-tongued. It was thought odd that Margaret avoided the first 
and was fond of the other. Only later was it known that an instinct 
of supernatural purity had perceived behind the pleasant fagade a 
corrupt nature and bad life. 

These four happy years (1651-1655) slipped by in lovely 
surroundings. The old castle, destroyed by Coligny during the wars 

218 



ST. MARGARET MARY 219 

of religion, had been rebuilt during the reign of Louis XIII and was 
surrounded by a spacious park shaded by noble hornbeams. The 
quiet solitude of these shady, grassy glades had an irresistible fascination 
for Margaret, in whom a desire for silence and remoteness alternated 
with outburst of noisy high spirits. 

Monsieur de Fautrieres died. Madame was about to marry again 
and Margaret, now eight, returned to her own home in the little 
hamlet of Lautecour. The house consisted of two great square blocks, 
separated by a courtyard, in the middle of which the old well was 
roofed by one heavy slab of granite. The block known as the maison 
de cabinet, because the notary had his office there, was rebuilt after a 
fire at the time of Margaret's brother's marriage (1666), which is 
commemorated by the allegorical paintings on the old rafters and 
ceilings, bearing the Alacoque arms, a cock and lion gules on a field or. 
A square tower at the far end, now a chapel, is traditionally the spot 
of the saint's birth and, probably, the room she occupied as a child. 

Margaret came home to a typically patriarchal household, her 
father and mother, five brothers, the two elder at School at Cluny, 
a sister younger than herself, who died as a child, her father's spinster 
sister, Catherine, his married sister, Benoite, her husband Toussaint 
Delaroche and their three children. 

The garden sloped down, beyond the house to a narrow valley 
whose steep sides were thickly covered with oak trees. The whole 
countryside has a fascination all its own. Huge granite boulders 
thrust up through oaks and pines, like the ramparts of legendary 
castles, or crop up in wide open spaces, their grey ness half hidden by 
the yellow and purple of broom and heather. Man can only wring 
his livelihood from this poor soil by hard work and sweat, for the 
famous wine country of Beaune and Burgundy lies beyond the horizon 
of serrated hills. One sheer rock, twenty feet or more high, rises in 
the little valley near the Lautecour house, completely screened by the 
thicket of oaks, and this was Margaret's favourite haunt. It is such a 
secret hiding-place as any child would love, but Margaret went there, 
like the Maid at the Fairy Tree of Domremi, not to play and invent 
stories but to listen to God and His mother. " Oh my only Love," 
she wrote over thirty years later, " how much do I owe You for having 
marked me out from my earliest youth by making Yourself master of 
my heart." 

The child who escaped alone to be with God was soon drawn into 
even closer relations with Him. Claude Alacoque died (1655), leaving 
his affairs in some disorder and his widow, strong neither in character 
nor in health, felt unable to cope with all her children, so Margaret 
was sent to school at the Urbanists (a branch of the Poor Clares) 
at Charolles, a few miles from home. There the nuns were so struck 



220 GREAT CATHOLICS 

by the little girl's supernatural gift of prayer that they allowed her to 
make her First Communion at the then amazingly early age of nine. 
Still gay and eager, full of life and enjoyment, she tells us that " This 
First Communion filled all my childish pleasures and games with such 
bitterness that I no longer cared for them." 

An illness, which kept her bedridden for four years (c. 1657-1661) 
completed her detachment and as she lay, helpless, immobile, sleepless 
and racked with pain, all her thoughts and desires were wholly turned 
to God, with a mystic comprehension of the spiritual value of suffering 
amazing in one so young, " My heart was burnt up by desire to love 
Him Who gave me such an insatiable longing for Holy Communion 
and for suffering. 53 

Suffering, bodily, mental and spiritual, was indeed to be all her 
life the seal with which her Divine Lover marked her for His own. 
No one more than she has shown so clearly the impossibility in this world 
of separating love from suffering. He who does not know sacrifice 
and pain does not know the true meaning of love. Like St. Teresa 
of Lisieux that other French saint whose fame, two centuries later, 
was to blaze from her cloister through the world Margaret's longing 
for pain and humiliation knew no limits. Her prayer was granted 
and in full measure. 

Brought home by her mother, cured apparently miraculously after 
a promise to become " a daughter of Mary," Margaret had to endure 
years of misery and mortifications made the harder to bear because 
her dearly loved mother was as ill as she. If Toussaint Delaroche 
treated his unfortunate sister-in-law and niece no better than paupers 
and beggars, his wife and Catherine Alacoque were worse and, cruellest 
of all was that worst of tyrants an old family servant, whose brutality 
was only equalled by her ignorance. When her mother" was ill, 
her recovery proclaimed impossible by a village quack called in to 
bleed her, Margaret had to beg food from the neighbours and perform 
surgical work and dressings of which she was entirely ignorant and 
from which her sensitive, highly strung nature shuddered in revolt. 

Madame Alacoque's hopes that her sons would take command when 
they came of age were dashed by the death at twenty-three first of one, 
then of another, but with the majority of Chrysostom, the third, better 
days dawned. Toussaint Delaroche, with all his faults, had nursed 
the estate so well for his brother-in-law's children that they were now 
comfortably off. Jacques, the third surviving child, was twenty and 
studying for the priesthood at Cluny. Chrysostom married well in 
1666 and Madame Alacoque was anxious that her daughter also should 
many and so provide her with a peaceful home for her old age. 

Lautecour became quite gay. The young couple entertained and 
suitors for Margaret's hand were not wanting. There is no contem- 



ST. MARGARET MARY 221 

porary portrait of her but those painted from descriptions of her 
fellow nuns must show her distinctive features. She was slight and 
graceful, good-looking, with straight nose and curved mouth. The 
heavy, low-arched eyebrows show character and the hazel eyes have 
the " Inner S! look of the mystic. She had charm, gaiety, sympathy , 
was sensitive, quick and affectionate. Quite as Important as all this 
in French eyes, she was promised a substantial dot. 

She tells us in her autobiography that, during these years (1666-1671) 
she became frivolous and worldly. The fact that, during one 
carnival, she went to a masked ball, assumed to her the aspect of a 
deadly sin, so the rest of her self-accusation can be judged by this 
instance. Yet to her it represented a falling short of her high vocation 
which needed to be expiated by merciless mortifications. Her 
visions and divine revelations were continuous but she was left 
without human help in her spiritual life. Her godfather, the cure 
of the village, seems to have been a good, ordinary soul, with ail the 
material commonsense of the French peasant but incapable of under- 
standing what he regarded as eccentric nonsense. 

The poor girl was torn in two between her inner conviction of her 
vocation to the religious life and the insistence of her relations, 
Including her godfather, on her duty to marry and provide a home 
for her mother, whom she loved more than any human being. If 
she were to go away to a convent, it was urged, she would be her 
mother's murderess. She tried to persuade herself _ that she could 
answer the divine call by local good works, was told that she was 
giving away food and money which was not hers to give. Even the 
good-natured Chrysostom remonstrated when he found the house 
filled by a crowd of wild, noisy and dirty children to whom his sister 
was trying to teach the catechism. 

At last came help. A Franciscan friar came to Vevrosvres to preach 
the Jubilee which Pope Clement had proclaimed on his accession 
(1670). " He came to the house and slept there to give us time to 
make our confessions," and in him Margaret found a wise director. 
The friar told her to give herself wholly to God, showed her how best 
to pray and do penance. He spoke to Chrysostom, now the head of 
the household, and told him it was dangerous to oppose a genuine 
vocation. Chrysostom spoke to his sister. Was she really determined 
to be a nun ? " Yes, rather death than to change my mind. 55 

She went on a visit to an uncle at Ma^on, where he and his daughter, 
a nun in the Ursuline convent there, tried to persuade her to enter the 
convent, so as to be near home and with relations. " Never, but some 
distant convent, where I shall know no one . . . where I can forget the 
world and be for ever forgotten by it. 53 Margaret, who had taken the 
second name of Mary at her Confirmation (1670), went with her brother 



222 GREAT CATHOLICS 

to the Visitation Convent at Paray-le-Monial and, hardly was she 
inside the parlour than she heard an Interior voice : " It is here that I 
wish you to be." She only returned home when her reception had been 
arranged. Such was her joy during her last few weeks at home 
that neighbours murmured that such riotous high spirits scarcely showed 
a religious vocation ! But, at the last moment, as she was ready to 
start for Paray, June 20, (1671) came the final struggle. " I endured 
such terrible agony that I think I shall suffer no worse at the hour of 
death. It felt as if my very bones were torn one from another." 

From that day till her death (October 17, 1690) Margaret Mary 
never left the enclosure, in which two months later she was clothed 
and (November 6, 1671) made her solemn vows at her profession. 
Her life, like that of St. Teresa of Lisieux, was entirely uneventful 
in the eyes of the world, because it " was hid with Christ in God." 
It seemed indeed that her desire to live " the world forgetting, by the 
world forgot " was to be fulfilled. 

France was then at the apex of her fame, the reign of Louis XIV, 
which even the mocking spirit of Voltaire acknowledged to be one of 
the three most glorious periods of human history. Round the splendour 
of the Roi Soldi shone such a galaxy of stars as Descartes, Pascal, 
Bossuet, Fenelon, Racine, Corneille, Moliere, Conde, Turenne, 
but no breath from the outer world troubled the calm of the Visitation 
Cloister at Paray. 

Paray-le-Monial has changed little, if at all, from the day when 
Margaret Mary came there. The typical small French provincial 
town, with its tall, gabled houses, its cobbled streets shaded by great 
plane trees, clusters round the towering bulk of the eleventh-century 
basilica, built by St. Hugh, Abbot of Cluny, as a model for that at 
Cluny. A little east of the basilica rises the sharp gable of the Visitation 
Convent, built in 1642. A cloister runs round the square court, with 
a fountain in the middle. Community rooms, sacristy, chapel, 
refectory and novitiate open off the cloister and two staircases in the 
corners lead up to the nuns' cells on the first floor. That of Margaret 
Mary is now a chapel of the Sacred Heart, but Bougaud describes it 
as he saw it, just over sixty years ago, unaltered from the time of her life 
and death, small and narrow, the only furniture a bed, table and 
chair, the whitewashed walls bare but for a wooden Crucifix and a 
crude drawing of the Sacred Heart. 

When Margaret Mary was professed, Mother de Saumaise was 
superior (1672-1678), and the affectionate relations between them 
continued after she left, to be succeeded as superior by .Mother Greyfie 
(1678-1684). The latter, more practical and austere, was thanked 
by the saint for the way she tried the revelations by mortifications and 
humiliations. The novice-mistress. Mother Thouvant, gave to the 



ST. MARGARET MARY 223 

new postulant, In answer to a question about the best way to pray, 
the historic words : " Place yourself before Him like a blank canvas 
before a painter." Margaret Mary obeyed, though, as she tells us, 
not understanding and not daring to ask an explanation. The 
" blank canvas " soon became a living likeness of God. 

Her desire to be " consumed like a burning candle to give back 
love for love " was soon fulfilled. Every spare moment was spent in 
chapel. When the Blessed Sacrament was exposed she would kneel 
before It the whole night for twelve hours or more, eyes fixed, hands 
folded, motionless, testified her companions, " as a marble image." 
When one of them asked how she did it, she answered simply that, 
at such times, she no longer knew she had a body. The word 
" obedience " alone could recall her from her ecstasy, for her Lord 
had told her that only by obedience and strict observance of the Rule 
could she please Him. 

St. Jane Frances Chantal, when she had founded the order, under 
the direction of St. Francis of Sales, had discouraged any great corporal 
austerities and mortifications. Indeed, the rule of enclosure was 
not adopted till eight years after the foundation in 1610. It was 
only natural that many of the older nuns, some of whom remembered 
the foundress, should look with an unfriendly eye upon the 
extraordinary behaviour of the new novice. Her profession was 
delayed for several months and she was heart-broken at the possibility 
of being sent away as unsuitable to " the daughters of Mary," as they 
were called locally. 

Mother de Saumaise tested her by mental and physical asceticisms 
which tried the delicate body and sensitive, affectionate nature almost 
to breaking-point. The infirmarian, an energetic, bustling, practical 
woman, continually found fault with a help who, in spite of super- 
human devotion to the sick, so often fell downstairs or forgot some part 
of the regime. It was the same in the kitchen. Plates slipped from 
Margaret Mary's hands on her way to the refectory as if the devil 
himself were in them and all the humility with which she picked 
up the dusty portions and put them on her own plate, did not excuse 
her clumsiness. On another occasion she was called away in the 
middle of sweeping the chapel and was confronted by the pile of dust 
as she came in with the other nuns to Office. She was set to watch 
an ass and foal to see that they did not break into the vegetable 
garden. Drawn as by a magnet, she was found pressed against the 
chapel wall while ass and foal rioted among the vegetables. Paray 
tradition, however, has it that not a hoofprint nor a sign of theft marked 
the invasion. A still worse trial was in store. It was revealed to her 
that she must announce to the nuns the Divine choice of her as victim 
to expiate the sins of half-a-dozen tepid souls. A more terrible task 



224 GREAT CATHOLICS 

could scarcely be imagined for one so sensitive, loving and humble, 
whose one desire was to efface herself. It was done, without the support 
ef Mother de Saumaise, who was ill in bed. The resulting taunts 
and rebuffs added to the strain of an inimical atmosphere which 
was torture to her. 

The day she made her profession she had written in her own blood, 
" Everything for God, nothing for self. 35 Her longing to suffer was 
only less than her love for God, Whose continual presence she was 
granted. Again and again in her autobiography and letters^ she 
expresses this love of sacrifice and suffering. " You will find neither 
peace nor quiet till you have sacrificed everything to God/ 5 she wrote 
to her brother Jacques, cure* of Bois Sainte Marie (1686). " I have 
only one desire, to love (God), to forget and annihilate myself. 9 ' 
" Three desires so ardent that 1 regard them as three tyrants, which 
make me suffer a continual martyrdom, without leaving me a moment's 
peace ... to love my God perfectly, to suffer much for His love and 
to die in that burning love" (1690). 

ts 1 cared no longer for time nor place, since my Sovereign 
accompanied me everywhere. 55 This continual communion with God, 
these almost continual revelations of the divine love and will, were 
supra-sensual and, like ail the experiences of the great mystics could 
not be adequately expressed in words. e{ I could not explain what 
happened then," " it seemed to me, 59 she knows that so many of her 
experiences can only be set out in symbols and forms which, like the 
Platonic Ideas, when materialized,, are only feeble mirrors which 
distort even as they reflect. 

Mother de Saumaise, feeling that all this was beyond her power, 
called in some th -ologians, who, says Languet, the saint's earliest 
biographer, " condemned without examination everything which 
appeared to them miraculous, unusual or supernatural." " I no 
longer doubted that I was abandoned, since I was told that it was not 
the spirit of God guiding me, and yet it was impossible for me to 
resist this spirit," 

Early in 1675 a new superior was appointed to the Jesuit house 
at Paray, young Father Claude de la Colombiere, formerly tutor to 
the children of the great statesman and financier, Colbert, and 
remarkable for Ms intellectual and spiritual gifts and his personal 
charm. As was customary the new superior came to give a conference 
to the Visitation nuns and, no sooner had Margaret Mary seen and heard 
him than her divine Master told her ^ This is he whom I send to you." 
Encouraged by Mother de Saumaise she opened her heart to the 
Jesuit and told him of the three special revelations she had already 
received of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. 

The first had taken place on December 27, St. John's feast, 1573, 



ST. MARGARET MARY 225 

when Margaret Mary, having a little leisure, was kneeling before the 
Blessed Sacrament exposed. Pressed close against the grille, she 
suddenly felt herself " Entirely clothed " (toute investie) with the divine 
presence, so that, no longer conscious of outward things, she was rapt 
in ecstasy. " He let me rest a long time upon His divine breast, where 
He revealed to me the marvels of His love and the incomprehensible 
mysterious secrets of His Sacred Heart, which He had always kept 
hidden from me till then and which He now opened to me for the 
first time." Then, taking her heart, He drew it into His own, " a 
tiny atom which was consumed in that burning furnace," and returned 
it, like a live flame, to her side, while she was named " the beloved 
disciple of My Sacred Heart." 

The second great revelation took place on a Friday in the early 
part of 1674, tne tkkd during the octave of Corpus Ghristi, 1674. 
" The divine Heart was shown to me on a throne of flames, more 
radiant than a sun and transparent as crystal, with this adorable 
wound, surrounded by a crown of thorns to symbolise how our sins 
pierce it, and crowned by a Cross." 

Devotion to the Heart of Jesus had existed since the earliest days. 
St. Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Catherine of Siena, Benedictines, 
Franciscans, Dominicans, had all expressed it. The thirteenth- 
century St. Gertrude, Abbess of the Benedictine convent of Rodelsdorf, 
prophesied in her Revelations that the secrets of the Sacred Heart were 
only to be proclaimed in a later age, when love of God should have 
grown weak and cold. 

A special devotion is needed at every period of history to counteract 
the evil of the age. That to the Sacred Heart came when France 
most needed it. When Louis XIV ascended the throne as a child of 
five (1643) France was devastated by nearly a century of civil and 
religious wars. Huguenots had destroyed and desecrated churches. 
Religion was practically dead in some districts and to reclaim the 
people from savagery and paganism it had needed missionaries as 
heroic as St. John Francis Regis in Auvergne and Fathers Nobletz, 
Maunoir and Huby in Brittany. Jansenism, made formidable by 
the genius of St. Cyran and Pascal and the influence of the nuns of 
Port-Royal, taught, like the Calvinists, that Christ had not died for 
all, so that few, and they only rarely, might approach the Sacraments. 
Gallicanism, which had sprung to full strength when Catherine de 
Medici had summoned a national assembly in opposition to the 
Council of Trent, shared with Jansenism a denial of Papal authority 
even in some things spiritual. The court, during the first forty years 
of Louis' reign, was a centre of moral corruption. Religion, even 
when practised, tended too often to a cold formalism. A new 
devotion was required to set cold and tepid hearts on fire. God chose 



226 GREAT CATHOLICS 

to proclaim it to the little country girl, who had never been twenty 
miles from home till she entered the convent which she was never 

to leave. 

Claude de la Colombiere was destined to be partner with Margaret 
Mary in the promulgation of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 
He alone realized that her visions and revelations were of God and she 
in her turn recognized in him the soul chosen by God to share in 

her work. 

There is perhaps no human relationship so perfect as friendship 
between saints, such as those of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clare, 
St. Francis of Sales and St. Jane Chantal. There was such a spiritual 
affinity between de la Colombiere and Margaret Mary and their 
names are for ever intertwined in the history of devotion to the Sacred 

Heart a closeness symbolized by her vision, as she advanced ^ to 

receive Holy Communion at his hands, of their two hearts being 
taken into the Heart of Christ and there fused into one. ^ 

The last great revelation took place while the Jesuit was still at 
Paray, the octave of Corpus Christi, 1675. It laid down the commands 
which have distinguished this devotion ever since the Holy Hour 
before the Blessed Sacrament exposed on Thursday night, in memory 
of the Agony in the Garden, " which will reduce you to an agony 
harder to bear than death," and Communion on the first Friday of 
every month, customs now universal throughout the Catholic Church. 
There was another command, that a new feast was to be instituted, 
the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, a feast of special love and 
reparation to the Sacred Heart. " I promise thee that my Heart 
shall abundantly shed the gifts of its divine love upon those who 
render it this homage and induce others to render it." 

Accordingly, on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, 
June sist, 1675, Margaret Mary and Blessed Claude de la Colombiere 
both dedicated themselves to the Sacred Heart and three months later 
he left Paray for London, where he had been appointed chaplain to 
Mary of Modena, wife of James, Duke of York. 

It is good to know that London was the first place after Paray in 
which devotion to the Sacred Heart was taught and preached by 
de la Colombiere during the two years of his work there. Then, in 
1678, broke out the madness of the Titus Gates " Plot, 3 * the most 
degraded page of English history. Thanks to his French nationality, 
the young Jesuit was saved from the martyrdom of his English 
brethren, but weeks of imprisonment in Newgate aggravated the 
delicacy of his health so that he returned to France in January, 1679, 
a dying man. During the ten days he spent at Paray on his way to 
Lyons he was able to have several long interviews with Margaret 
Mary and the new superior, Mother Greyfie. He was again there, 



ST. MARGARET MARY 227 

sent by his superiors in hope of arresting the galloping consumption, 
before his death (February i5th, 1682), but this time, almost too weak 
to speak or move, a mutual friend was the bearer of messages between 
him and Margaret Mary. Only two meetings were possible. He 
wrote of one : "It was the greatest difficulty for me to speak. 
Perhaps God willed it thus so as to let me have the greater pleasure 
and opportunity of speaking to her heart." 

Once again Margaret Mary was deprived of human help. Attempts 
to further the new devotion were indeed successful among the novices, 
of whom she was appointed mistress (1684-1685) and who were devoted 
to her. One in particular, Nicole de Farges, whom she called her 
" little St. Aloysius," was a great help and consolation. The novices 
resolved to celebrate the feast day of their mistress by a surprise. 
When she entered the chapel of the novitiate on July 2Oth, 1685, 
she was transported with joy to find a little altar erected to the 
Sacred Heart, before which she and the novices knelt and dedicated 
themselves to this manifestation of Christ's divine love. " What 
joy for me that the adorable Heart of my divine Master should be 
known, loved and glorified," she exclaimed to her novices. "It is 
the greatest comfort I can have in my life." 

But trials were not over. A novice who ran to beg the nuns to come 
and join them was sent back with the words, " Go and tell your 
mistress that sound devotion is to be found in the practise of our Rule 
and Constitution and that this is what she should teach and you 
should practise." 

Even the allusions in Father de la Colornbiere's Spiritual Retreat, 
read aloud in community early in 1685, to the new devotion, the 
revelations made by God " to the person whom one is justified in 
thinking after His own heart," did not bring victory. Margaret 
Mary wrote in Lent of the following year to Mother Greyfie, " I feel 
myself tortured and persecuted in many ways, one of the most violent 
being to regard me as a toy of Satan." Indeed some of the older 
nuns went so far as to asperse her with holy water whenever she passed, 
to drive out the devil of whom they believed her possessed. Bodily 
illness and pain were added to her mental and spiritual woe. Her 
longing for suffering was indeed fulfilled. 

Father Rolin, S.J., superior of the Jesui! house at Paray, 1685-1687, 
succeeded to Claude de la Colornbiere's work. It was he who induced 
Margaret Mary, under obedience, to write her autobiography. He 
encouraged her and helped the spread of devotion to the Sacred 
Heart to other Visitation Convents and Jesuit houses and corresponded 
with her till her death. 

At last came peace and triumph. On June sist, 1686, the Feast 
of the Sacred Heart was solemnly inaugurated in the Paray convent. 



228 GREAT CATHOLICS 

" I shall die happy now that the Sacred Heart of my Saviour is 
beginning to be known," Margaret Mary wrote to Mother Greyfie. 
In all her activities as infirmarian and assistant during the next four 
years, she lived continually in communion with God. " I shall not 
live much longer, since I no longer suffer/ 5 she was heard to say in 
1690 and on the iyth October she died, in the arms of her dear 
cc little St. Aloysius " and Frangoise Vercheres, another of her favourite 
novices. " I no longer need anything but only God, and to lose 
myself in the Heart of Jesus Christ," were some of her last words. 

It has been said that dogma is imposed from above but devotion 
springs up from below. We have seen an example of this in our own 
day, in the way in which love of St. Teresa of Lisieux swept the world 
and might also be said to have " forced " her canonisation. The 
spread of devotion to the Sacred Heart was slower, for the world was 
wider two and a half centuries ago. There was opposition even 
within the Church from Jansenism, but in 1 765 Pope Clement XIII 
authorized some churches to celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart, 
which was extended to the whole world in 1 856 and is now one of the 
most popular and widely spread of devotions. Margaret Mary was 
not beatified till 1864 eight years after the Feast was made universal, 
and canonized in 1920. 

Blessed Claude de la Colombi&re, who first preached devotion to 
the Sacred Heart, and was Margaret Mary's best spiritual help and 
adviser, has not yet been canonized in spite of his sanctity and heroic 
virtues* 



J. LEWIS MAY 



FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA 
MOTHE-FENELON 

Archbishop and Duke of Cambrai 



A.D. 



N ELDERLY GENTLEMAN of courtly manners who used to visit my 
father's house when I was a child he would be at least a 
hundred and twenty if he were alive to-day used occasionally to grow 
reminiscent and discourse of his school-days, and at such times he 
rarely failed to recite in an accent of great purity the following sentences 
from Fenelon 's Telemaque : Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du depart 
d'Ulysse. Dans sa douleur, elle se trouvait malheureuse d'etre immortelle. 
I heard those words so often that in the end I came to know them 
by heart. I loved them and love them still, not only because they 
are associated in my mind with the memory of an old friend, and with 
a leisurely grace of manner that somehow seems to recall spinets and 
jars of pot-pourri, but for themselves, because they have a singular 
charm and fragrance of their own. 

For a long time my acquaintance with Fenelon did not progress 
beyond those two sentences. Fenelon remained a shadow to me 
and might have continued to do so to this day, had I not, many years 
afterwards, come across, in Pater's Imaginary Portraits, the passage that 
runs as follows : 

On the last day of Antony Watteau's visit^ we made a party to 
Cambrai. We entered the cathedral church : it was the hour of 
Vespers, and it happened that Monseigneur le Prince de Cambrai, 
the author of Telemaque, was in his place in the choir. He appears 
to be of great age, assists but rarely at the offices of religion, and is 
never to be seen in Paris ; and Antony had much desired to behold 
him. Certainly it was worth while to have come so far only to 
see him, and hear him give his pontifical blessing, in a voice feeble 
but of infinite sweetness, and with an inexpressibly graceful movement 
of the hands. A veritable grand seigneur ! His refined old age, the 
impress of genius and honours, even his disappointments, concur 

230 



FRANQOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-F^NELON 231 

with natural graces to make him seem too distinguished (a fitter 
word fails me) for this world. Omnia vanitas ! he seems to say, 
yet with a profound resignation, which makes the things we are most 
of us so fondly occupied with look petty enough. Omnia vanitas ! 
Is that indeed the proper comment on our lives, coming, as it does 
in this case, from one who might have made his own all that life has 
to bestow ? Yet he was never to be seen at court and has lived 
here almost an exile. Was our " Great King Lewis " jealous of 
a true grand seigneur or grand monarque by natural gift and favour 
of heaven, that he could not endure his presence ? 

The author of Te'lemaque \ At once, those words of my old friend 
came back to me, like music borne upon a perfumed breeze back 
out of the haunted past Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du depart d' Ulysse. 
Dans sa douleur elle se trouvait malheureuse d'etre immortelle. And Cambrai ! 
In that name, too, there was music. And who was he, this great 
ecclesiastic, who was also a genius and a grand seigneur? And what 
were his disappointments, and what was the reason of that profound 
resignation which led him to sigh, or seem to sigh, Omnia vanitas? 
I determined to discover. 

And so it was thus, in this seemingly chance fashion, that I came 
to call back from the shadows into which he had vanished more than 
two hundred years since, one of the most gifted, one of the most 
fascinating, and one of the most unfortunate figures in history. 

In the heart of le Perigord JVbfr, a land of dark ravines and rushing 
torrents, of shadowy woods and jagged heights, haunt of the wolf 
and the wild-boar, a land whose memorials of the past go back beyond 
the dawn of history here in the ancestral chateau of his race, in the 
year of grace 1651, was born Frangois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon. 
His father, Pons de Salignac, Comte de la Mothe-Fenelon, having 
been left a widower with twelve children, married again when he 
was well on in life, and the future Archbishop of Cambrai was one 
of the four children of this second union. 

The family, though very noble and very ancient its records go back 
to 997 was by no means rich, and the task of supporting so large a 
family and of educating them in a manner appropriate to their station 
must have been anything but an easy one. Fenelon was delicate, 
and was at first brought up at home under the care of a tutor. Who 
that tutor was and whence he came, no one can tell ; but, whoever he 
was, he instilled into his pupil a love of high literature, and especially of 
the great writers of Greece and Rome, which abode with him through 
all his days, and in which, when the shadows of sorrow and disillusion- 
ment fell across his path, he was to find, next to his religion, his 
deepest and most unfailing consolation decus et solamen. 

To a younger son, and a delicate one, of an aristocratic but im- 



232 GREAT CATHOLICS 

poverished family the Church seemed naturally to offer a career, 
particularly In this case, as Fenelon's uncle, his father's brother, was 
Bishop of the neighbouring town of Sarlat, a see which for generations 
had been a sort of fief or appanage of the Fenelon family. But apart 
from such worldly and practical considerations, apart, too, from his 
quick and lively intelligence, his studious temperament, his taste for 
literature, especially classical literature, there was a mysterious grace, 
as though an aureole, about the child, an indefinable suggestion even 
in those early days of the noli iw tangere, which seemed to hint that he 
was destined to be one of those of whom people come to say that they 
are " in the world but not of it " ; that he was destined for the 
sanctuary. 

At the age of twelve, probably on the advice of the Bishop of Sarlat, 
who had early conceived high hopes of his promising nephew, the 
boy was sent to the university of Gahors to follow a more definitely 
ecclesiastical line of study. There he remained until he was sixteen, 
when he was sent to the College du Plessis in Paris. In the metropolis 
he came under the tutelage of another of his father's brothers, the 
Marquis de Fenelon. This uncle, whose name was Antoine, had had 
a tumultuous past and had been a famous duellist in his day. Later 
on 5 suddenly abandoning his wild courses, he became the friend and 
coadjutor of the saintly Olier, the founder of St. Sulpice. The Marquis 
Antoine was a member of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament, 
whose aim was nothing less than the moral and spiritual regeneration 
of France. He was in the good graces of the King, who had granted 
him quarters in the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres. It was his uncle 
who facilitated his introduction to the de Chevreuses and the de 
BeauvillierSj who formed a sort of coterie, at once aristocratic and 
devout, an inner ring within the Court, of which Mme de Maintenon 
herself was one of the most important adherents. Though he may 
have been indebted to his uncle for his initiation into this exclusive 
and highly cultivated group, his rapid advancement in the regard 
and affections of its members he owed entirely to himself, to that 
union of grace and charm, intellectual attainments and austere 
unworldimess which constituted at once his mystery and his fascination. 
St. Simon in a celebrated passage of his memoirs notes the diverse 
and seemingly contradictory elements which in Fenelon resolved 
themselves, as by a miracle, into the most enchanting harmony. 

" Everything," he says, " was there in combination, and the 
greatest contradictions produced no lack of harmony. In him were 
united seriousness and gaiety, gravity and delightful manners, the 
scholar, the prelate and the grand seigneur ; the prevailing charac- 
teristics, in his facej as in his whole bearing, were refinement, 



FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FfiNELON 233 

intellect, graciousness, decorum and above ail noblesse. It was 
difficult to take one's eyes off him. . . . His perfect ease was 
infectious, and his conversation was marked by the grace and 
good-taste which are only acquired by habitual intercourse with 
the best society and familiarity with the habits of the great." 

On taking orders, about the age of twenty-three, he devoted himself 
to humble parish work, toiling with unwearying zeal among the poor, 
the downtrodden and the outcast. He taught the catechism to little 
children. Even then his fame was beginning to get abroad and 
many were the distinguished men and women who came to see and 
hear this very exceptional catechist at Ms expository labours. 

One of Fenelon's half-brothers had gone as a missionary to Canada 
(where he was fated to leave his bones) and Fenelon himself, also fired 
with missionary zeal, ardently desired to follow in his steps. The 
project was vetoed by his two uncles, the Bishop and the Marquis, 
on the grounds that for one so delicate as he to face the rigours and the 
hardships of missionary life in so inhospitable a climate would be to 
court swift and certain death. His thoughts then turned to the East 
and he wrote half-seriously, half-playfully (the mixture is characteristic) 
telling of the project he so ardently cherished. For whom the letter 
was intended is uncertain ; it was probably Bossuet. " At last, 
Monseigneur," the letter ran, " I am about to set forth ; I almost 
feel as if I could fly. Greece lies spread out before me. The Sultan 
is recoiling in terror. Already the Peloponnesus breathes the air of 
freedom, and the Church of Corinth shall put forth new bloom, and 
the voice of the Apostle again be heard in the land. I shall not forget 
thee, O Isle made sacred by the celestial visions of the beloved disciple, 
O happy Patmos ! I will go and kiss the footprints of the Apostle 
and dream that I see the heavens opening above me." Playful 
rhetoric ! A young man giving rein to his ebullient fancy. Some 
have found fault with the tone and called it flippant. The flippancy 
is superficial. No man was ever more sincere than Fenelon, but the 
last thing he would do would be to make a parade of his piety. 

In 1 68 1 his uncle of Sarlat resigned the Priory of Carennac in his 
nephew's favour. Carennac is a delicious little town in Quercy, on 
the banks of the Dordogne. Fenelon wrote to his cousin, the Marquise 
de Laval, giving her an account of his reception. All the gros bonnets 
of the place were there to do him honour ; the local nobility and 
gentry, the clergy, the military, the big farmers and the common 
people. Everybody came out to acclaim his arrival. The elite of 
the soldiery were there in force and there was a prodigious letting-off 
of muskets. " The air," he writes, " was thick with smoke, and the 
noise of the firing was deafening. My prancing steed, fired with 



234 GREAT CATHOLICS 

noble ardour was for plunging incontinently into the river. I was 
more prudent and came down to terra firma. The guns fired, the 
drums rolled. I crossed the beautiful Dordogne, which was hardly 
visible for the boats that were escorting me. At the water's edge, 
the venerable monks, drawn up in a body, gravely awaited my landing. 
Their address of welcome was full of the loftiest encomiums ; my 
response was gentle and friendly, but not without a touch of the 
sublime. From countless throats the shout went up, c He'll be the 
apple of our eye ! ' Next, no less a person than the Orator-Royal 
delivered his harangue. He likened me to the Sun ; then to the Moon. 
Anon, all the brightest planets had the honour of being compared to 
me. Then we came to the elements and the meteors and finished up 
appropriately with the Creation of the World. By this time the Sun 
had gone to bed, and to confirm the likeness between us, I retired to 
my room and prepared to follow Ms example." 

That is the letter of a young man written when the world was opening 
our before him, and the future bright with promise ; but it exemplifies 
a trait in his character which never deserted him, and that was his 
complete naturalness in all things. There was never in him a trace of 
the bigot or the pedant. He had an amused contempt for all that was 
pompous, or self-important, or pretentious whether in manner or dis- 
course. He was an ascetic, but he never showed it. He was learned, 
but no one ever wore his mantle with an easier grace. It was said he 
was ambitious in those days. If to be ambitious is to know one's power, 
to realize one's gifts and to wish to use them, to make them shine, 
then Fenelon was ambitious. One of the gifts he possessed in perfection 
was l y art de plaire, the power to charm, and if by its means he sought 
to win a gentle dominion over the hearts and minds of the men and 
women with whom he came into contact, of the youthful converts 
at the Nouvelles Catholiques^ of the dour and stubborn Huguenots of 
Saintonge and Aunis, of the aristocratic men and women of the court, 
can this be imputed to him as a fault ? A touch of the feminine in his 
composition of the feminine, not the effeminate which is the almost 
invariable concomitant of genius, gave him a wonderful insight into 
the female heart. Yet it was this sympathy, this subtle understanding, 
combined with his generosity, his charity, his sense of noblesse oblige 
that was fated to bring upon him the supreme trial of his life. 

Fenelon's success at the Jfouvelles Catholiques, where he went to 
instruct and confirm in the faith girls newly converted from Protes- 
tantism, led to his transference to a very different portion of the 
mission field. In 1685, ne was sent to Saintonge to collaborate with 
the soldiers in bringing back the Protestants to the Church. There 
his patience, his persuasiveness and his sympathy worked miracles. 
He had little faith in the secular arm as an instrument of conversion. 



FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAG DE LA MOTHE-FfiNELON 235 

He thought it more important to count hearts than heads, and deemed 
that one soul really won to the Church was worth any number of 
" converts " dragooned into outward compliance by force majeure. 

"It seems, M. i'Abbe," said de Harlay, the worldly Archbishop 
of Paris, whose offers of preferment Fenelon had coldly rejected, " it 
seems that you wish to be forgotten. Well, you shall be," But de 
Harlay was wrong ; Fenelon was not forgotten, nor will be. One of 
the things by which he will be remembered is his Traite de V Education 
des Filles, a little book dealing with the education of girls, which he 
wrote at the request of Mme de Beauvilliers. 

Mme de Beauvilliers had a numerous family. The girls alone 
numbered eight, and there were several boys. She asked Fenelon to 
advise her regarding their education, particularly that of the girls. 
And so he produced this delightful little Manual for Mothers \ a jewel of 
pedagogic wisdom, from which mothers and teachers even in these 
" advanced " days might derive many a useful lesson. Fenelon 
begins by saying that female education in those days was practically 
non-existent. And yet a woman's occupations are scarcely less 
important to the common weal than a man's. She had a house to 
manage, a husband to bless and children to educate. And how can 
she educate them if her stock of knowledge is limited to curtseying, 
dancing and knowing how to enter a room ? Here are a few specimens 
of the advice he gave to Mme de Beauvilliers : " Never let lessons 
become associated in the learner's mind with boredom and restraint. 
Don't scare children into obedience by frightening them with bogies 
of black-robed priests, or ghosts that walk by night. Make your 
lessons entertaining, attractive ; reduce rules and discipline to a 
minimum. Don't bore and discourage children by perpetually 
talking to them in schoolmaster's jargon about things they cannot 
understand. Don't let the words * school * or * class * spell only 
gloom, constraint, everlasting lessons, silence, uncomfortable postures, 
fault-finding and perpetual threats. However, if you do threaten, 
do what you say you will do, or it will be good-bye to discipline." He 
looks on it as a serious disqualification in a teacher to exhibit any 
physical abnormalities likely to repel or disgust the pupil. " People," 
he says, " may be models of all the virtues, and yet be anything but 
agreeable to look upon. It is a mistake to try and force children to 
take to them. 53 

In contrast to Sir Austin Feverel, Fenelon had little faith in 
" systems." He believed rather in suiting the education to the character 
and temperament of the child who was destined to receive it, with due 
regard to the position which he or she was afterwards to fulfil. The 
curriculum for girls is not a little interesting : " There is not much 
use in letting a girl spend a lot of time over Italian and Spanish ; a 



236 GREAT CATHOLICS 

little Latin would be far more to the purpose. She should of course 
be thoroughly conversant with the three * R's/ and, if it is a country- 
house she is going to run, then some acquaintance with estate- 
management would not be amiss. She must know some history, and 
be familiar with the works of the best standard writers in prose and 
poetry. Painting ? Music ? Yes, perhaps ; but sparingly. The 
main thing for a woman next, of course, to her religious duties is to 
know how to manage her house ; no easy matter if it is to be done well. 
Let her be thrifty, but not fussy. And she must have practical, 
first-hand knowledge of her servants' duties. It is no good blaming 
the cook for an unsatisfactory omelette, if you don't know how to 
make one yourself." 

There is no doubt about whom he was thinking of in all this, or of 
the house he had in mind. His model was his mother who, without 
being stingy, was yet so " careful of the gear," not only for the sake 
of her own family, but that she might have the wherewithal to befriend 
the poor about her gates. As for the house, that was surely the 
beloved old home la pauvre Ithaque as he called it by the Dordogne, 
with its great rooms and tarnished splendours, where his happy 
childhood had been spent. 

On the i yth August, 1689, Fenelon was appointed by the King tutor 
to the Due de Bourgogne, and at once became one of the great 
notabilities of the Kingdom. Congratulations poured in upon him 
from every side ; a chorus of compliments and adulation. Only one 
letter struck a different note. It came from his old friend and former 
tutor, M. Tronson of St. Sulpice. " It cannot be denied," so ran 
his words, " that, in the ordinary course of things, promotion makes 
the way of salvation harder. It opens the door to the prizes of this 
world ; take heed lest it close it against the everlasting blessings of the 
world to come. No doubt," he went on, and his words show how 
accurately he read the heart of his cherished pupil, " your friends will 
comfort you by telling you that you did not seek the post. And that 
is certainly a thing to thank God for. But beware of laying that 
unction too freely to your soul. A man often has a great deal more 
to do with his own advancement than he himself imagines. We may 
not actively solicit promotion, but we are sometimes very adroit in 
removing the obstacles that hinder it." And he concludes, " After 
all the fulsome compliments you have doubtless received, a little 
plain-speaking from me will not come amiss." 

The Due de Bourgogne, wayward, wilful, capricious, subject to 
ungovernable fits of temper, but clever, and sound at heart, was a 
terribly difficult pupil. But Fenelon was gifted with unerring tact, 
inexhaustible patience and an unbreakable will. None knew better 
than he how to combine the suaviter in modo with thefortiter in re. When, 



FRANgOIS DE SALIGNAG DE LA MOTHE-FfiNBLON 2*$] 

later on, he came to look back on Ms handiwork, it is said that he 
sometimes wished he had not done it quite so thoroughly, for the once 
wilful, high-spirited, violent-tempered child had been transformed 
into a meek, retiring, and entirely unenterprising young man. It 
seemed to him then that he ought to set about the opposite and more 
difficult, task of restoring the spirit he had so effectively subdued. 
Fenelon composed his own text-books, Fables in the style of Perrault, 
charmingly written, and each with a suitable moral ; Dialogues des 
Morts, imaginary conversations between historic personages ; and 
lastly Telemaque, which its author describes as "an heroic poem (it is 
written in prose) like those of Homer and Virgil, introducing matters 
suitable to be taught to a prince destined to the throne all the virtues 
necessary for the good governance of a state, and the faults to which 
sovereign power is liable." There was no reference intended to the 
King. So said the author. Many thought, or pretended to think, 
otherwise ; among them the King himself and Bossuet ! But all 
this was later. At present Fenelon is in high favour. The barometer 
is set fair. So much so indeed that in 1694 ^e King bestowed on him 
the wealthy abbey of St. Valery. A year later he appointed him to 
the Archbishopric of Cambrai which carried with it the title of Duke 
and revenues amounting to two hundred thousand livres per annum, 
permitting him at the same time to retain the office and emoluments 
of tutor to the royal princes. 

But now, when he seemed to be on the crest of the wave that should 
raise him sooner or later to the highest position in the realm, when 
present greatness seemed but the harbinger of greater things to come, 
the tragedy of his life was at hand. 

It is impossible indeed it would be beside the mark to attempt 
here to discuss in detail the character of Mme Guyon and the long and 
bitter Quietist controversy which brought about the irremediable 
estrangement of two great Churchmen, turning their love into 
bitterness and gall, and sending one of them, the most gifted, the most 
fascinating, the most ethereal spirit of the age, into an exile that 
endured until his death. 

Who then, and what, was this Mme Guyon ? A saint fired with the 
mystical ardours of a St. Teresa, or a St. Jeanne de Ghantal ? Or 
was she a victim of delusional insanity and, in plain language, mad ? 
Mad or not mad, she was a woman of extraordinary personal charm. 
The fact that she had brought Mme de Maintenon for a time beneath 
her spell is sufficient proof of that. 

It was in the autumn of 1688, or the spring of 1689, that Fenelon 
met Mme Guyon for the first time. He had heard of her wanderings 
up and down the country with her strange, gaunt Barnabite monk, 
Pere La Gombe ; of her visions, her " preachings," her numerous and 



2 3 S GREAT CATHOLICS 

voluminous writings. He had made enquiries about her at Montargis, 
her native town, on his way back from Saintonge, and the result of his 
investigations did not tend to allay his prejudice against her. On the 
contrary. But then he met her face to face at the Duchesse de Charost's 
(the Chateau de Beynes) and they returned to Paris in the same coach. 
Mrne Guyon took advantage of this tete-a-tete to expound her doctrine, 
and Fenelon eagerly imbibed it. " From that day," says d'Aguesseau 
In Ms Memoirs, u they became close friends and Fenelon shared all her 
Illusions. He was perverted, even as the first man, by the voice of a 
woman, and his genius, his fortunes, even his good name were sacrificed, 
not to the illusion of the senses, but of the mind." 

Now, her doctrine of T amour pur, or the mystical love of God, a state 
In which the soul loves God so absolutely as to be regardless even of its 
own salvation, loving Him without any expectation, indeed without 
any thought of recompense, might, a generation or so earlier, have 
passed more or less unheeded, but the Molinos scandals had Intervened 
and led the ecclesiastical authorities to scrutinize with great care any 
new manifestations of mystical enthusiasm. Molinos had taught that 
the soul and the body were perfectly distinct, and that the soul was 
neither soiled by, nor responsible for, the sins committed by the body 
Mme Guyon entirely rejected that pernicious doctrine, but her own 
teaching was, her opponents held, calculated to weaken the ritual and 
sacramental system of the Church. It would take too long here to go 
into the details of the controversy that raged about her voluminous 
writings, especially the famous Moyen Court defaire oraison. In the end, 
a council consisting of Bossuet, Tronson and de Noailles was held at 
Issy for the purpose of sifting the true mysticism from the false. As a 
result of these deliberations thirty-two articles were drawn up, and 
to these Fenelon, who added two more, attached his signature. The 
whole matter seemed satisfactorily settled when Bossuet, in order to 
explain and amplify the decisions arrived at, brought out a book which 
he invited Fenelon to approve. Fenelon refused, on the grounds that 
the book, under cover of exposing false doctrine, was In reality a 
personal attack on Mme Guyon. as cruel as it was unwarranted. Mme 
Guyon, if she had erred had erred in the letter, not in the spirit. 
That was the position taken up by Fenelon. He was her friend, and 
he claimed to know what was In her heart more truly than her other 
judges, who knew her only by her writings. Fenelon then brought 
out a book which he called Explication des Maximes des Saints^ setting 
forth his view of true mysticism, basing it on the writings and teaching 
of the great mystics, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales and 
others of equal weight. Thus the controversy began again with greater 
bitterness than ever. 

If an inhabitant of some neighbouring planet had been able to look 



FRANQOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FfiNELON 23$ 

down upon France just at that time, he would have noted some strange 
phenomena. He would have seen two erstwhile friends, both men of 
genius, both loyal sons of the Church, confronting and denouncing 
one another in terms of unparalleled ferocity. He would have noted 
unprecedented activity in the episcopal palaces of Meaux and Cambrai 
and an amazing output of polemical compositions attack and reply, 
rejoinder and counter-rejoinder, and so on without end. And if he 
had been able to investigate the cause of this extraordinary, this 
unexampled commotion, he would have learnt to his amazement 
that it concerned the mystical and disinterested love of God. 

Fenelon sent his book to Rome a bold step seeing how jealous at 
that time the church in France was of its " liberties " and begged that 
the Pope would pass judgment upon it. This act of " ultrarnon- 
tanism " added fuel to the fire that was already raging furiously enough. 
The King ordered Fenelon to retire forthwith to his diocese and to 
remain there. That meant exile and he knew it and the downfall 
of all his hopes. Once, and only once, they revived like the dying 
flicker of a candle. In 1711, when the Dauphin died, the Due de 
Bourgogne, Fenelon's one-time pupil, who had never ceased to love 
his former tutor, became the direct heir to the throne. The great 
King Louis was old and in failing health. In the natural course of 
events, the Dauphin's accession could not be long delayed, and when 
it came to pass, Fenelon would be the power behind the throne and in 
a position to instigate those measures of humane and enlightened 
government which he had had so long at heart. After nearly two 
years of deliberation les Maximes des Saints was condemned. The blow 
must have been a heavy one, but Fenelon bore it without a murmur, 
and with complete submission. The voice of the Church was the voice 
of God. And the Church had spoken. 



Years have gone by. The Archbishop is still an exile in his diocese 
at Cambrai. The art de plaire, the old magnetic charm, has not 
abandoned him and he has endeared himself to all his people. But 
day by day he seems to grow more detached from the world. The 
young Dauphin, on whom rested his last hopes of playing that 
distinguished part in his country's affairs to which his splendid gifts 
and his enlightened patriotism entitled him to aspire the Dauphin 
is dead ; cut off in the flower of his youth. Death too has been 
busy among his dearest friends, those staunch companions of good and 
evil days, who had remained steadfast when all the world had turned 
against him. First, de Langeron was taken, the friend of his youth, 
who had served him so long and loyally and whom he loved with a 



240 GREAT CATHOLICS 

love passing the love of women. " I have lost the greatest comfort 
of my life/* he wrote to de Chevreuse, " and the best helper God has 
given me in the service of His Church." And in another letter, " I 
have lost a friend who has been the delight of my life for thirty-four 
years. 38 Quid moror altera? we seem to hear him cry from the depths 
of his solitary anguish. Soon another friend, hardly less intimate, 
the Due de Chevreuse had followed de Langeron to the grave. " He 
is not gone from us because we see him not," he wrote to the Duchesse ; 
" he sees us, loves us, feels all our needs. He himself has reached his 
haven and prays for us who are still exposed to the perils of the deep." 
Singula de nobis ami predantur euntes ! Two years later, the Due de 
Beauvilliers followed, the last to go of that little group of friends who 
had clung to him more closely than brothers. " If only," he sighs, 
" all great friends could wait for each other and die on the same day ! " 
Of F6nelon's life at Cambrai we get a vivid glimpse from an 
unexpected source. Bossuet is dead and his secretary, Le Dieu, whose 
principal motive seems to have been curiosity, paid a visit to Cambrai 
soon after his master's death. He presented himself to the Arch- 
bishop, a little doubtful as to the reception in store for him. His 
misgivings proved groundless. " His manner," Le Dieu sets down in 
his diary, "was gentle and exquisitely polite. Courteously, but 
without effusion, he invited me to his room . . . The Archbishop was 
attired in long violet robes, cassock and chimere, with rose-coloured 
button and button-holes. There were no gold tassels or gold fringes 
on his girdle, and round his hat was a plain cord of green silk . . . 
When dinner was announced, he invited me to a seat at his table . . . 
The Archbishop said grace and took his place at the head of the table 
with the Abbe de Chanterac (his Grand Vicaire) on his left. I had 
chosen an inconspicuous place among the general company, but the 
seat on the Archbishop's right being vacant, his grace signed to me 
to come and take it. I thanked him aod observed that I was already 
seated and served. With great courtesy he insisted, saying, c Come, 
your place is here.' So I obeyed without further demur." The 
visitor then goes on to describe the " tasteful magnificence " of the 
repast, the many varieties of meats and game, the excellent red wine, 
the choice dessert " peaches and grapes first-rate, albeit we were in 
Flanders " the spotless napery, the massive plate, the liveried 
servants. Then he goes on, " The Archbishop did me the honour 
to help me with his own hand to everything that was choicest on the 
table. Each time he did so, I raised my hat, and each time he did 
the same to me. He also paid me the compliment of raising his glass 
to me, which he did with grave and gentle courtesy." But amid all 
this state and dignity the Archbishop himself lived in all respects a life 
of the strictest self-deniaL 



FRANgOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FENELON 241 

Fenelon's life at Cambrai varied little from day to day. As a rule 
the only tiling that interrupted its regular routine and there was no 
lack of routine-works for the diocese was a vast one would be a 
visit from one of his kinsmen, nephews or great nephews he adored 
children or a pastoral journey to preach, or to hold a confirmation, 
in some outlying town or village. His flock worshipped him ; his 
gentleness, his meek-hearted dignity, his burning sincerity, his 
unselfishness, his charity, the indefinable impress of genius that seemed 
to surround him like an aureole, his voice so infinitely sweet and 
clear, his kindness to the poor and suffering, his love of children all 
these things, united with his own sorrows and tribulations so nobly 
borne, had won him an abiding home in the hearts of his people. 
Norn omnis moriar, he might have said, had he guessed how his memory 
would live on undimmed, and his story be handed down from genera- 
tion to generation. " The days are long," he wrote pathetically to 
one of his kinsmen, " but oh, how short the years ! " And again, 
" Old age is stealing insensibly upon me ... I feel like one in a 
dream, or a figure in a shadow-show." And, sometimes, in a moment 
of despondency, " Life seems to me like a poor play on which the 
curtain will soon be rung down." But such moods are rare and swiftly 
pass. For the most part his temperament was sunny and serene. 
This letter reflects the calm cheerfulness that marked his usual mood : 
" Your letter delighted me, my dear nephew. Its little poetic flights 
amused me and its affection warmed my heart. I live on 
friendship, and of friendship I shall die. I only realise that it is 
springtime now by the trees in our poor little garden here, 

iam lento turgent in palmite gemmae" 

Then follow three more quotations from the Georgics these to 
illustrate his love of trees. " Oh, how I wish you were here beneath 
their shade ! " 

Fenelon is a prince of humanists and nowhere is his love of the 
humanities more attractively displayed than in his famous " Letter 
to the Academy." That exquisite literary causerie proclaims Fenelon 
one of the most penetrating and delicate of critics. It was his last 
work, written in fact but a few months before his death. Yet it shows 
no trace of weariness of mind or body. 

The Abbe de St. Pierre, a member of the French Academy, 
had submitted for the approval of his colleagues a syllabus of works 
to which in his opinion it was meet that they should address themselves. 
The Academy thereupon decided that all its members should be 
individually consulted in the matter, and invited each to send his 
comments on the syllabus presented to him, or, if he preferred, to submit 



242 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



an alternative scheme of his own. Fenelon chose the latter course, 
and his reply reached the Academy towards the end of May, 1714. 
It was regarded by his fellow Immortals as a delightful piece of work, 
but not conspicuously practical. " Full of lofty, delicate and carefully 
meditated ideas," said the Abbe de St. Pierre, " expressed in terms 
of gracious elegance, it is well calculated both to charm and to 
instruct." " But," he added, " it leaves us as much in the dark as 
ever as to the nature of the work to which we should devote our energies. 
At the moment, we have to decide what to do ; the question how to 
do it will follow later." And this, perhaps, is what was to be expected 
from one whom the King had described as the most gifted, but the 
most chimerical mind in his kingdom ("C *est V esprit leplus bel mais leplus 
chimerique de mon royaume "). There is, at any rate, no doubt about the 
bel esprit of this little essay. One might say of it what Sir Arthur 
Quiller-Couch says of Newman's /dw of a University, namely, that " it is 
so wise so eminently wise as to deserve being bound by the young 
student of literature for a frontlet on his brow and a talisman on his 
writing wrist." If, however, we compare it with Newman's Idea, 
we shall see that it is much less closely knit ; that it is an informal 
causerie, rather than the orderly and logical development of a thesis. 
If it be asked what the book is about, I suppose one might have 
recourse to its sub-title and say that it is composed of " Reflections on 
Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry, and History." But that would not tell 
you much. It might even lead you to avoid it, for Grammar, 
Rhetoric, History, Poetry itself, are, alas, subjects whose expositors 
do not always escape dullness. But this essay, from beginning to end, 
is pure crystal. Fenelon is learned, but no pedant. His heart is with 
the Ancients however much he may strive in this opusculum to do 
justice to the Moderns. He is steeped, as they say, in the classics, 
and if he wants to illuminate a truth, or to drive home an argument, 
it is to Virgil, or to Horace, or to Homer, rather than to any modern 
writer, that he will go for his illustration. Those who, like George 
Eliot's Parson Irwine, or Mgr. Dupanloup, have a taste for classical 
quotation, wbo care for these things, not only for their own sake but, 
like the hero of Stevenson's Ebb Tide, for the associations which they 
call to mind, will love the " Letter to the Academy." 

Towards the end of 1714, when the autumn was flaming away 
and the trees in his palace garden had changed from green to gold, 
Fenelon went to spend a few days with his friends at Chaulnes, where he 
was ever welcome. It was his last taste of earthly joy. A little before 
Christmas, as he was returning to Cambrai after a pastoral visit, the 
carriage in which he was driving collided with the parapet of a bridge. 
One of the horses was killed, but Fenelon himself escaped with a severe 
shaking. He never recovered from the shock. On January ist, 



FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-F&NELON 243 

17155 the Feast of the Circumcision, Fenelon was seized with illness. 
From the first onset of the malady, he knew that he would not recover. 
He had himself carried from the little " grey room " in which he 
habitually slept, into the great State Bedchamber with its crimson 
hangings, in order that he might take leave of all who might wish to 
bid him farewell. As the news of his illness got abroad and it became 
known that he was dying, a great number of the townsfolk whom he 
had befriended, counselled and consoled came to look their last on 
him and to ask his blessing. On the morning of the Feast of the 
Epiphany he received Extreme Unction. At times he was delirious, 
but in his intervals of consciousness his kinsmen and some others, 
his friends, came and knelt at his bedside, one after another, to receive 
his blessing. Afterwards, all his servants came and, weeping, begged 
that he would bless them also. This he did, very gently. Abbe Le 
Vayer, a member of the Congregation of St. Sulpice and the 
Superior of the Sulpician Seminary at Cambrai, then recited the prayers 
for the dying ; after which, lying for a space in perfect stillness, he 
breathed his last, quite peacefully, at a quarter past five in the morning 
of the 7th January, 1715. 

And now, as we bid him farewell, what words more apt could we 
apply to him than those with which a great English poet saluted the 
shade of Virgil, with whose noble and tender spirit Fenelon, C majestic 
in his sadness," has so much in common : 

Light among the vanished ages, 

Star that gildest yet this phantom shore, 
Golden branch amid the shadows, 

Kings and realms that pass to rise no more ! 



THE RIGHT REV. MGR. PETER GUILDAY 



CARROLL OF CARROLLTON 



A.D. 



IT is DIFFICULT within a restricted space to present the life and times 
of a man who lived during one of the most stirring periods of 
American history from the early years of the last English colony of 
Georgia to the end of the " Era of Good Feeling " almost a century. 
It was a century that witnessed the culmination of the inter-colonial 
wars, the final defeat of France in the western world in 1 763, the growing 
spirit of independence in the English colonies, the War of Independence 
from 1774 to 1783, the launching of a new nation founded upon the 
democratic principles of liberty, justice and equality, the stabilization 
of that independence through the War of 1812, and the successful 
organization of the federal government up to Jackson's triumph in 
1828-1829. 

However, there is this advantage : no other Revolutionary character 
offers a better focus for these years (1737-1832) than Charles Carroll 
of Carrollton. He was born about the same time as the outstanding 
men among the Founding Fathers, and he outlived them all. There is 
the added advantage in reviewing this great epoch through Carroll's 
participation in it : we are dealing with the largest plantation owner 
of the day, probably the wealthiest man in the English colonies, and 
without any doubt, one of the most cultured spirits of all those who 
had a share in founding the American Republic. That he was born a 
Catholic, that he remained a Catholic in spite of all the legal 
proscriptions both before and after Independence against his Faith, 
and that he gloried in preserving his Catholic Faith until death this 
last factor in his life must endear him to all Catholic readers. 

First of all a word about the Carrolls. The two principal branches 
are Irish in origin, but their genealogy in Maryland is somewhat 
uncertain, since the same Christian names occur in each branch 
Charles, Daniel, John, Mary and Elizabeth. The older branch 
begins with Charles Carroll, the attorney-general (1660-1720), whose 
son Charles Carroll of Annapolis lived from 1702-1781, and whose son 
is the subject of this sketch. The younger branch begins with Daniel 
Carroll of Upper Marlboro, two of whose sons attained fame Daniel 

244 



CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON 245 

Carroll, a signer of the Federal Constitution and one of the three Com- 
missioners appointed by President Washington to lay out the capita! 
city 3 and John Carroll, who was the first American bishop and arch- 
bishop, his See being Baltimore, Both branches married into the 
Darnall family, and so were of the blood of the Calverts the Lords 
Baltimore who founded Maryland. 

Much might be written on the unfortunate social, political and 
religious condition of the English and Irish Catholics in the Maryland 
Province at this time, but it may be summed up in a word : the 
ostracism was complete, all-embracing, deadly. It must be 
remembered also that the fourth Lord Baltimore had apostatized in 
1 7 13 in order to obtain proprietary rights over Maryland. In no phase 
of social life was the penal legislation against the Maryland Catholics 
more vicious than in the matter of education. In my Life and Times 
of John Carroll (Vol. I, pp. 15-16). I have attempted to describe the 
situation in a paragraph : 

Nothing more noble in American life can be found than the 
determination of the Catholic parents of Maryland to preserve 
amongst their children the Faith for which their ancestors had fought, 
suffered, and died. The transmission of the doctrines and the 
discipline of the Church was a sacred obligation imposed upon them 
by their conscience ; and at a time when to apostatize from the 
Catholic Faith was the open road to social and political advancement 
in the English dominions, there was a strength of purpose in the 
hearts of these Maryland mothers comparable in every respect 
to the mothers of the martyrs. To see their children go from their 
side for a sojourn often or fifteen years, and to be bereft of the happy, 
innocent faces of their boys and girls during that period when they are 
a parent's consolation, knowing that even on their return as educated 
gentlemen and gentlewomen they would be politically outcasts, 
demanded a nobility of soul which is one of the brightest factors 
in the drab colourless colonial history of America. Apart from the 
fact that Catholic parents could not compromise in the matter of 
education, there was added reason why they refused to enter their 
children in the colonial schools of Maryland. The appalling 
description of the immoral conditions of these schools, as painted 
by the historians of the Anglican Church of Maryland and Virginia, 
needs but to be read to understand the abhorrence in which such 
educational masters must have been held by Catholic Maryland 
women. Children of cultured families like the Carrolls could 
not be trusted to schoolmasters unworthy of their calling, and with 
the laws ever on the alert against the establishment of Catholic 
educational institutions, one avenue of escape alone was opened to 
the colonial families, that which the Catholics of England, Ireland 
and Scotland had taken for two centuries, namely, the English 
colleges and convents in continental Europe. 



246 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Charles Carroll was the victim of the illiberal attitude of his day, 
but he was to benefit by these years of training abroad and was to 
return as a leader in the struggle which eventually won freedom for 
his fellow-Catholics in the new republic. To a boy of his age, the perils 
of the long journey across the Atlantic were forgotten in the joyous- 
ness of the great adventure, but there had been implanted in his young 
heart memories of the political and religious intolerance against his 
people, and the vision of the tear-stained faces of his parents as he said 
good-bye had its place in determining his judgment when the call 
came to break for ever with the motherland. 

Charles Carroll of Carrollton was twenty-eight years old when 
he returned to his father's house in Annapolis in 1765. The years 
spent abroad at the English Jesuit College of St. Omer, where he 
had as his companion the future bishop, John Carroll, then the years 
at the College of Louis le Grand in Paris, and later at the Middle 
Temple in London these formed the great character he was to become. 
Eleven of those seventeen years had been spent under the instruction 
of the Jesuits, who almost alone among the educators of the day, in 
the face of the dominant non- Catholic doctrine on the divine right 
of kings, had kept alive in their classrooms the fundamental democratic 
principles of equality, justice and freedom ; it was their training in 
history, politics and jurisprudence which served him and his country 
admirably once Americans decided to place these old and well-tried 
Catholic principles at the basis of their national life. 

At this point, a word should be said about his father, Charles Carroll 
of Annapolis or Doughoregan. With his great wealth and high social 
standing he might easily have sent his son to any one of the better 
known classical colleges of the day Harvard, Yale, or even the nearby 
William and Mary College of Virginia, where Jefferson, Monroe and 
John Marshall were once students. But there was no stronger 
determination in the hearts of Maryland's Catholic fathers and 
mothers than that of giving their boys and girls a sound moral Catholic 
education. Rather than have their sons subjected to the danger, 
remote as it may have been in those days, of losing their faith and their 
moral Catholic code in these institutions, the parents of boys like 
Charles and John Carroll willingly saw their sons set out on the long 
and perilous journey across the Atlantic to find safe harbourage in 
the schools of Catholic France. 

His return in 1765 coincided with the violent opposition of the 
Americans to the Stamp Act, and it has recently been shown from his 
letters, that " he was one of the first, if not the very first, to see the 
probability of successful revolution and eventual independence " as a 
result of the storm of indignation aroused by the Act. 

It must be realized that, in spite of his wealth, education and culture, 



CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON 247 

in spite of the social standing of which the anti-Catholic laws of Mary- 
land could not rob him, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, as he was hence- 
forth known, returned a disfranchised citizen, with no voice in the 
political affairs of the province. As a Catholic, he was only a little 
better politically than the slaves on his plantations. He was denied the 
public exercise of his religion, and was forced by these same laws to 
pay a double tax for the support of a clergy that could never be his 
own. 

Events, however, of far-reaching importance were soon to brush 
aside this civic disability, and before he quite realized it, he was in 
the thick of the political controversies of the day. 

The Carroll-Dulany controversy gave him a victory over the 
acknowledged head of the American bar, and he came out of the 
newspaper strife as the " First Citizen " of Maryland, Carroll's 
famous reply toward the end of the battle of letters c< Meminimus 
et ignoscimus " " We remember and we forgive " has been the 
watchword of American Catholics in every nativistic attack since his 
day. American historians now recognize that the real significance 
of this controversy (1773) lies in the fact that the struggle against 
bigotry and intolerance had been at last won. Although the laws of 
Maryland disfranchised Carroll, his fellow-citizens ignored them and 
appointed him to important colonial committees. From 1775 on he 
was Maryland's principal political leader, and in 1776, he was one of 
the three Commissioners appointed by the Continental Congress to 
go to Canada for the purpose of securing the co-operation of that 
province in the fight against England. He signed the Declaration of 
Independence on August 2, 1776, the only Catholic to have that 
privilege. 

There is one chapter in his life which has only recently been given 
an adequate appraisal. No educated American to-day would deny 
the fact that without the help of Catholic France, the American 
Revolution was doomed to defeat. It may be true, as Carroll wrote 
to an English friend in 1774, that once hostilities began, the Americans 
would never surrender. " If we are beaten on the plains," he said, 
" we will retreat to our mountains and defy them . . . we have no 
doubt of our ultimate success." These are the words of a loyal patriot, 
but the statesman in him realized that a victorious American Revolution 
could only be achieved through an alliance with England's century-old 
enemy, Catholic France. 

The American cause was in a desperate state in 1777, even after 
the victory over Burgoyne at Saratoga in October of that year, and 
Carroll's knowledge of France and of French political leaders was to 
be of infinite value during the negotiations. Efforts were made 
to have him go to Paris as the envoy of the new Republic, but he 



248 GREAT CATHOLICS 

wisely declined ; for, on all sides the rank and file of the Americans 
would rather have gone back to the rale of England than form a 
compact with a Catholic king and a Catholic people. To offset bigotry, 
negotiations had to be made in secret. When the Franco-American 
Alliance became known in 1778, the outcry from American pulpits 
was even more violent than that against the Quebec Act in 17743 ^y 
which the English Parliament gave freedom of worship to the Catholics 
of Canada. 

Every school-boy knows the result of that famous Alliance. When 
Admiral de Grasse arrived in the waters of Chesapeake Bay in the 
summer of 1781, at the head of a fleet of twenty-five war vessels, with 
a military force of almost 22,000 officers and men, and with nearly 
ninety Catholic chaplains, the war was virtually at an end. In 
October that year, Cornwaliis surrendered at Yorktown. 

Carroll's services during the Revolution were many and varied. 
He was the chief assistant to Robert Morris in financing the war. He 
was a member of the first War Department of the United States, 
He followed the American army everywhere and spent part of the 
terrible winter at Valley Forge with George Washington. He was 
instrumental in exposing the famous Conway Cabal. He refused 
the presidency of the Second Continental Congress, and was almost 
alone in condemning the confiscation of loyalist property. Later on, 
in 1793, he was to be spoken of as Washington's logical successor in 
the presidency of the United States. While he was not present at 
the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, having 
declined the nomination, it is fairly well ascertained that his influence 
was felt in the proposal of his cousin, Daniel Carroll, which broke the 
worst deadlock of its deliberations, namely, the method of electing the 
president of the new nation. This method the electoral college 
is said to have had its origin in Carroll's explanation of the way in 
which the College of Cardinals elect the Pope. A recent writer has 
said : " It is safe to state . . . that Charles Carroll of Carrollton 
was the father of the electoral college/ 5 As Maryland's first Senator 
in the Federal Congress of 1789, he, with Daniel Carroll, Maryland's 
first Representative in the same body, was responsible for the celebrated 
clause in the First Amendment " Congress shall make no laws 
respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free* exercise 
thereof." 

With the turn of the century, Carroll ceased to take an active 
part in national affairs, but his letters up to his death display his 
keen patriotic interest in aU that concerned the principles of American 
democracy. 

In a letter written shortly before his death to George Washington 
Custis Parke, Charles Carroll said : 



CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON 249 

When I signed the Declaration of Independence I had In view 
not only our Independence from England but the toleration of all 
sects professing the Christian religion and communicating to them 
all equal rights . . . Reflecting, as you must, on the disabilities, 
I may truly say, of the proscription of the Roman Catholics In 
Maryland, you will not be surprised that I had much at heart 
this grand design, founded on mutual charity, the basis of our holy 
religion. 



In 1827, * n a ^ etter to a Protestant minister he wrote : 

Your sentiments on religious liberty coincide with mine. To 
obtain religious as well as civil liberty, I entered zealously into the 
Revolution, and observing the Christian religion divided Into many 
sects, I founded the hope that no one would be so predominant as 
to become the religion of the state. That hope was thus early 
entertained because all of them joined in the same cause with few 
exceptions of individuals. God grant that this religious liberty 
may be preserved in these states to the end of time and that all 
believing In the religion of Christ may practise the leading principle 
of charity, the basis of every virtue. 

The opening years of the nineteenth century in the United States 
were among the most remarkable through which the nation has passed. 
There was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 which must have recalled 
to Carroll one of his father's letters during his student days In Paris, 
when a movement was started by the Catholics of Maryland to leave 
that province in a body for Louisiana where they could worship God 
in peace. The aftermath of the French Revolution with the rise of 
Napoleon he understood better than most Americans of the day, and 
he took part in the defence of Baltimore during the War of 1812. He 
lost his only son, Charles Carroll of Homewood, in 1825, and he had 
seen his three grand-daughters marry Into the British nobility. One 
became the wife of the Marquis of Weilesley, the Lord Lieutenant of 
Ireland and the brother of the Duke of Wellington. The second 
became the Duchess of Leeds, and the third. Baroness Strafford. 
In 1827, he was named chairman of the Committee for the incorpora- 
tion of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, and on July 4, 1828, he laid 
its foundation or corner stone which may still be seen in the old Camden 
Station in Baltimore. To this period belongs the meeting again after 
so many years between Carroll and Lafayette in 1824, w ^en that 
national hero was the guest of the United States. To these years 
belongs also that more striking episode the visit of the prelates of the 
First Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1829 to Doughoregan Manor 
to pay Carroll honour. Few scenes in American Catholic history 
are comparable to this. 



250 GREAT CATHOLICS 

All his life long, he was a faithful son of Mother Church. Neither 
the luxuries of Paris nor the temptations of London dampened his 
religious zeal and devotion ; and certainly no young Catholic man of 
the day received more stirring letters from his father to keep true to 
Catholic principles of life and action. It was on his death-bed that he 
gave utterance to one of the noblest thoughts that ever came from his 
lips : "I have lived to my ninety-sixth year ; I have enjoyed continued 
health ; I have been blessed with great wealth, prosperity, and most 
of the good things which the world can bestow public approbation, 
esteem, applause ; but what I now look back upon with the greatest 
satisfaction to myself is, that I have practised the duties of my 
religion." 

Perhaps, the most dramatic moment of his life occurred on the 
occasion of the golden jubilee of American independence July 4, 
1826, for on that day two of the three remaining Signers of the 
Declaration, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, entered into their 
eternal reward, leaving Carroll to bear for the last six years of his life 
the title " Last of the Signers." 

On August 2, 1826, at Faneuil Hall, Boston, Daniel Webster, 
the greatest of American orators, paid Charles Carroll of Carrollton 
this tribute : 

Of the illustrious Signers of the Declaration of Independence 
there now remains only Charles Carroll. He seems an aged oak, 
standing alone on the plain, which time spared a little longer after 
all its contemporaries have been levelled with the dust. Venerable 
object ! We delight to gather around its trunk while it yet stands, 
and to dwell beneath its shadow. Sole survivor of an assembly of 
as great men as the world has witnessed, in a transaction one of the 
most important that history records, what thoughts, what interesting 
reflections, must fill his elevated and devout soul ! If he dwell on 
the past, how happy, how joyous, how full of the fruition of that 
hope which his ardent patriotism indulged ; if he glance at the 
future, how does the prospect of his country's advancement almost 
bewilder his weakened conception ! Fortunate, distinguished 
patriot 1 Interesting relic of the past ! Let him know that while 
we honour the dead we do not forget the living, and that there is 
not a heart here which does not fervently pray that Heaven may 
keep him yet back from the society of his companions. 

When they laid him to rest in the chapel of his beloved Doughoregan, 
in mid-November, 1832, the entire nation went into mourning. 
Panegyrics were delivered by leading orators in the chief centres, 
and the American press was unanimous in its praise of a long 
Hfe of perfect devotion to God and country. The nation had lost a 
common father. He was the last link with the past, with the founders 



CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON 251 

of the American Republic. When he died, a new generation was in 
the seats of the mighty, never to forget that their legacy of American 
idealism came from the Catholic Carroll as truly as it had come from 
Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton. 



REFERENCES : 

The biographies of Charles Carroll of Carrollton upon which this text is based are: 
Rowland, Life and Correspondence of Charles Carroll of Carrollton (New York, 1898, 
2 Vols.) ; Leonard, Life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton (New York, 1918), and Joseph 
Gurn, Life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton (New York, 1935). Other important sources 
are : Russell, Maryland, The Land of Sanctuary (Baltimore, Md. 1907), and J. Moss 
Ives, The Ark and the Dove (New York, 1934). 



RIGHT REV. DR. JOHN G. VANCE 



JULIE BILLIART 



A.D. 



OF THE LIFE and character of Julie Billiart we can but give a 
brief and inadequate sketch. She was born in 1751 and died 
in the year 1816. Her life, therefore, spans what, until our own 
day, was the most unstable and tumultuous period in modern history. 
It is an age full of declarations of rights and of independence ; of 
revolutions and counter-revolutions ; of plots and revolts ; of 
constitutions and mighty wars ; of systems, of treaties and of 
congresses. Rarely has there been a period comparable for 
unsteadiness, unless it be the last eventful years. 

Julie Billiart was born of humble peasant farmer stock, of people 
who for generations had owned their own poor fields. She thus 
had the soil of France, and of Picardy in her blood. She enjoyed a 
radiant childhood. Her mother was a dear and saintly woman, and 
her father was both good and devout. The tone of the household 
was entirely Catholic, and the family enjoyed the ministrations of 
a remarkably devoted parish priest. 

It was clear at an early date that Julie was especially wrapped in 
the things of God. She took a vast interest in her Catechism, and 
especially in repeating it to others. Nothing seemed to affect her 
so definitely as the thought, presence and companionship of God. 
Her childhood, the little we know of it, was singularly beautiful. 
She naturally engaged in the ordinary household work and in the 
farm work until, through disaster, her people lost their fields. Then 
she perforce worked as a hireling in the harvest fields of another. 
Whether she was selling goods in the market, working with the 
reapers in the fields, or resting for the mid-day meal, there clung 
about her the beauty of holiness and a wonderful enthusiasm the 
enthusiasm of a lover for God. A long period of sickness ensued, 
during which she was half crippled. From the age of thirty-one 
to the age of fifty-three, for twenty-two long years the long years 
that are chronicled in one short sentence she was completely 
crippled and bed-ridden. She passed that time, as indeed she had 
passed all her active life, in intimate communion with Almighty God. 

252 



JULIE BILLIART 253 

In these days of sickness and illness she knew what it was to be 
forced to flee from the violence and brutality of the revolutionary 
forces. She knew and heard of the civil constitution of the clergy 
and of the utter desolation of the Church. She heard Mass and 
received Holy Communion sometimes from priests who had been 
proscribed, or sometimes from those who were at the moment being 
ruthlessly hunted. But all the brutality, clamour and violence of 
her day seemed to her in her preoccupation like the sound of distant 
voices. Her soul was wrapped in God. Not that she was insensitive 
to the pain of others or the disasters affecting the Church. She was 
touched and wounded deeply on hearing that sixteen of the Carmelite 
Nuns who had been so gentle and encouraging to her as a child had 
been taken to Paris and there guillotined, one after the other, as 
they stood murmuring the Salve Regina. This always seemed to her 
the w 7 ay to die, unbending and unbroken for the love of Christ. 
Though it would be well to linger over the period of pain and 
suffering in Julie's life, or better still to try and estimate what it 
meant in the unfolding of her heroic spirit, we must pursue our 
breathless chronicle. 

At the age of fifty-three, at a time of special devotion and religious 
revival, she was commanded by a priest to take one step for the love 
of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. Julie took the one step, then 
a second, then a third, and her paralysis was cured. 

Thereafter she had but twelve years to live, and in that short 
interval she founded the Institute of Notre Dame, informed its spirit, 
fixed its labours, drew up its regulations and rule of life, founded some 
ten or more convents, and animated her daughters in Christ with 
something of her own magnificent enthusiasm and restless zeal for 
God. To effect this mighty work she had to travel much, and many 
dozens of long journeys are recorded, particularly through the 
north-east of France and in Belgium. She would travel the long 
journeys sometimes on foot it is recorded that one day she walked 
twenty-eight miles or by the rocking stage coach, or partly on 
foot and partly in the farm carts that lurched along the uneven roads. 
She knew every manner of trouble and anxiety that can overwhelm 
a human soul. Real poverty and want she indeed experienced, but 
these she scarcely seemed to notice. She met, too, with profound 
dislike in some quarters. She was persecuted by some of the clergy 
bitterly and persistently persecuted by one priest who did much to 
turn the hearts of people in high places away from her. She was 
persecuted, moreover, by the bishop of the diocese in which the 
congregation had been cradled. She faced schism in her own 
community of nuns, and before her death she knew what it was to 
suffer profound and terrible misunderstanding even from those of her 



254 GREAT CATHOLICS 

own Order whom she had most loved and trusted. At the age of sixty- 
five, having wrought a mighty work in the foundation of a great teaching 
order which has rescued hundreds of thousands of children for Christ 
both in Europe, and in the far-away mission fields of India, Japan, 
Africa and China, she gave up her radiant soul to God, murmuring 
the words of the Magnificat : 

" My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced 
in God my Saviour." 

We turn to a brief appreciation of this truly wonderful life. In 
Mere Julie, we discern the simplicity and literalness of a child, which, 
in passing, we may expect to find in all great lives. It is indeed one 
of the indisputable signs of greatness. One sometimes finds it in 
the lives of great philosophers : one finds it always among the great 
saints like Teresa, John of the Cross and Ignatius Loyola. Smaller 
minds and weaker personalities try to interpret and explain, and are thus 
led to compromise, until, their deeds half done, death comes silently 
to capture them. Not so Mere Julie. Christ, for instance, has said 
" If anyone will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his 
Cross daily and follow Me." Julie, hearing these words wished to 
follow Christ. She therefore denied herself, took up her Cross daily 
and sought His Footsteps. Again Christ had said " Happy are the 
poor in spirit : happy are the meek : happy are they that mourn : 
happy are they that suffer persecution for justice sake," and Julie 
took the words, in literalness and simplicity to heart. She was 
genuinely happy when she was reviled and persecuted : she gave 
praise to God in moments of sorrow and desolation, believing quite 
simply that the Eight Beatitudes were Christ's code of happiness. 
Christ further had said " Unless ye become as little Children, ye shall 
not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." Julie thus became, as all 
the great saints have become, as a little child to fit herself the more 
fully to understand the words of Christ. 

But Christ did not only say that His followers should become as 
little children to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. On one 
occasion He said " The Kingdom of God is for the violent, and only 
the violent carry it away." This quality of violence in Mere Julie 
is to be sought in her inexhaustible and undaunted courage. She did 
indeed view life and its events as a " battered caravanserai 5> jolting 
now slowly, now more swiftly, towards eternity. Everything that 
transpired, whether for joy or suffering, assumed in consequence its 
true proportion. Thus no word of men, no power of men, no threat, 
no anxiety, no inner dereliction of spirit could break her wonderful 
courage that was founded upon God. This is much to say of one 



JULIE BILLIART 255 

who was tried in almost every way in which we human beings can 
suffer. At least she underwent all the graver and more terrible anxiety 
of evil report, misunderstanding, calumny and abuse. Only once 
in the biographies do we hear of an occasion when, broken in health 
and overcharged with anxiety, she burst into tears. Nor in so doing 
did she detract in any way from her high courage. 

Herself undaunted, she inspired her whole Congregation of Nuns 
with her own splendid courage. They led hard lives without seeming 
to reflect for a moment on their hardship, as everything was trans- 
formed into joy by their love of God. Boys who go camping or 
picnicking will undergo want and grave discomfort because the picnic 
or camp is a new experience. They see in it something novel and 
inspiring, and they relish, whatever be the discomfort, the delightful 
absence of restraint. This spirit of children picnicking or camping 
with their supreme disregard for trifles was the spirit that Mere 
Julie infused into her Congregation. When the sisters had food, 
they ate it gladly. When they had none, they uncomplainingly went 
hungry. When they found beds they slept in them with comfort. 
When they found none, they were content with a mattress on the 
floor, or some straw, and as the " caravanserai " moved along they 
found in all these and similar privations nothing but trifles. 

Mere Julie's courage was shown too in the way she handled money, 
and that courage again was shared by her sisters. She thought and 
believed that, if the sisters worked for God, He would provide at 
least for their elementary needs. So, on one occasion she left one 
franc with the Sister Superior of a newly founded Convent. On 
another occasion she left five francs, but for Mere Julie this was almost 
capital. Her own courageous belief must indeed have been shared 
by the poor Sisters Superior. In Julie's undaunted spirit and high 
womanly courage, therefore, we find that character of violence which 
Christ demanded of those who would enter His Kingdom. 

But how can one convey anything worthy of this strikingly beautiful 
figure with the gentle voice, the tender wistful care for all her children, 
and the radiant smile of holiness ? Yet where we must perforce fail 
to delineate the personality, we may attempt to assess the work. 

In the Political and Social History of the time we read of great names, 
of revolutions, consulates, and empires, and of all the personalities 
and forces in the different hemispheres that shaped and coloured these 
stirring events. Praise is given to the soldier, the statesman, to that 
far-seeing constitutionalist, or to this Prime Minister who could 
withstand the violence of a Continental System. Throughout the 
whole recital you will hear no reference to the person and work of 
Mere Julie. In omitting her name and that of others who have 
wrought foundation-work of Christian education, the historians 



256 GREAT CATHOLICS 

greatly err, for they omit one of the most significant forces of the 
period. 

Let us, In order to have some standard of comparison, consider 
for a moment the case of Napoleon. By the magic of his name and 
person he could, even at the end, gather about him the remnants of 
a great army. That army was defeated and dispersed. Mere Julie, 
by the magic of her person, and the saintliness of her life gathered 
about her an army which has steadily grown into a mighty force 
spread throughout the whole world. That army has never known 
defeat, has never lacked recruits, and has never lost sight of its 
objectives. Again Napoleon, long before his death, saw the dreams 
of his life, his work, his great political structures mostly shattered 
and in ruins. In the event scarcely anything of his constructive 
work was to remain. Mere Julie saw her work founded, extended 
and consolidated during the twelve magnificent years of her active 
life, and in the intervening century that work has grown in extent, 
in spirit, and in power. Lastly, Napoleon's name is known to the 
many. The name alone can still evoke grand enthusiasms and some- 
times extravagant praise ; it can still, almost as it were a living thing, 
call forth words of utter disparagement. All who know Mere Julie, 
on the other hand, and her beautiful life her children's children now 
number a mighty family of many millions speak of her with joy and 
love, and they invoke her aid in struggles and difficulties. 

Why then do the Political and Social Historians continue to err by 
omitting references to so mighty and indomitable a force as Julie 
Billiart ? But perhaps Julie herself would have preferred to share 
with other saints the silence of history. She loved her God ; she 
bore her Cross ; she followed Christ ; she wrought the work Christ 
gave her to do ; she now reigns with Him in glory. 



BIOGRAPHICAL DATES. 

ist Period EARLY YEARS. 

(to age of 1 6). 

July 1 2th, 1751 Birth at Cuvilly, Picardy, France. Daughter 
of Jean Frangois Billiart, a small farmer, and 
Marie Louise Antionette Debraine. 
Education at village school of Cuvilly. 
1760 First Communion. 

1764 Confirmation by Cardinal Bishop of Beauvais. 

1765 Vow of perpetual chastity. 
1767 Ruin of the Billiart farm. 



<znd Period 
(to age of 23). 

1767-1774 

About 1770 

1774 



JULIE BILLIART 
YEARS OF POVERTY. 



257 



Work in fields. Apostolic zeal among labourers. 
Admission to daily Communion. 
Paralysis caused by shock resulting from attempt 
on her father's life. 



yd Period 
(to age of 53). 

1774-1790 

1790*794 



1794 



August 5th, 



1797 
1803 



February 2nd, 1804 
June ist, 1804 



YEARS OF PHYSICAL SUFFERING. 

" The Saint of Cuvilly." Work for God from 
her sick-room. 

Attempts on her life by Republicans. Flight 
to Compiegne. Frequent changes of lodging. 
Her vision of the future Institute of Notre Dame. 
Removal to Hotel Blin at Amiens. Meeting 
with Marie Louise Frangoise Biin de Bourdon 
(co-foundress) . 

First beginnings of Religious Life. 
Petite Terreur. Removal to Bettencourt. 
Instructions continued in sick-room, 
Return to Amiens. First foundation of Insti- 
tute of Notre Dame. 
First Religious vows. 
Sudden cure of her paralysis. 



q.th Period 

(to death at age of 64) 
October i5th, 1805 
February 2nd, 1806 
1806-1808 

1808 

1808 

January, 1809 

1807-1814 

1813 
1814-1815 



April 8th, 
May 1 3th, 



1816 
1906 



FOUNDATIONS OF NOTRE DAME. 

Final vows. 

Revelation of expansion of Institute. 

Foundations in dioceses of Amiens, Ghent, 

Namur, Tournai, Bordeaux. 

Persecution by ecclesiastical authority at 

Amiens. 

Gift of healing : 23 sisters cured of typhoid, 

Expulsion from Amiens, departure for Namur. 

Foundations at Saint Hubert, Zele, Gembloux, 

Andenne, Fleurus. 

Visit to Pope Pius VII at Fontainebleau. 

War in Belgium. Courageous visitations of 

convents within war-zone. 

Persecution by the Sisters. Final martyrdom of 

the spirit. 

Death at Namur. 

Beatification by Pope Pius X. 



CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS, M.A. 



JOHN LINGARD 



A.D. 1771185-1 

IT TOOK TWO hundred years after the Reformation in England before 
the Catholic body was stamped out. Throughout those two 
hundred years the Catholics were an ever-decreasing, but still impor- 
tant, minority. After the rebellion of 1745 the Catholic body, as a 
body, almost ceased to exist. Catholicism became the creed of a very 
few, scattered individuals. For almost exactly a hundred years from 
the death of Pope in 1 744 and the rebellion of 1 745 Catholicism dropped 
out of English life. In the 1840'$ came the revival, the " second 
spring." 

The new Catholicism was the product of a wide variety of causes. 
The sharp addition to the numbers of practising Catholics in England 
was mainly due to the Irish immigration, consequent on the famine. 
There was also a lesser trickle of immigration from other Catholic 
lands. Converts were chiefly the result of the Oxford Movement 
and the influence of Newman. 

Yet, while so much has been written, and justly written, of the 
influence of Newman and the Oxford converts, it is strange and 
ungenerous to underrate, as is now commonly done, another influence, 
in its way as remarkable as that of Newman the influence of John 
Lingard, surely the most remarkable man that has been born of 
English Catholic parents since the seventeenth century. The present 
writer found himself seated at dinner a year or two ago near two of 
the best-read of living English priests, and was astonished and shocked 
to find that neither of them ever read Lingard, that they did not 
believe that anyone else ever read him and that they thought praise 
of him was an exercise of the foolishly pious rather than of the sincere 
and scholarly. Such an opinion is surely a disaster. 

The great achievement of Lingard was this. The bias against 
tradition of the encyclopaedist mind of the eighteenth century had raised 
a demand for the revision of history. " Why should we accept tradi- 
tional stories ? " they said. " Let us go back to the original documents 
and find out what really did happen." The pretence, at least, of an 
acquaintance with original documents is to-day so common that we 

258 



JOHN LINGARD 259 

can no longer appreciate the originality of that demand. Yet it 
was an original demand a hundred and fifty years ago, and it was 
made by men who had not the least doubt that the consequence of 
satisfying it would be the explosion of the Christian religion. The 
Catholics in England, such as they were, were few and timid, few of 
them qualified to meet an intellectual challenge and the majority 
apprehensive that nothing but harm could come out of a Catholic 
engaging in controversy, whatever the controversy's result, grateful 
not to be physically persecuted, apprehensive that any provocative 
conduct might be a barrier to further emancipation. Lingard, as 
we shall see, had a full understanding of the importance of avoiding 
provocation. Yet he saw, too, that victories could not be won by 
timidity and that, when there was a bluff to be called, it was well 
to call it. 

For it was his conviction a conviction the justice of which he amply 
demonstrated that the encyclopaedist challenge was a bluff. Just 
as de Maistre had shown that there was no reason to fear that challenge 
in philosophy, so Lingard showed that there was no reason to fear it 
in history. Faith had no cause to fear a challenge. It could appeal 
to reason, and it could appeal to evidence, and could win the verdict. 
It was un-faith that was un-reason. 

Yet Lingard, who was so great a historian only because he was a 
great statesman as well as a great scholar, very well understood how 
carefully a Catholic priest must tread, if he wanted to gain the 
attention of an English audience in the early nineteenth century. 
It was not enough for him to win most of his controversies ; he must 
win all his controversies. If he would correct mis-statements about 
the Church, he must confine himself to correcting those that could 
be exposed with absolute certainty. Accusations, where refutation 
was not yet quite demonstrable, must for the moment be allowed to 
go by default. 

Thus in his private papers we find the record of his making a list 
of the errors in Macaulay and Carlyle and then docketing them away 
in a desk with the reflection that it would be best to leave a non- 
Catholic to expose the errors of the anti-Catholic writers. " Through 
the work," he wrote of his History. " I made it a rule to tell the truth, 
whether it made for us or against us : to avoid all appearance of 
controversy that I might not repel Protestant readers ; and yet to 
furnish every necessary proof in our favour in the notes ; so that, if 
you compare my narrative to Hume's, for example, you will find 
that with the aid of the notes, it is a complete refutation of him 
without appearing to be so. This I thought preferable. In my 
account of the Reformation I must say much to shock Protestant 
prejudices and my only chance of being read by them depends upon 



260 GREAT CATHOLICS 

my having the reputation of a temperate writer. The good to be 
done is by writing a book which Protestants will read." 

In particular he determined early on the necessity for making a 
great renunciation. No man was ever better qualified than he to 
expose the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for the cads' ramp that it was. 
Yet he saw that there was a limit to the amount of exposure that the 
British public would tolerate from one priest. His prime task was 
to expose the Reformation. Even such an exposure was to the English 
mind so great a paradox that, careful though he was to write in studied 
moderation and understatement, yet, even as it was, Macaulay was 
able to dismiss him with a " Dr. Lingard, a very able*and well-informed 
writer but whose great fundamental rule of judging seems to be that 
the popular opinion on historical questions cannot possibly be correct." 
Lingard felt that, should he go forward and attack 1688 as he had 
attacked the Reformation, however irrefutable both attacks might 
be, the force of both would be diminished. 

That a Catholic priest should have been the first of scientific English 
historians is a happy accident, whose importance is sometimes over- 
looked. " It is a Providence truly/' said Cardinal Wiseman, " that 
in history we have given to the nation a writer like Lingard. . . . 
This is a mercy indeed and rightful honour to him who, at such a 
period of time, worked his way not into a high rank but to the very 
loftiest point of literary position." Whatever may be the degree 
of anti-Catholic prejudice that is still to be found among English 
scholars, certainly the language in which the achievement of mediaeval 
civilization is discussed to-day differs greatly from that in which it was 
commonly discussed in Lingard's day, and the most confident of 
rejoicers at the destruction of Christian unity in the sixteenth century 
would not to-day try to justify it with the careless and cocksure 
inaccuracy of a Froude. For that there are many reasons. One of 
them is most certainly the influence of Lingard the conviction which 
he imposed on English historical scholarship that the deepest learning 
and the highest integrity might cause not a weakening but a 
strengthening of Catholic faith. It may have been strange that 
they needed such a lesson, but need it they certainly did. Mr. Belloc, 
with characteristic generosity and characteristic aggressiveness, has 
continually borne witness to Lingard's influence. He has acknow- 
ledged him as his master and he has accused his fellow-historians of 
" using Lingard as a quarry, and without acknowledgment." 

If we consider the date at which he wrote, it is extraordinary how 
high was the level of accuracy which he maintained. Page after 
page of Macaulay is disfigured by the grossest errors both in text and 
reference. Froude gives as quotations sentences which are but 
paraphrases, if that, of their original. And their modern defenders 



JOHN LINGARD s6i 

plead that the age was not an age of accurate history. LIngard, 
working under enormously greater difficulties than Macaulay or 
Froude, covering an enormously larger period than they, can hardly 
be convicted of any Important inaccuracy. Even where new evidence 
has come to light since his time, very often, as In the case of Chapuys* 
reports of the state of England to Charles V, it has entirely confirmed 
conclusions to which Lingard had already come. 

The estimate of the Influence of LIngard has been disputed, and it 
has been argued that, so far as nineteenth-century England was 
convinced that a man could be both a scholarly historian and a 
Catholic, he who convinced them was not LIngard but Acton. It 
Is hard to agree. Lord Acton's influence was in exactly the opposite 
direction. Acton changed no man's rnlnd. He was a victim of the 
dominant ideas of his time to an excessive degree. His influence 
on the academic world was to persuade It that, when there did happen 
to crop up an intelligent man who had had the misfortune to be 
brought up Catholic, he agreed with the academic world so far as he 
dared to. It was Lingard's greatness that, while he won the esteem 
of the academic mind, he never himself faltered in his contempt for It. 

There is loss and gain In exclusion from the main educational 
stream of one's country. The average standard of the Catholic school 
then was probably, as It probably is to-day, lower than that of the 
non-Catholic, and students may lose Intellectually, though they gain 
spiritually, from exclusion from non-Catholic schools. But for the 
exceptional man, able to learn for himself, It is a gain that he be able 
to learn, freed from the stereotyping influence of a strong tradition. 
Nothing but the happy accident of penal laws could have produced 
the great liberating influence of LIngard. 

It is probably true that Lingard was too contemptuous of Oxford. 
Never having himself experienced those complex loyalties to and 
affections for an institution, by which Englishmen are so largely 
moved, he under-rated their power for good. For he himself loved 
Ushaw, but loved it rather as his child than as his parent. He judged 
the Intellectual solely on his intellect and thus formed for him a 
perhaps excessive contempt. While other Catholics were con- 
gratulating themselves on the intellectual reinforcement of the Oxford 
converts, Lingard, while congratulating, yet could not conceal a 
measure of contempt for men who even for a time had been captured 
by the values of Oxford. It was no difficulty to him to understand 
how an active, unreflecting man accepted the values taught in 
England by nineteenth-century Church and State. But he could not 
understand how a scholar could accept them, gaping as they were 
with their inconsistencies. " There appears to me," he wrote, " a 
superabundance of wordiness and dreaminess in all the writings of 



S62 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the Oxford tractarlans." And in a private letter he wrote, in a 
phrase of typically humorous petulance, of a group of them at Oscott, 
that they talked " as if they were all old women or lunatics." 

He had, it cannot be denied, a certain prejudice against the Oxford 
converts, though in serious moments ready to recognize the good 
that they did and to advocate the wise policy that, with their differing 
background, they should go their way and he should be allowed to 
go his. It was important that there should be different sorts of 
Catholics, pursuing their different policies, the one hitting the 
mark here, the other there. "Let the converts write in their own 
way. They must know better than we do what is most likely to 
influence the Protestant mind." Yet it was his conviction that it 
was a highly untypical sort of Englishman w r ho was attracted by the 
Oxford Movement and his fear that large hopes of a national 
conversion in the wake of that of Newman were doomed to disappoint- 
ment. He has proved right in his fear and it may be that he has 
proved right in his belief that his apologetics were more calculated 
to appeal to, at any rate, a large class of Protestant Englishmen than 
those of some of the Oxford thinkers. It was his contention that 
there was no deep difference between him and the Protestants as to 
what the Catholic Church was ; their difference was whether that 
Church, as she now existed, did or did not resemble the organization of 
the primitive Christians. It was a question that could be settled 
by the appeal to history. But in a way his difference from the Puseyite 
was more profound than his difference from the Protestant, because 
one who held the branch-theory of the Church must attach so wholly 
different a meaning to the word " Church " to that which Catholics 
attached to it that it was difficult even to talk with him. When after 
his many spiritual wrestlings Newman decided that a branch-theory 
of the Church was not tenable, it was a momentous catastrophe to his 
disciples, but Lingard was not wrong in his expectation that the 
answer of ninety-nine out of a hundred even of educated Englishmen 
would be a shrug of the shoulders and an " I never supposed that it 
was." 

One of the strongest battles which he fought was the battle against 
those who would be stricter than the mind of the Church. " All 
things are lawful, but all things are not expedient," he used often to 
quote. The passage of the generations had built up in the English 
soul a massive wall of anti-Catholic prejudice. The Catholic habits 
had come to seem to it bizarre and puerile worse still foreign. It 
was most important that Englishmen should not be compelled to 
accept more than the Church definitely commanded. Once that 
the authority of a teaching Church was accepted, then the converts 
would form their own pious habits in time. That could be left to the 



JOHN LINGARD 263 

future. But for the moment he was most strongly opposed to les 
petites devotions to the introduction into England of harmless but 
unnecessary Continental customs. He scorned the uncouth halter 
of the Roman collar, seeing no reason why the priest should be 
compelled to dress like a dog in order to show the world that he was 
not a layman. And he rightly rejected as an offence alike against 
English susceptibilities and against Catholic tradition the barbaric 
notion that a secular priest should be addressed as " Father." He was 
more than doubtful at first of the wisdom of reintroducing the Jesuits 
into England and determined to fight to prevent them from regaining 
control of the English College at Rome. Yet after Father Plowden's 
death and in the second half of his life his relations with the Jesuits 
at Stonyhurst grew much more friendly* 

The waters of Lingard's great learning flowed along two widely 
different channels. On the one hand, as we have said, he started a 
tradition in academic circles which has endured to this day. cs Talbot 
adds," he was able to record at the end of his life,. " that my history- 
had no small share in creating in the universities the spirit of enquiry 
into Catholic matters. . . . This, if it be true, is very gratifying.' 5 
But his history also fell into the hands of a creature more wildly 
unlike a don than any that was ever erect upon two legs. William 
Cobbett acknowledged Lingard as his master. 

Cobbett, a politician, aflame with indignation at the sufferings of 
the poor of his own day, a man of humble origins who had had no 
expensive schooling, had, he tells us, up till then accepted uncritically 
the conventional Whig history and believed that, if things were bad, 
they had at least always been bad. It was Lingard who opened his 
eyes, through whom he first learnt that there had been an England 
very different from that of the early nineteenth century. No two 
men could have been more different than Cobbett and Lingard. 
They had nothing in common save only the common advantage of 
having escaped the cramping influence of the academies. Cobbett 
had but little interest either in history for its own sake or in religious 
truth. His interest was in the social problems of his own day, and 
history to him a useful weapon, if it enabled him to pillory the rich 
by telling of another age in which things were managed very much 
better than in his own. Lingard showed him that there had been 
such an age, and Cobbett eagerly seized his Lingard, translated it 
into his own tremendous prose, used what suited him, omitted what 
did not suit him, blurred out all qualifications and set it out as a 
trumpet-call to bid the people rise for liberty. 

Lingard had never believed in art for art's sake or history for history's 
sake. Like Trollope, he had always written frankly with a purpose. 
But his purpose had been a very different one from Cobbett's. He 



264 GREAT CATHOLICS 

wrote to dissipate prejudices against religion, Cobbett to rouse men to 
revolt. As a result, therefore, Cobbett's story of the Reformation, 
though based upon Lingard, yet reads very differently from Lingard. 
Cobbett, for instance, for the purposes of his contrast, is inclined to 
romanticize the conditions of the pre-Refbrmation monasteries and to 
speak of the Reformation as a crime perpetrated by a few wicked men 
against a contented England. Lingard, as a true historian must 
needs have done, knew well that the Reformation could not have 
happened if there had not already been much amiss with the pre- 
Reformation England, and, if anything, he perhaps somewhat 
exaggerated the corruption of the pre-Reformation monks. They 
were " a time-serving lot," he wrote. He did not need to create 
imaginary paragons of virtue in order to heighten the contrast with 
the vices of the reformers. Yet the gap between Cobbett's mind and 
Lingard's mind was perhaps not so great as that between their works. 
For Lingard was, from policy, always understanding, while Cobbett 
from his policy that of creating immediate excitement was always 
overstating. 

In any event the consequence of the Lingard-Cobbett critique, 
even though details of it have not proved tenable, has been important 
and beneficent. The England of Lingard *s day worshipped at the shrine 
of the depressing materialistic goddess of progressive capitalism. A 
reaction against the horrors of capitalism was sooner or later in- 
evitable but, if the reaction should come to a generation whose eyes 
were covered with the blinkers of Whig history, it was only to be 
expected that they would react from the Tweedledum of capitalism 
to the Tweedledee of Marxian Communism, thence to collapse into 
despair when they found that they had but exchanged prison for prison. 
What has kept England alive is the persistence in every generation of a 
small band of men who have rejected the false liberties of liberalism 
and Whig history and maintained the right of appeal to tradition. 
A motley band they are Disraeli and the Young Englanders, Feargus 
O'Connor and the " back-to-the-land " wing of the Chartists, Ruskin, 
William Morris and, to a lesser degree, the other pre-Raphaelites ; 
Mr. Chesterton and the Distributists of our own day. They all, to 
a large extent derived, whether they were conscious of it or not, from 
Cobbett and, through Cobbett, from Lingard. 

They derived from Lingard, but Lingard must not, therefore, be held 
responsible for all their doings. When we come to the world of art 
an important distinction must be drawn. There can be no doubt 
that the Gothic Revival owed a great deal to the impulse towards a 
better understanding of the Middle Ages which Lingard gave. But 
for all that Lingard strongly disapproved of it. He disapproved of 
Pugin's medievalism perhaps because he knew so much more about 



JOHN LINGARD 265 

the Middle Ages than Pugin did. It was his argument, not dissimilar 
to that of Mr. Eric Gill to-day, that every age must have its own 
artistic expression and that nothing was less of a compliment to the 
Middle Ages that to imitate their forms of architecture in an alien 
environment. 

The external story of Lingard's life can soon be told. The son of a 
carpenter of Lincolnshire family, resident at Winchester, he was born 
in that city in 1771 and brought up there. Owing to the offices of 
Mr. Nolan, the local priest, a burse was obtained for him at Douai, 
whither he went at the age of nine. After his nine years of schooling 
there, he decided to stay on and study for the priesthood, expecting 
to receive his ordination at Douai, The troubles of the French 
Revolution came, and Lingard, like other English seminarists, had to 
flee to England. Once in Douai he had already been in danger of 
his life, when he had stopped the mob to ask of them why they were 
dragging a French acquaintance of his to the guillotine ; a cry had been 
raised of le calotin a la lanterne, and Lingard had only saved himself 
by taking to his heels. Eventually he and three companions escaped 
from Douai by letting themselves by sheets from the windows. 

Thus it happened that he received his ordination in England one 
of the first Englishmen to do so since the Reformation. The England 
to which he returned was an England in which Catholics were still 
to wait almost another forty years for their full political emancipation. 
Yet it was an England, in which, for the first time since the Reformation, 
the Catholic religion was again tolerated. By the Second Catholic 
Relief Act of June 24, 1791, it was declared no longer a penal offence 
to say Mass publicly. Lingard went to teach at Douai's new home of 
Crook Hall, near Durham, and moved with the College to Ushaw 
in 1808. In 1811 he became parish priest of the little Lancashire 
village of Hornby and there he remained for the last forty years of his 
life. 

Many opportunities of advancement came to him. But for his 
own strenuous opposition he could certainly have had a bishop's mitre 
and probably a cardinal's hat. But a brief spell in the temporary 
rectorship of Ushaw had confirmed the conclusion of his temperament 
that he was unfitted for executive office. He thought indeed that 
gifts of statesmanship were required in order to shape the policy with 
which the Catholics should meet their new opportunity and their new 
status, and there was probably no man in England who had so large a 
hand in the shaping of that Catholic policy as Lingard. But he 
preferred to work through advice and consultation rather than be him- 
self the acknowledged leader. And, as an adviser, he played a part in 
Catholic councils very different from that of the average village priest. 
Nor was his influence confined to Catholic circles. He was able to 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

occupy a position in general English life such as no Catholic priest had 
occupied for centuries and which it is extraordinary that a man without 
family connections should have been able to acquire. He was the 
confidential friend, in a day when such a relationship was indeed rare, 
of Blomfield, the Anglican Bishop of Chester, and boasted with good- 
humoured amusement to his Anglican neighbours that the Bishop had 
sent him a copy of his episcopal charge before he distributed it to his 
own clergy. In an age when travelling was by no means the easy 
business which it is to-day, Brougham, soon to be Whig Lord 
Chancellor, and Pollock, to be Tory Attorney-General, had a habit 
of making the difficult journey to remote Hornby in order to take the 
advice of its parish-priest. 

In learning he was the complete man to a degree which it is rare to 
find in our hurrying age. French, owing to his education in France, 
was as much his language as was English, and, when elected a Member 
of the French Academy, it was no difficulty to him to write his qualifying 
essay in the French language. Greek and Latin were his companions, 
as they were those of all educated men at that day, but he had a 
contempt for those who confined their reading in those tongues to the 
conventionally termed classical authors. He was a master of prose 
and a competent versifier in four languages. 

He achieved his mastery because he was willing to pay for it the 
necessary price of a secluded life. The telephone and the motor car 
have in our day made it fatally easy to obtain company and, as^a result, 
there are few who are ready to find their first companions in their books, 
which is the necessary condition of great scholarship, or to commune 
with themselves rather than chatter to others, which is the necessary 
condition of great literature. It would indeed be a foolish falsehood to 
pretend that the average Englishman, Catholic or Protestant, lay or 
clerical, a hundred years ago was such a man as Lingard. There 
were but few like him in the country, and it may well be that the average 
even among the professedly educated was more ignorant than are we 
to-day. But one cannot but wonder, when one reads the life of such 
a man as Lingard, whether too high a price cannot be paid for 
raising the average level of information, whether there is not some value 
in a more frank division between the learned and the lewd and whether 
it is altogether better to have a society in which all claim to be 
lieutenants and none is willing to be private or able to be general. 

Like all very able men, Lingard would doubtless have become 
both base and boring had his life not been disciplined by faith. He 
had a power of irony that a later age was to find tedious in Anatole 
France. "The sagacity of Mosheim," he wrote of Egypt in his 
Anglo-Saxon Church, " has discovered that this practice" that of 
celibacy of the clergy " owed its origin not to the doctrine of the gospel 



JOHN LINGARD ^67 

but to the influence of the climate." There follow two lines of learned 
references, and then, ce If this be true we must admire the heroism of its 
present inhabitants, who in their harems have subdued the influence 
of the climate and introduced the difficult practise of polygamy in lieu 
of the easy virtue of chastity." He was sometimes almost brutal in 
his rebuffs to the distinguished who had, he thought, presumed too 
far. " If Dr. Wiseman should be of a different opinion respecting 
St. Thomas, I can only account for it by supposing, as is not unlikely, 
that he never studied the question." Or, in reply to a suggestion of a 
visit from Dollinger, whom he did not esteem as highly as did others 
in England of that date. " I hope Dr. Dollinger will think the con- 
servation of his money preferable to my company." 

Young men in a panic, old men in a frenzy, alike aroused 
his almost contemptuous amusement. He took a positive, perhaps 
sometime an almost cruel, delight in ridiculing what he considered 
affectation. When an over-enthusiastic nun begged him to bring 
back for her a memento from the Vatican, he complied with the 
request but sent also a flea which he had caught in the Papal ante- 
chamber. The driver of the stage-coach used to stop his coach 
opposite Lingard's house and say to his passengers " This is the house 
of Dr. Lingard, the famous historian of England." The passengers 
then stared in. So Lingard trained his dog to sit at a desk in the 
window in cap and gown with spectacles on his nose. The passengers 
imagined that they had seen the famous historian, while Lingard 
himself continued his work in another room at the back of the house. 

Yet contempt and brusqueness in him never became inordinate, 
because there reigned over all the discipline of charity, He had a 
most profound sense of vocation. There were two tasks to which 
he felt himself called, nor was it for him to estimate their relative 
importance. He was called to minister to the scattered faithful of a 
large north-country parish and he did so for forty years with a devotion 
and a patience so great that even to-day the memory of " the old 
doctor " has hardly perished in the Hornby district. He was called 
to play a great part, if not the greatest part, in shaping the policy 
by which Catholicism should seize a new opportunity for the recapture 
of the lost province of England. There he engaged a battle, the 
event of which is not yet known. 



EDMUND C. BUCKLEY 



DANIEL O'CONNELL 



A.D. 177^-1847 

TN HER INCOMPARABLE adventures, Alice, that Marco Polo of Wonder- 
J[ land, once encountered the Cheshire cat. Ensconced on the 
branch of a tree, the animal gradually faded away until nothing of it 
could be seen save the grin. So is it that, with the passage of time, a 
man whose stature once impressed a continent, may survive only in 
the faint transparency of a name. 

In Ireland " the Liberator," in England " the Irish Agitator," such 
was Daniel O'Conneli in the eyes of the great majority of the two 
races. The two titles illustrate in their way the tragic differences 
between them, which have painfully contributed to the making of our 
island's story. 

O'Connell was not the first nor was he the only worker In the struggle 
for the smashing of the great social and ecclesiastical machine, based 
on intolerance and greed, which held the Irish race bound for the 
best part of two centuries. There were many others, both in England 
and in Ireland, towards the end of the eighteenth century, who 
realized the degrading injustice of the system of ascendancy and 
worked, not without success, for its amelioration. But these were 
for the most part English or Anglo-Irish politicians who had little or 
no spiritual contact with the mass of the population. O'Connell, 
on the other hand, was Irish of the Irish, born and fostered among 
the glens of remotest Kerry, in a district and among a people to whom 
English law and the English tongue were still strange ; remote and 
inaccessible from the capital, but free and open to the wild Atlantic, 
which made the markets of France and Spain the natural, if illicit, 
outlet for a race of adventurous cattle-breeders, traders and smugglers. 

It was at the end of an era that, in 1775, O'Connell was born. 
With the realization of the penal laws against Catholics there was 
achieved a measure of economic emancipation. But there was 
still the aftermath of a great wrong and O'Connell's Ireland was a 
country where, as Charles Lever vivaciously intimates, the administra- 
tion of law had been brought into discredit. 

By this chaos the O'Connells themselves were affected. Debarred 

268 



DANIEL O'CONNELL 269 

as he had been from the usual opportunities of commerce and the 
usual right to own property, the chieftain of the family, Daniel's uncle s 
had become the most accomplished and admired smuggler in County 
Kerry. So strong was his scruple against contributing to the revenue 
that, when a tax was imposed on beaver hats, he changed his headgear 
and, for the rest of his life, was known as " Hunting Cap/' Happily 
for Hunting Cap, the grand jury, though Protestant, consisted of his 
customers ; and when, inadvertently, a new official. Captain Butler s 
searched the cave where O'Connell kept his contraband, even he allowed 
the lady of the house to retain a silk dress from France. " You shall 
have it free, madam," he said, " if it costs me my commission." 

The vicissitudes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had 
brought the O'Connells down from their old position of tribal chiefs 
and rulers over a wide domain, but they still maintained a certain rude 
dignity of their own. They furnished recruits for the French King's 
armies, imported French wines and silks, paid for them in Irish cattle 
and sheep, and grew rich by trading with their inland neighbours, 
Protestant or Catholics, who were less favourably situated for 
smuggling purposes but who had no compunctions about profiting 
by transactions grateful and comforting to themselves although frowned 
on by English law. An uncle of the Liberator was a colonel in the 
French service, and as regular communication was kept up between 
the members of the family, it was natural that when young Dan came 
to the proper age he was sent to school in France, where he received 
a fair grounding in the ss humanities. !S Whether he was to become a 
priest or an officer was still an open question when the outbreak of 
the French Revolution brought about a new order of things in which 
all his plans came to grief. In the clerical-royalist atmosphere of St. 
Omer the Revolution was regarded with detestation and horror ; 
things went from bad to worse until the college was occupied by 
Revolutionary troops and the pupils turned out. Young O'Connell 
made his way, not without danger and difficulty, to Calais. He and 
his companions were hooted and hustled as " young priests " and 
" little aristocrats." They were forced to wear the hated tricolour, 
but O'Connell's last act on leaving for Dover was to tear the cockade 
from his hat and throw it into the sea. 

It is as a wild Irishman, making things hot for England, that Daniel 
O'Connell has usually been depicted. Certainly his personality was 
masterful ; certainly his career was tempestuous. If, however, he 
stands among the universal, it is as a symbol, not of anarchy, not of 
rebellion, but of order. In a world, encumbered with anomaly, his 
gospel was logic and his practice was law. He saw, on the one hand, 
the dangers of the excesses being perpetrated in the sacred name 
of " liberty," and the calamitous reprisals that were certain to follow ; 



2jO GREAT CATHOLICS 

on the other, he beheld his country dejected, degraded, downtrodden 
in every way ; his religion persecuted, proscribed, and outlawed. 
He felt that he was born in servitude, and living a slave, and his noble 
spirit determined to be free. 

Even in boyhood, his essential conservatism was revealed. But 
the radicalism of Robespierre was to him a peril from which he must 
make his escape. He returned to Ireland the royalist that he never 
ceased to be. In another respect, he was normal. Meeting his cousin, 
Mary, he remarked one day, " Are you engaged, Miss O'Connell ? " 
She replied, " I am not." " Then," he went on, " will you engage 
yourself to me ? " and she answered, " I will." Secretly, but happily, 
they were married ; there was a large family, and amid his agitations, 
O'Connell maintained his home. For twenty-five years he rose at 
4 in the morning, lit his own fire and worked till 10 in the evening. 

In O'Connell then we see the paradox which sometimes puzzles 
the student of the British Labour Party. He was no Bolshevist, eager 
to smash society. On the contrary, his grievance was that, in this 
society, he was not permitted to play his part as a loyal subject of the 
Throne. What made him so dangerous was the fact that he asked 
nothing at any times except the obviously reasonable. Of his two 
main demands, it may be said that both were merely expressions of 
the usual Whiggery. What was the Catholic Emancipation that so 
greatly enraged Wellington? Nothing except the principle that no 
citizen shall suffer disqualification on account of his religion. What 
was " repeal of the Union " for advocating which O'Connell was 
sent to prison ? Merely the policy of allowing an English-speaking 
democracy to manage its own strictly domestic affairs. 

The very fact that Catholics arrived at a measure of prosperity, 
meant that they were the more conscious of political exclusion. Take 
O'Connell's own case. As a "junior " at the bar, he only received 
200 for his first seventy-eight briefs. Yet when his income rose to 
twenty times that figure, he had still to practise as a junior and was 
unable either to " take silk " as a King's Counsel or to sit on the bench 
as a judge. It was what South Africa would call a colour bar, but 
without the colour. 

Ireland had been a nation before England had an alphabet. Now 
she was a downtrodden province, dominated by avaricious and 
intolerant blood-suckers. The ablest lawyers, including the Govern- 
ment's own Attorney-General, had declared the Union binding only 
until it could be successfully defied. The Parliament that passed the 
Act had no power from God or man to do so. Votes for it were obtained 
by open bribery and fraud at 8,000 a-piece. Upwards of a million 
sterling was expended in the purchase of the votes that carried it. 
Peerages, Protestant bishoprics, judgeships, positions in the army, 



DANIEL O'CONNELL 271 

navy, and Civil Service were bestowed in payment of votes. Public 
opinion in Ireland was despised during the negotiations. Public 
meetings against it were dispersed by force. Martial law was in full 
force, and the Habeas Corpus Act suspended. Intimidation to an 
alarming extent prevailed. Nearly one hundred thousand soldiers, 
with all the savagery of '98 attaching to their characters, occupied the 
island ; and, notwithstanding, seven hundred thousand were found 
to petition against the Bill, while only three thousand, including officials, 
could be marshalled to petition in its favour. Carried by perjury, 
corruption, and intimidation the " Union " became the law of the land. 
Froude describes Ireland at the same period as follows : 

The executive government was unequal to the elementary work of 
maintaining peace and order. The aristocracy and the legislature 
were corrupt beyond the reach of shame. The gentry had neglected 
their duties until they had forgotten that they had any duties to 
perform. The peasantry were hopelessly miserable ; and, finding 
in the law, not a protector and a friend, but a sword in the hands 
of their oppressors, they had been taught to look to crime and 
rebellion as their only means of self-defence. 

The cruelties inflicted on the Irish people by reason of the rebellion 
of 1 798, to which they had been driven, and into which they had been 
actually incited by the Government, the unchecked lawlessness of the 
Orange Society, and the enforcement of martial law under which 
Ireland groaned, produced almost universal hopelessness amongst 
Irish patriots. As long, however, as the Irish Parliament remained, 
anti- Catholic and bigotted though it was, there were certain hopes 
of its having to allow liberty of conscience to the vast majority of the 
people it legislated for, and otherwise to promote their happiness and 
prosperity. 

O'ConnelPs powers of vituperation and abusive oratory were 
immense. The age was one in which coarse rhetoric flourished, when 
even The Times could print epithets that would be barred to-day 
from gutter sheets, but O'Connell exceeded in scurrility all the coarse 
orators of his day. It was unlikely that the victims of his abuse would 
feel pleased with him. 

Catholic Emancipation had its advocates before O'Connell, and 
in the easy-going sceptical eighteenth century it did not much disturb 
the " Protestant conscience " of England. The practical difficulty 
at the earlier period was that it would completely upset the balance 
of power in Ireland, based as it was on the impregnable rock of the 
Protestant establishment. After the Union this danger did not exist 
in the same form ; but in the interval there had been a great 
" Evangelical " revival, which by reviving the " No Popery " feeling 



2J2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

among the masses of the people created a much more serious obstacle, 
the overcoming of which was O'Connell's great achievement. 

He got little help or sympathy from the English Catholics, whose 
motto was to " let sleeping dogs lie " ; and the Irish Hierarchy, with 
one or two exceptions, favoured the same attitude. A considerable 
amount of practical toleration had been secured by quiet means under 
Grattan's Parliament in 1793 ; and the fear was that by over-hasty 
agitation and clamour things might be made worse rather than better 
for the timid Catholics who in Dublin and in the other large towns 
had been thriving and prosperous under existing conditions. 
O'ConnelPs attempt to found a " Catholic Association " in 18123 
met at first with little encouragement : the body rented two small 
rooms in a side street, and sometimes there was the utmost difficulty 
in assembling a quorum to carry on the necessary business. The 
carrying of the agitation over the heads of the ec country gentry and the 
rich traders of the towns," and getting it into the hands and the 
minds of the fanners and country priests was O'ConnelFs idea ; 
and on these lines he won. " A penny a month, a shilling a year " 
was his cry, and the " Catholic Rent " was started. This in time 
provided the necessary funds, and the movement spread till the country 
was fairly covered. 

At this date we need not defend O'Connell against the insinuation 
that he made money by politics. The truth is rather that he gave up a 
magnificent practice at the bar and impoverished his inherited estate, 
dying almost without means. But, of course, his " penny-a-month 
plan for liberating Ireland," as the critics called it, resulted in the 
collection of what seemed to be enormous sums of money. In 1825 
this penny " rent " backed by the priests, was yielding 1,000 a week, 
and O'Connell thus established a precedent the importance of which 
possibily he did not realize. Hitherto, constituencies and their 
candidates had been dependent on the finances of the few. But in 
Ireland there arose a democracy that financed itself. 

But still O'Connell was powerless. No Catholic could sit in 
Parliament, and although some English Radical members occasionally 
took up their cause things were at a deadlock. Then came a stimulus 
in the form of a Government prosecution, based on the newspaper 
report of a speech in which O'Connell had warmly praised the South 
American Republics for their successful assertion of independence 
and had hinted that " if driven mad by persecution " Ireland might 
follow their example. But as Dublin Castle had not taken the 
precaution of sending an independent reporter, and as all the news- 
paper reporters had lost their notes and could not strain their memories 
to the extent of recalling the words used, the prosecution ignominiously 
collapsed and the movement secured a huge advertisement. The 



DANIEL O'CONNEIX 273 

Government then brought In a Bill for the Suppression of Unlawful 
Associations, and many speeches were made but nothing in particular 
achieved. When the association was suppressed O'Connell promptly 
founded a " New " Catholic Association, and things went on as 
before. 

O'Connell had none of the qualities of a statesman. Compared 
with Parnell the great Protestant leader of the Irish, O'Connell seems 
like a Tammany Boss in the presence of Abraham Lincoln. He was 
emotional and superstitious and ludicrously vain. Words were a 
sort of dope to him and he came to a point at which he could not live 
without oratory, just as a drug addict cannot live without cocaine. 
Yet he achieved a great act of deliverance for the people of his faith. 
It was he, more than any other man, who removed disabilities from 
Catholics, and it is an odd fact, and one likely to provoke cynical 
reflections, that among the most strenuous opponents of his efforts to 
emancipate his co-religionists was a young Oxford don, who wrote to 
his mother, after Peel's defeat in the University constituency. fi We 
have achieved a glorious victory ; it is the first public event I have 
been concerned in, and I thank God from my heart, both for my cause 
and its success." His name was John Henry Newman. 

Freedom for his fellow- Catholics to practise their religion, eligibility 
for every position and office in the State, and similar freedom for every 
man to follow his own convictions, were the cardinal points in his 
demands for " Emancipation " ; and the power for his fellow-country- 
men to legislate under the Crown, through a House of Lords and a 
House of Commons thoroughly representative of the people of Ireland, 
was what he claimed as " Repeal." 

O'Connell was, first and last, a man of law and order with an 
ingrained hatred of revolution and violence. While Wolfe Tone and 
Lord Edward FitzGerald and the wilder elements in Dublin and 
Belfast cheered for the Revolution in France and plotted rebellion in 
Ireland, young O'Connell joined the Militia and turned out in arms in 
support of the Government. His uncle and the other officers of the 
Irish Brigade placed their swords at the disposal of the English King ; 
and the whole O'Connell clan in Kerry, with their co-religionists, 
were enthusiastic loyalists and supporters of the Union which O'Gonnel! 
himself was to spend most of his later life in denouncing. But here 
again he knew where to draw the line, for when at the very end Young 
Ireland was once more caught in the revolutionary whirlpool and 
tended to follow Davis and Mitchel (both Protestants) into rebellion, 
O'Connell withstood them, even at the risk of sacrificing all he had 
worked for, and went out alone .to die a broken-hearted man on an 
alien shore. 

O'Connell's career divides itself naturally into two movements 



274 GREAT CATHOLICS 

which, although essentially and inevitably related, must be separately 
considered. The Union with England and the abolition of the Dublin 
Parliament were warmly supported by the Catholic Bishops, to whom 
that Parliament meant nothing but a hated ascendancy. Cork and 
the southern counties had no love for Dublin, and they too supported 
the Union. None were more vociferous in their clamour than the 
members of the junior Bar, and O'Connell in the first glory of wig 
and gown joined in the outcry with his fellows of the Four Courts. 
But it was Emancipation that held the attention alike of the Catholic 
Church and of the Irish people. It had the sympathy of all that was 
progressive and tolerant in English public life and over the civilized 
world. It was a tremendous struggle, and O'Connell was the hero of it. 
And when it was granted, nothing in particular happened ! A few 
wealthy Catholics could enter Parliament, but the Catholic peasant 
was still left to groan under the burden of the payment of tithe to a 
Church that was not his. The " Forty Shilling Freeholder " found 
himself disfranchised. Everything in Ireland went on much as 
before. 

What was O'Connell to do ? He was no longer a young man ; 
he had necessarily neglected his profession while engaged in endless 
public work. The Bishops were prepared to rest and be thankful, 
but there was no rest for the " Liberator." And thus he inevitably 
drifted into his second great movement which was to lead him to 
failure as complete as his first had been triumphantly successful. As 
an " Emancipator " he had the support of the English Whigs, but on 
the matter of Repeal they were opposed to him. In Ireland most of 
the younger priests rallied to his support, but the Bishops and the 
elder priests were lukewarm, if not hostile. He had huge popular 
successes, huge meetings at which endless speeches were delivered. 
But what was it leading to ? His health gave way. His financial 
position was seriously involved, " Young Ireland " rose in revolt, 
and clamoured for war and bloodshed. It was a hopeless position, 
and O'Connell broke under its weight. 

The turning-point came when in 1828 it was finally determined, 
in spite of the legal disqualification, to challenge an election for 
Parliament. Mr. Vesey FitzGerald, member for Clare, had been 
appointed President of the Board of Trade, and it was arranged to 
contest his re-election, O'Connell himself being the opposing candidate. 
The result is well known. The majority of the electors were Catholic 
tenant farmers, but never before had the landlord's right to the votes 
of his tenants been seriously challenged. The association had, however, 
changed all that ; and the tenants, headed by their priests, marched 
in platoons to the poll and voted for O'Connell. Mr. Vesey Fitz- 
Gerald wrote to Peel : " Nothing can equal the violence here. The 



DANIEL O'CONNELL J?/J 

proceedings of yesterday were those of madness : the country is mad." 
But O'Connell and his men had kept within the law, and his election 
was not disputed. 

There remained the obstacle of the Oath at the Table, containing 
as it did a declaration against ce Popery " which O'Connell could 
not make. But there was no more fight in the opponents of Emancipa- 
tion, most of whom were already tired of the conflict. Lord Anglesea, 
writing from Dublin discovered, somewhat later in the day, that it 
did not matter much after all and that the best way of " depriving the 
demagogues of their power " was " by taking Messrs. O'Connell, 
Shiel and the rest of them from the Association and placing them in 
the House of Commons." So the objectionable declaration was 
withdrawn. O'Connell was re-elected and took his seat. The 
struggle that threatened revolution was at an end, and Peel and 
Wellington discovered that nothing veiy remarkable had happened. 
The question of tithe still remained to act as a cause of turmoil and 
bloodshed ; but the main point was won, and O'Connell became the 
hero of the Catholic world. 

In normal circumstances this would have been the end. Indeed, 
O'Connell himself had indicated that with Emancipation there would 
be no more cause for agitation. " I say now," he cried, " that all, 
all, shall be pardoned, forgiven, forgotten upon giving us Emancipation, 
unconditional, unqualified, free and unshackled." But from one 
cause and another this measure of agreement was never reached. 
The Government took back with one hand what they had granted with 
the other, the " Forty Shilling Freeholder " was disfranchised ; 
O'Connell remained embittered and dissatisfied and before long 
agitation for Repeal of the Union succeeded that for emancipation. 
But that need not concern us here. The great concession that could 
have been made without agitation thirty years before was at last 
grudgingly made, and the lesson of successful agitation was learnt, 
with result of which perhaps the end is not yet. 

About his advocacy, there was heroism. In West Cork, an attempt 
was made on the life of a magistrate. Dublin Castle undertook what 
would have been a veritable massacre of suspects. In five minutes 
a packed jury consigned four men to death and a second batch had 
been scheduled to share the same fate. 

Desperately a messenger made his way over the mountains to 
summon O'Connell. Surrendering his briefs, Daniel set out on a ride 
of ninety miles in a dog-cart. Without wig or gown or brief he strode 
into the court, where they brought him a sandwich and a glass of milk. 
The prosecutor continued his speech. Suddenly, O'Connell munching 
the while, ejaculated, " That's not law," and it was not law. So began 
a crashing counter-attack, under which the entire case for the Crown 



276 GREAT CATHOLICS 

collapsed. There was no verdict possible except an acquittal and 
that verdict had to be accepted also for the men already awaiting 
execution. 

With the Protestant as such, O'Connell never had a quarrel. His 
colour was <e green/ 3 but he would say, " 1 kiss the Orange to my lips 
and I press it to my heart." For years he was comrade to Grattan, 
and when Grattan's Parliament was obliterated, O'Connell devoted 
his first great speech to denouncing the Union. With the Protestants 
of Dublin he fought against what was bound to be a loss of patronage 
and prestige. But " the garrison " declined to reciprocate. One 
alderman, D'Esteire, refused to support a petition to emancipate the 
Catholics and was the first of many disputants to challenge O'Connell 
to a duel. He was a little man and a good shot, but despite his bulk, 
O'Connell met him. To the general surprise it was D'Esterre who 
was killed, and of O'Connell we read : 

" His conscience was bitterly sore. He had not only killed a man, 
but left his widow and two small children almost destitute. He was 
determined to do all he could to assist her. He wrote at once, offering 
to ** share his income " with D'Esterre's widow. She declined, but 
consented to accept an annuity for her small daughter, which was 
paid regularly for more than thirty years until O'Connell's death. 
The memory of the duel haunted him for the remainder of his life. 
He never went to communion afterward without wearing a white 
glove on his right hand as a sign of penance ; and whenever he passed 
D'Esterre's house he would raise his hat and murmur a prayer for the 
dead." 

He was a weak man in a crisis, and had scarcely any judgment 
in difficult situations. His tactics and his strategy were equally poor. 
He always imagined he had won the fight when he had merely won 
the first round. He would found a society, such as the Catholic 
Association, to support a cause, and then, at the first rumour that 
the cause was won, would propose the society's suppression as " a 
gesture " of friendliness towards his opponents. He may have put 
his ear to the ground, but he could never hear anything, and could 
neither be persuaded to believe that any person had a chance of 
defeating the Beresfords in the pocket-borough of Waterford or that 
the nomination of himself for the constituency of Clare could have any 
value whatsoever. " Peel," he said, " is the merest man of words 
that the world has produced." He might have been describing him- 
self. What finally destroyed him was his behaviour at the monster 
demonstration at Clontarf to demand the repeal of the Union. Peel 
proclaimed the meeting, and O'Connell instantly came to heel. 
" c This must be obeyed/ the old agitator ordered," and thereby 
established himself as a model for Professor John MacNeill to follow 



DANIEL O'CONNELL 277 

in 1916. Once again O'Connell " immediately urged complete 
submission and recommended the dissolution of the Association," 
and compelled the editors of his newspaper to resign, and C ordered 
the unofficial law courts to suspend their activities.' 3 When Lord 
Chief Justice Denman delivered his judgment on the appeal against 
the sentence which sent O'Connell, in circumstances almost of luxury, 
to Richmond Gaol, upsetting the sentence and inflicting a heavy blow 
on Peel and his Ministry, O'Gonneli " received the news with blank 
incredulity." He never foresaw or anticipated anything that happened 
to him. 

Such an achievement constitutes a great claim for honour and 
renown, and having rescued liberty from licentiousness and error, 
having shown it compatible with loyalty, as he did in his own person, 
as well as in the persons of millions of his countrymen ; and having 
supernaturalized it by religion, he exhibited It as one of the dearest 
earthly gifts of God to man, the safety of governments, and the basis 
of human happiness. 

For well-nigh half a century, as Herculean agitator he tolled, with 
zeal unequalled and with wisdom unsurpassed. A bright and easy 
career of happiness was before him in an honourable profession. He 
renounced it, and when one would suppose him weary of the political 
warfare, he rejected Its highest reward. His minutes literally counted 
as gold honestly earned as a lawyer In his laborious profession. Yet, 
no one devoted more time to his country's welfare. The whole 
burden of the Irish cause rested upon Mm. He bore it up. General 
apathy for a long time pervaded the masses. Suspicion, opposition, 
calumny, and contempt were hurled against him. Attacks on himself 
he paid back with interest and scorn, and from insult he defended 
himself, once sinfully indeed, but according to the mistaken code of 
honour that then prevailed, with the weapons employed In duel 
encounters. Insults to his country he drove back with pulverizing 
blows. Peel and Disraeli fell beneath them morally as completely 
as the unfortunate d'Esterre did physically. Him It was O'Connell's 
misfortune, for which he publicly repented, to have fatally wounded. 
The " Orange " Peel and " the legitimate descendant of the impenitent 
thief," are epithets of lashing invective that made the greatest men 
writhe beneath its inflictions, as witness their contemplated duels with 
him. Disappointments, baffled hopes, perfidy to pledges, in turn 
accosted him. 

It was, moreover, O'Connell, more than any other man, who 
created the Idea of the public meeting as we know it to-day. At a 
time when it was contrary to etiquette for statesmen to mount the 
platform, he was second to none as a popular orator and actually was 
under a perpetual threat of prosecution. His Catholic Association 



2j8 GREAT CATHOLICS 

was forcibly suppressed ; so was his Anti-Union Association, but 
O'Connell always had the best of it. 

With King George IV, as Prince of Wales, a Catholic like O'Connell 
did not suppose that he could have a quarrel. It was known that the 
Prince had married Mrs. Fitzherbert and Mrs. Fitzherbert belonged 
to the Roman Church. Years after that affair had ended, we have 
a glimpse of O'Connell, kneeling at the feet of King George IV and 
presenting him with a wreath of laurel as he says, " When your 
Majesty came amongst us, discord ceased and even prejudice fled." 

It was his obsequious loyalty on which the King trampled, and the 
result was an embittered alienation. In a famous resolution, O'Connell 
and his friends learned " with deep disappointment and anguish how 
cruelly the promised boon of Catholic freedom has been intercepted 
by the fatal witchery of unworthy secret influences " otherwise Lady 
Hertford, the divinity at Windsor. On the other hand, the King, 
seeing O'Connell at his levee, muttered " There is O'Connell ! G d 
damn the scoundrel." In bitterness, in humiliation, thus spoke King 
George IV of England in London in May, 1829, just after the passing 
of the Act of Catholic Emancipation. For it was a humiliation for 
this bigoted, dropsical Hanoverian and his Court to be forced to do 
justice to his Catholic subjects, and O'Connell was the man whose 
brilliant political skill forced him. But O'Connell was more than a 
man in those days : he was a nation. He was Ireland. And Ireland 
won this freedom for herself and for us. As the late Bishop Ward 
said : " A comprehensive history of Catholic Emancipation can only 
be written from an Irish standpoint. . . . The struggle for emancipa- 
tion in England was only an episode in it, though, of course, one of 
essential importance." And again : " Emancipation was from the 
beginning an Irish, not an English question. . . Emancipation was 
forced from an unwilling Government ... as the lesser of two evils, 
and because the state of Ireland had become such that it had become 
in their opinion ungovernable by any other policy." In 1836, 
O'Connell became co-founder with Bishop Wiseman, of The Dublin 
Review. 

He gave a series of weekly breakfasts at Holmes's Hotel. If the 
government thought fit to proclaim political breakfasts, he declared, 
then they would " resort to a political lunch. If the luncheon be 
equally dangerous to the peace of the great duke, we shall have 
political dinners. If political dinners be proclaimed down, we must, 
like certain sanctified dames, resort to * tea and tracts/ leaving us still 
to fall back upon the right to meet at suppers 3 until suppers also are 
proclaimed down." 

So was inaugurated the tradition of an Irish humour in politics 
which, at its best, has been devastating. 



DANIEL O'CONNELL 279 

There is not much need to unfold O'Connell's public character. 
He was a man of whom any country might justly feel proud. A 
lawyer he was the most renowned of the Irish Bar. A statesman 
he was the admiration of liberty-loving people in its true sense In all 
the surrounding nations. A champion of civil and religious freedom 
by his labours and victory, all the millions of British subjects are ever 
since in possession of that inestimable boon. A constitutional warrior 
for the emancipation from thraldom and for the national liberty of 
his countrymen, for which he fought in every action of his life, he 
stands unique in history in that position which can best enlist the 
admiration of humanity, and evoke for his memory its most grateful 
veneration. Pope Pius IX describes him in words that should be 
inscribed in brass on the tablets of the Irish people as " the great 
champion of the Church, the father of his country, and the glory of 
the Christian world." His life was an eventful one. The battle he 
fought was a tremendous one. The victory he obtained was a glorious 
one. The cause in which he may be said to have died was a noble 
and glorious one, though as yet unwon, and his memory is a priceless 
and sacred heirloom for the scattered Irish race. To this day his 
reputation remains a tradition in all the democracies of the world. 
But in Ireland and in England, where he played so dominating a 
part in the evolution of modern politics, his fame has never recovered 
from the eclipse of those closing years of his strenuous life. 

It is true that repeal was not carried until seventy years and more 
after his death, but it is not to O'ConnelFs fame that the delay has 
been a disaster. Looking back on the drama, we cannot be other 
than amazed at the folly with which the statesmen of England rebuffed 
a man who, being never happier than in the House of Commons, was 
pathetically anxious to keep within the law. The very pliability of 
O'Connell, as the stalwarts regarded it, is the measure of the madness 
which denied a reasonable response to his approaches. 

Ireland has never had a more devoted servant than O'Connell. 
In her cause he sank all ambition for personal advancement ; so long 
as he knew that his country needed him, he gave her his service first 
and last. 

In the last years of his life he lost some of the ground he had gained, 
but he continued to sacrifice himself to his country's call with that 
magnificent generosity which brings him vividly home to a new 
generation to whom he is little more than a name. 

He died at Genoa, a man bereaved and broken. " The heart of 
O'Connell at Rome, his body in Ireland and his soul in heaven " 
so he murmured " is not that what the justice of man and the mercy 
of God demand ? " Enough that his wishes were carried out. At 
the Irish College there is a silver urn that enshrines the heart. A tall 



sSo GREAT CATHOLICS 

tower at Glasnevin stands sentinel over the rest of that mighty physique. 
Within a year of his death Ireland entered upon that prolonged series 
of insurrectionary offensives which ended at last in the establishment 
of the Free State. For the Diehards, progressive Britain has had to 
pay a heavy price. 

The heart that has truly loved never forgets, 

But as truly loves on to the close. 
As the sun-flower turns on her god, when he sets. 

The same look which she turn'd when he rose. 

He was a great Catholic lawyer who sacrificed all hopes, and repeated 
offers of professional advancement, in order to retain his freedom to 
continue his self-imposed life's work of serving his country. 

The great Montalembert addressing him a short time before his 
(O'ConnelFs) death, said : 

Thy glory is not only Irish it is Catholic. Wherever Catholics 
begin anew to practise civic virtues, and devote themselves to the 
conquest of civic rights it is your work. Wherever religion tends 
to emancipate itself from the thraldom in which several generations 
of sophists and logicians have placed it, to you, after God, is religion 
indebted. 

The prejudice and passion which were at their height at the 
Liberator's death unjustly obscured the fame of one whom Gladstone 
called " the greatest popular leader the world has ever seen " but 
it will contribute to a revival of interest in one who was a veritable 
Titan in his time, and beyond dispute a genius. 

His life story should be an inspiration to every Catholic and democrat, 
and of surpassing interest to anyone, in fact, who has a spice of romance 
in his character. 

Perhaps the most paradoxical feature about Emancipation is that it 
was the logical outcome of the Reformation. The very liberty of 
conscience to which O'Connell appealed was the fruit of the Reforma- 
tion, which, in its turn, had its origin in the centuries of intolerance. 



DOUGLAS WOODRUFF 



THE ABBE MIGNE 



A.D. 

PAUL MIGNE came from the Auvergne country. He was 
1 born there on October 25th, 1800, and so just missed the last of 
the conscriptions of the First Empire. He grew up, the son of poor 
parents, a boy of all-round proficiency but of no especial brilliance. 
He was fond of swimming, rather good at games, of a good average 
capacity with books. He was offered a place in the seminary at 
Orleans, accepted it, and emerged as an ordained priest in 1824. -^ e 
was appointed, in the ordinary way, to a succession of local curacies 
in the Auvergne countryside. 

So far, until his early thirties there is nothing in his story to set him 
apart from hundreds of other young priests. The years during which 
the Bourbon Restoration was slowly failing to strike root again in a 
France transformed by the Revolution, were slowly disclosing the 
character of the new French society. What that character was is 
preserved for us and our posterity in the stories of Balzac. After all 
the vicissitudes of Jacobinism and foreign war and the Empire, the 
France of the nineteenth century emerged as the men of 1 789 had 
dreamt of it, with the world made safe for private enterprise. The 
restored Bourbons, the more limited monarchy of Louis Philippe, 
King of the French and not of France, the Second Empire and the 
Third Republic, all succeeded each other without challenging or 
disturbing the new supremacy of private business and the quiet reign 
of the middle class. 

The Church lived under the Concordat with which Napoleon had 
brought it back into the national life, and during the first years of the 
Abbe Migne's pastorate, the characteristics of the new form and 
spirit of society began to be appreciated for the profoundly uncatholic 
things they were. The new Catholic life took many forms. In 
alliance with the romantic spirit, and the rediscovery, in Germany 
and England no less than in France, of the forgotten middle ages, 
there came the movement of which the greatest name is Montalembert. 
There appeared, at a deeper level of spirituality, the multiplication 
of new religious orders, mainly for women, orders severe in temper 



THE ABBfi MIGNE 283 

and In opposition to the easy worldliness of an age primarily concerned 
with private accumulation for private comfort. In Lacordaire and 
Lamennais the new spirituality was directly concerned with the social 
ills of the new liberal economic order. The Concordat gave the 
French Government a veto on the appointments of bishops, and the 
nineteenth-century French hierarchy were in consequence safe and 
cautious men, from whose minds the French Revolution was never 
very far. They were attached to the civil order because they could 
not take it for granted as their highborn, assured, predecessors of the 
old regime had done. They were good men, but they were in their 
positions to maintain an understanding, to keep the Church's side of 
the bargain. Catholicism was the religion of France, but it was 
expected to live discreetly, and to allow the tone to be set by the 
State, and to accept the supremacy of lay opinion. The ancient 
monarchy had prepared the way, controlling and formalizing religion 
through the higher ranks of the clergy, and the nineteenth-century 
Church lived under a double handicap. It was suspected because 
of its old close association with the effective bureaucratic monarchy, 
and it had itself lost the habit of independence. One kind of weakness 
before the Revolution involved another kind of weakness after it. 

It was its strength, as it is always the perennial strength of 
Catholicism, that its clear hold on doctrine enables it to stand partially 
outside the atmosphere of every age. Its priests brought away from 
their severe seminaries principles with which to measure the fashions 
of the hour, and if the new liberalism was of its nature hostile to the 
idea of a revelation which claims so much and expects so intimate an 
obedience, at any rate it provided the conditions for free and vigorous 
controversy. It was the purpose and the achievement of the Abbe 
Migne to provide the weapons for the secular contest. He was the 
armourer of the clergy of Europe. 

When he first enters the larger scene, he is a young priest who has 
realized that every age differs in the difficulties and opportunities it 
presents to the Catholic apostolate, and that the great weapon of the 
Church in the nineteenth century was the printing press. Charles X 
had been driven away on the very issue of the press. The liberal 
era disclosed the freely circulating newspaper, and that provided 
opportunity for the Catholic as much as for anybody else. 

A small local incident in the Auvergne, arising directly out of the 
events of 1830, had first awakened Migne to the new significance of 
the newspaper. He had become involved in a controversy over a 
political demonstration at a Corpus Christi procession, and he had 
written a pamphlet, De La Liberte, par un pretre. As often happens to 
priests who write pamphlets, there had immediately been trouble 
with the bishop. It was the immediate occasion for his leaving the 



afy GREAT CATHOLICS 

Auvergnc for Paris, where he arrived in 1833, a fi re to start Catholic 
newspapers, to educate not only the laity but the clergy, and perhaps 
the episcopate as well. He was a man of boundless self-confidence, 
worthy of the province which bore Mm and which has borne so many 
of the most practically gifted Frenchmen, and he brought away 
unimpaired from a seminary education an instinctive talent for 
publicity. He had, of course, no funds, and he had no grounds for 
supposing that the religious authorities of Paris would be particularly 
pleased at a young priest arriving to found newspapers devoted to 
religion, including the airing of grievances. 

But he began, as he was to go on for the rest of his life, printing 
appeals and circularising possible subscribers, and then committing 
himself to the work without waiting to see if the funds were in hand. 
No sooner had he arrived in Paris, in 1833, than he issued prospectuses 
for rUnivers Religieuse and Le Spectateur. He never believed in under- 
statement, and this his first prospectus is characteristic of his advertising 
methods for the next forty years. He declared : " We shall present 
the most Catholic notions on the most interesting questions of the 
moment, dances, balls, theatres, novels, loans on interest, divers taxes, 
divorce, the salaries of the clergy, everything with the utmost reserve." 
These papers were launched in the waters which had been so deeply 
troubled by Lamennais. There was a ferment of ideas, and the 
papers immediately found a public. He then took over La Tribune 
Catholique, which had been founded also in 1833, to defend the ideas 
of FAvenir, and to save the paper from the ruin which had overtaken 
Lamennais himself. La Tribune Catholique was merged with I'Univers, 
and eighteen hundred subscribers were collected in three weeks. In 
those days in France the owners of newspapers could think in small 
and reasonable numbers and did not, have to envisage their readers, as 
modern popular papers do, by the hundreds of thousands. Le Spectateur 
never in fact managed to appear. There was a foretaste of the Abbe's 
unconventional business methods in the way those who had subscribed 
to Le Spectateur received instead VUnivers Religieuse. This paper, 
destined to become the most famous Catholic paper of the century, 
appeared in November, 1833, with the title I'Univers Religieuse, 
Politique, Scientifique et Litttmire, but it was destined to its great career 
not under Migne but under Louis Veuillot, one of the writers whom 
Mgne had collected for the paper, Migne had the experience, a 
common one for editors, of many people giving their name but not in 
fact any active collaboration. In 1836 Migne gave up this editorship, 
but he reappears in Catholic journalism ten years later with a new 
paper, in collaboration with two other priests, La Voix de la Verite, 
whose purpose was to give legal advice to priests, but it did not limit 
itself to advising them in disputes in the civil courts, it also took an all 



THE ABBfi MIGNE 28$ 

too keen Interest In their disputes with their bishops. There followed 
immediately conflict with the bishops and suspension. This happened 
when Migne was already in much disfavour on other grounds. A 
certain impetuousness, a determination not to be balked or stopped, 
made conflict with the somewhat timidly conservative French epis- 
copate probable from the first. At the beginning and the end of his 
public career Migne was In disgrace, but It was a disgrace compatible 
with a general recognition that few men In a very active season have 
clone more valuable work for the Church. Migne withdrew from the 
Univers, because he had had another and a vaster Idea altogether. He 
would not publish newspapers and live preoccupied with the passing 
affairs of the hour, each day affording doubtless the occasion for 
recalling a thoughtless and ill-educated generation to the majestic 
structure of Catholic thought. He would present the age with that 
whole majestic structure itself. A task, he 'declared, equal to 
tunnelling Mount Cenis or building ten cathedrals, " the greatest 
work of the century. 3 ' 

Accordingly he set himself In the course of 1836 to become a 
publisher, of a new kind, and on a scale that no one had attempted 
before. He proposed to himself no smaller aim than to bring back 
into circulation the whole of the written possessions of the Church ; 
to collect them and print them and sell them very cheaply. He 
worked at his task till his death nearly forty years later, leaving a name 
that is held in admiration whenever learned works are written and 
footnotes and references are written and read. Every considerable 
work on the first fifteen centuries of our era makes the continual 
acknowledgment to Migne, P.L. or Migne, P.G., Op. cit, loc. cit. 
" There is not an article in this encyclopaedia," writes Dom Henri 
Leclerq, the editor of the great Dictionnaire d* Archeologie Chrttienne, 
" that is not indebted to him." 

The French Revolution had destroyed or dispersed or nationalized 
the libraries of the religious houses. Sometimes, the authorities had 
made a new museum, and had filled it with the treasures of a neigh- 
bouring monastery ; so at Avranches a municipal building holds the 
books of the Abbey of Mont St. Michel. But that was the best that 
could befall. When the Abbe Migne began, few bishops and religious 
houses and extremely few parish priests had any good libraries. The 
Fathers of the Church were only to be procured in large and expensive 
folios, produced sumptuously, but spasmodically, and by chance in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the fruit, for the most part, 
of Benedictine scholarship in the Benedictine abbeys. The position 
was closely parallel to that in England where at the same time and 
from the same motive, the scholars of the Oxford movement were 
producing by subscription their libraries of the Fathers, in English, 



286 GREAT CATHOLICS 

to give English clergymen something more accessible than the 
expensive and cumbersome folios in which alone, and only in the 
larger libraries, the chief authorities for Church doctrine and Church 
history could be read. 

Migne could not and did not aspire to bring out critical editions. 
He was content to make a reasonably sound text widely available. 
His editions have always been exposed to two major objections, that 
they are not really scholarly, and that they are produced, in double 
columns of small print on cheap paper, in a way that makes their 
reading needlessly fatiguing and unappetizing work. From Vienna 
and Berlin later and better editions have since his day been taken in 
hand, but they have followed his chronological plan of division. 

The beginnings of the publishing business repeated the difficulties 
of the newspapers. Money had to be collected by a prospectus, and 
very eloquent though the prospectuses were the response was always 
inadequate. Episcopal authority was watchfully unsympathetic, 
holding that such a business was forbidden by Canon Law to a priest. 
Migne argued that it was a recognized thing for religious houses to 
have their own printing houses. He pointed to the Benedictines. 
He said he intended to limit himself, as religious houses did, to printing 
his own publications ; he would not be conducting a commercial 
printing works. He may seem to have gained his point when 
Monsignor de Quellen, Archbishop of Paris, suggested that the 
undertaking should be transformed into a diocesan one with the 
Archbishop at its head. But such control he refused, and he continued 
suspended, but allowed to say Mass at Versailles, by kindness of the 
Bishop there. 

Without episcopal approbation, the great undertaking began. 
In 1840 the first volumes of a general encyclopaedia of theology were 
produced. A brief enumeration of the major works issuing from the 
press will convey an impression of its activity. There followed, 
before 1845, twenty-eight volumes on the Scriptures, and twenty 
volumes of Gospel commentaries between 1842 and 1853. Ninety 
volumes of Sacred Orators run from 1844 to 1866. Three successive 
Encyclopaedias of Theology, in 52, 53 and 66 volumes appeared in the 
same twenty years. The greatest undertaking of all, and the one 
which is meant now by the word Migne, was the collection of the 
writings of the Latin and Greek ecclesiastical authors from the earliest 
times. The Patrologia Latina was sold at five francs a volume to 
subscribers, at 7.50 frs. otherwise. The Patrologia Gmca with its more 
difficult type cost 8 francs by subscription or 10 francs otherwise. The 
Latin Fathers were tackled first, at the rate of twenty volumes a year. 
The work began to appear in 1844, and eleven years later there were 
217 volumes, some 300,000 pages. The Greek Fathers were then 



THE ABBfi MIGNE 287 

tackled, and from 1857 to 1866, there appeared 162 volumes, for which 
new Greek types were made. 

The Benedictines had been the chief precursors of Migne, and it 
was fitting that at the outset of his work, it was a Benedictine who 
was at hand to undertake the editing. The future Cardinal Pitra 
was the man. Little over thirty, he had already made his name as an 
archaeologist, as the decipherer of the Early Christian inscription found 
at Autun. He had just become a monk of Solesmes under Gueranger 3 
and on the completion of his noviciate had been made Prior of the 
Benedictine house at St. Germain-des-Pres in Paris. The future 
Cardinal lived hard years through the eighteen-forties. The attempt 
to revive Benedictine life in nineteenth-century France without 
endowments meant unceasing financial cares. The Paris house was 
from the first in difficulties which finally overwhelmed it, and too 
much of Pitra's time was spent travelling to Belgium, Germany, 
England, in the attempt to obtain gifts. In these painful years, the 
work which Migne entrusted to him formed the happiest part of his 
life. He protested against the name Patrologia for collections which 
were so much wider than patrology, but Migne was adamant. But 
in general he had a free hand, and he selected the texts, brought back 
into use the writings of many quite forgotten writers, and above all, 
prepared the summaries and guides which under the title of Conspectus 
so greatly add to the usefulness of the volumes. 

The Abbe Migne, whose work was to bring back an old world to 
challenge the preoccupations of the new, used the methods of the 
enemy which he sought to destroy. His work was the sanctification of a 
secularized society, but his methods involved the use of competitive 
business practices. If he had not been a holy and disinterested man, 
he would have been a typical highly successful French entrepreneur. 
He obtained his labour when it was cheap. He employed gladly and 
very cheaply, for the works of proof-reading and correcting, priests 
who for one reason or other had fallen into disgrace and were glad to 
earn a mere pittance. For the less intellectual work, he employed 
orphan children. We must imagine him in his ever-growing premises 
at Petit- Montrouge in the suburbs of Paris, ruling with a strong hand 
over a great number of unfortunate people. The public is fond in 
those cases of passing a rather severe judgment on the payers of low 
wages, but the whole question is whether there are any profits out of 
which more could be paid. Of most Catholic good works it is true 
to say that if they cannot be carried on cheaply they cannot be carried 
on at all. The real paymasters are the ultimate purchasers, and it 
was the public, chiefly the clergy, who would pay five francs a 
volume but not more, who determined the pay the Abbe Migne 
could offer. 



288 GREAT CATHOLICS 

A traveller who visited the workshop in 1854, has left a vivid picture 
of the Abbe at work. 

"The establishment contains within itself almost everything 
required : a type-foundry as well as steam-presses ; book-binding 
and hot pressing ; and the preparing glazed and satin paper ; every- 
thing, in short, except making the paper ; which, by the way, is now 
of a greatly improved quality from that of the earlier imprints. Two 
thousand volumes could be at any time produced in twenty-four 
hours by the actual day's work. The different rooms are large and 
lofty ; everything scrupulously clean and perfect in order and method. 
The walls are lined with the stereotype plates, whole volumes of leaden 
books of some tons weight. The modest apartment of Mr. Migne 
is entered through a library containing a single copy of each work he 
has produced, handsomely bound ; this forms his luxury. The 
excellent Abbe is a bright, brisk-looking man of about fifty. We have 
fallen on very matter-of-fact days ; still, I could have wished he had 
had something of an ecclesiastical dress, instead of his brown working 
coat ; and the sound of a bell, and a pause for the Angelus at noon, 
would have been pleasant, and a prayer at assembling ; he himself 
hears and says Mass daily at the adjoining small Church ; many 
of his workmen also attend it. Every day, and all day long, except 
from eleven to twelve o'clock, when he and his people take their meal, 
Mr. Migne is seated in the centre of a sort of raised glass room com- 
manding the whole of the workshops, with about forty secretaries and 
editors at desks around him. At twelve o'clock precisely he unlocked 
the door of this room ; we had been sitting there the last few minutes 
previously, having entered it from the Abbe's private apartment, 
and then his fellow-labourers* who were waiting on the stairs below, 
entered ; five minutes of settling down and arrangement, and each 
was engaged in correcting proofs, collating, and the like, and all in 
perfect silence. The Abbe himself; with scissors and paste began, 
pour s'amuser, concocting paragraphs for La Voix de la Verite, a news- 
paper of two editions, one daily and the other three times a week, 
which he has newly added to his other labours, for ecclesiastical 
distribution. He also engaged himself on a clerical commonplace 
book, alphabetically arranged in 640 divisions, each of double-columns, 
with sub-divisions for morals, dogma, discipline, etc. I whispered 
my adieu and trod gently out, feeling as if I had witnessed some grand 
institution of the * Ages of Faith 5 advanced into the nineteenth 
century, and thinking that the patient old monks, while toiling over 
their manuscripts in the scriptoriums of those great Benedictine 
monasteries which so long adorned and blessed France, would have 
joyfully recognized their meritorious successor in this laborious and 



THE ABB MIGNE 289 

virtuous ecclesiastic. They preserved theological learning to our 
day he had secured it, and has achieved, single-handed, an enterprise 

at which all Paternoster Row would stand aghast." 

This same visitor found the Abbe Migne in a happy mood of 
optimism. He had just finished his Cours Complet and was embarking 
on the Traditions Catholiques. His past, he said, assured him of his 
future, and looking round his shelves, he quoted St. Augustine's sentence 
on Prophecy, " Impleta cerne^ implenda collige" 

He had collected together the letters of thanks and testimonies he 
had received from all over the world in the course of the twenty years 
he had devoted to his task. They amounted to more than 50,000 
and filled twelve quarto volumes. The autographs his visitor observed 
included Cardinal Wiseman, Archibishop Cullen, Cardinal Bonaid, 
Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, the Archbishops Afire 
and Sibour and Bishops from furthest Asia. He had received the 
Holy Father's special benediction for himself and his labours. He 
gave his visitor a frank account of how the financial side worked. 
With no other capital than " La bonne volonte> the devotion of all he 
could command, his own fortune, and trust in Providence," the Abbe 
had made himself into a sort of banker. He received loans, mostly 
from the clergy, for which he paid 5 per cent, in money or 7 per cent. 
in books. These loans were generally in very small sums, but at the 
time of this interview, he had decided in future to refuse all sums 
smaller than 500 francs, the expenses of correspondence, etc. being 
so great. His caller was rather horrified at this, and ventured to 
hint at the possible risk, thinking of the poor priests of France, whose 
professional income was 1,200 francs a year, or 48, lending out 
their slender provision for old age and sickness to help on this 
great work. 

" Jamais" replied the Abbe, "jamais aucun de mes billets da eprouve 
le deskonneur d*un protet, meme dans les jours les plus mauuais." There 
was also the sideline of supplying the Stations of the Cross, painted 
in oil and framed, which he sold at 1,500 francs, to which he had 
recently added the famous Murillo, the Conception ; these pictures 
were sold at 700 francs. He had never been ashamed of adopting 
any efforts which would help him to advance his great work, con- 
descending without demur to the usual tradesman's artifices, such as 
offering reduction for large numbers or for subscriptions taken out in 
advance ; 290 francs' worth of books added to every 1,800 francs 
paid ; so many volumes having the privilege of being sent carriage 
paid with correspondence also free ; the right of sending other books 
from different booksellers in the same paid parcels ; premiums to 
those who procure 600 subscribers, and so on. What else could he 



2QO GREAT CATHOLICS 

do ? The only patronage he received was In the form of the promise 
in advance of considerable episcopal subscriptions for the books them- 
selves, for presentation by the Bishop to the various diocesan seminaries. 
The largest of these was from Monseigneur Dupanloup, who ordered 
thirty copies of all the works. The Abbe's visitor was much impressed 
by these numbers, considering " that the aggregate income of ail the 
sixteen Archbishops and seventy-one Bishops of France falls short 
of the revenue of the present Protestant Bishop of London, and exceeds 
only by a trifle that of the Bishop of Durham, as returned by those 
gentlemen themselves, and the actual receipts are probably much in 
excess of what actually appears in figures." 

Migne pursued his steady programmes undistracted by the troubles 
of the Church in France under the Second Empire, but it is interesting 
to note how these troubles in fact closely affected him. The turning- 
point in the history of Napoleon III, his relations with the Church, 
comes just half-way through his twenty years of rule. In 1859 with the 
change in his Italian policy, and a certain hardening of anti-clerical 
temper in France itself, the precursor of the temper of the Third 
Republic. The revolution of 1848 was, in its early stages, led by men 
who were well disposed to the Catholic religion. The great influence 
of Lamennais and Lacordaire was strikingly shown in the way the 
Second Republic sought to avoid the disastrous quarrel with religion 
which had ruined the movement of 1789. From their side the 
Catholics were active in support of the revolution. But the fatality 
which lies at the heart of these movements, by which the centre of 
gravity shifts all the time further to the Left, destroyed the first fair 
promise and played into the hands of Louis Napoleon, who became 
President with a great measure of Catholic support which was not 
withheld from him even when he carried through his coup d'etat. For 
ten years the Second Empire maintained close and good relations 
with the Church. They were years during which the reputation of 
Migne was steadily increasing. A provincial synod of the clergy at 
Perigueux gave him official praise in 1856, but it was not until 1862, 
when in fact the moment was no longer propitious, that his praises 
were sung in the French Senate, where an eloquent speech called a 
reproach on France that he should have been left single-handed to 
undertake labours which should have been collective, the joint work 
of the government and the clergy. For many years his friends 
had pointed out that it was a reflection on French scholarship 
that so many of the subscribers were foreigners, Englishmen or 
Greeks. 

The tribute in the Senate came at the apogee of his work, for in 1861 
he had completed the first series of Greek Fathers. He then wrote : 
" Now can we gaily sing our Nunc Dimittis, because with neither great 



THE ABB MIGNE 291 

help nor great virtue, it has been granted to us to be of greater use to 
the Church than many of the wise men and the saints, and that, laying 
down this book, fundamental to every serious library, a r edition duquel 
nous rfavons pu determiner ni libraire ni cornmunaute^ ni gauvernement> nous 
pouvons, en quelque sorte, dire comme St. Paul : 4 Cur sum meum consummavi^ 
and then, present ourselves with confidence before God, our Cours 
de Patrologie in hand." 

Then there came great and, as it proved, irretrievable disaster. 
On February nth, 1868, the printing works were destroyed by 
fire. His faithful friend Bonnetty has left a moving account of the 
way the Abbe met the blow. 

ce c They are no more ' we heard these sad words from the mouth 
of the tireless and irreplaceable editor of all the works of the Greek 
and Latin Fathers. In these immense workrooms, where, under the 
master's eye, there toiled that army of workers by brain and by hand, 
reproducing the masterpieces of the human intelligence, the traditions 
of the Catholic Church, and, one may truly say, of the whole world, 
the title deeds of the beliefs and faith of our ancestors, we have seen 
that abomination of desolation of which the prophet spoke : a heap 
of smoking ruins, a mess of dust and burnt wood, of paper and lead all 
mixed together, with more than fifty fire-engines pouring water on it 
all, and a hundred and fifty firemen, axe in hand, carrying away 
what could be salvaged under the eyes of their officers and in an 
obscure corner, the Master, the indefatigable Migne, overcome with 
grief and saying to the friend who tried to console him c They 
are no more. 5 }J 

When the loss could be estimated, it amounted to six million francs. 
Migne was insured with over twenty insurance companies, and after 
three years of argument and litigation he succeeded in getting paid 
about half this loss. But much no insurance company could restore. 
The stereotype plates from which the Latin and Greek texts had been 
made were lost forever, and lost, too, was the manuscript material 
which had been assembled in order to carry on the Latin Patrology 
from Innocent III to the Council of Trent. Another two days 
and the last volume of the Greek Fathers y volume 162, would have 
been out. It was destroyed, and so was the 223rd volume of the 
Latin Fathers. 

But the great fire really came when the work of Migne was done. 
He was sixty-eight and he had laboured prodigiously. But it was 
not in him to retire. He set to work to re-establish his press, and the 
effort involved him at the end as at the beginning of his career in 
trouble with his Bishop. He had little by little added all sorts of 
sidelines to his printing. He was Washbourne as well as Burns and 
Gates. He developed an ingenious scheme by which he collected the 



sgs GREAT CATHOLICS 

stipends for masses and gave the priests who said the masses not cash 
but books and Church goods. He allowed them a discount, they 
fared better than they would have done had they received the offerings 
and then come to spend them over the counter, and yet he made a 
good profit, for the books and articles cost him considerably less than 
the prices at which they were reckoned when delivered to the priests. 
On i franc 65 centimes, the normal mass offering, he cleared the 65 
centimes. It is not surprising that the Archbishop of Paris, when he 
heard of this, declared that it must stop. Unfortunately the Abbe 
was in no mood to let go one of the life lines by which he hoped to 
regain financial ground. He defied authority, and authority replied 
by a decree on July 25th, 1874, by which Migne was suspended. It 
was the last blow, for a little over a year later, on October, 24th, 1875, 
the eve of his seventy-fifth birthday, he died. 

A lifetime has passed since his death, and his labours can be appraised 
in retrospect. Was he, perhaps, par excellence, the publisher of works 
which are bought but not read ? Did he make Bishops, priests and 
librarians say " Yes, we ought to have that " without ever envisaging 
who would have occasion to sit down to " that " ? In large measure, 
it was so. But there is more to books than being read. It is important 
that they shall be known to exist, and they are not without effect, even 
when they seldom leave their shelves. Migne was in a pre-eminent 
degree, the publisher of works which were never intended to be read 
through but in. Silas Wegg emphatically said of Gibbon that he 
had not read him slap through lately, and every priest of France, 
although he might have been paying his 5 francs, had the same story 
to tell of his relation to Migne. Like the don who in days now remote 
said the purpose of a classical education was nothing so ambitious as 
to impart a real knowledge of Latin and Greek, but rather to leave an 
ineffaceable impression that both languages existed, Migne left 
an enduring mark even on the unscholarly and the slightly literate. 
There has never been an age less theologically instructed than our own. 
The books which were the fruit of his long and courageous activity 
were not the fashion of his time, or of ours. But equally they were 
not antiquarian pieces, the materials of scholarship and nothing 
more. They held the words and the spirit of the first twelve hundred 
years of the Church, the living testimony of some forty generations 
of Catholics. It was Migne's greatness that he did more than any 
other man in the last century to enable Catholics to recover touch 
with the earlier members of their great society. He fortified and 
enriched his own and succeeding generations and he was a true educator 
who knew, as the Christian tradition has always maintained, that it is 
not knowledge in itself which is of importance but knowledge of what 
it concerns men to know, not truth but particular truths. In a 



THE ABB MIGNE 293 

century so filled with a sense that it knew more than Its predecessors 
and had little to learn from those who had had the misfortune to 
live in earlier days, Migne came forward, preparing his five-franc 
volumes and saying plainly that in all the great urgent questions 
of human destiny the nineteenth century must not do all the talking, 
but must listen also to the fourth or fifth. 



SHANE LESLIE, M.A. 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 



OUR FATHERS HAVE told us how their fathers told them of the 
magnetic and unforgettable influence of Newman upon his 
generation at Oxford. Before he gave the Catholic Church in England 
her second spring he had given the same to Oxford. It is difficult 
to know what Oxford stood for in the national life a hundred years 
ago. The Colleges were refined preserves of an old-fashioned Anglican- 
ism. There was no Cause worth writing for save a memory of the 
Stuarts. There was no Theology save a certain patristic knowledge 
amongst a few old seniors. There was no Movement save when the 
wind of controversy stirred the ashes of the Nonjurors. 

The University Dons had every reason to be satisfied with the best 
of sinecures in the best of worlds. Privilege met Power without being 
over worried by thought. 

The solemn complacency of the University was rippled by the 
brilliant young Fellows of Oriel. Newman, who had already been 
stirred and sharpened by Dr. Whately, passed under the daring 
domination of Hurrell Froude. It was a short but a decisive spell. 
It turned his imagination and his logic like twin steeds together in the 
direction of all that was Catholic. Henceforth, as Tutor at Oriel or 
Vicar of St. Mary's (the University Church), he drove his chariot in one 
direction. 

Amongst minds as eager as his he played his part in the Tractarian 
Movement. The outburst of these fameus Tracts could be compared 
in the intellectual and theological world to the Gold Rushes in 
California. Men who had long been starved for lack of a philosophy 
or an ecclesiastical sense suddenly discovered nuggets of doctrine 
lying under their dry Creeds. Hurriedly they disclosed these and from 
Oxford spread word that this new gold was available. But the chief 
artificer was Dr. Pusey and the exquisite refiner thereof was Newman. 
Around him were the choice spirits of Oxford : the Wilberforces, the 
Froudes, Ward, Oakeley and the scores of writers, pioneers, poets and 
priests who were to swell the historical Oxford Movement. Few of 
them knew themselves yet in any guise save that of disciples but it was 



CARDINAL NEWMAN ^95 

Newman's influence and voice, and above all, his advancing thought 
which shaped, and often entirely disposed their destinies. 

The century of the Oxford Movement has passed. The year 1833 
is taken as the beginning. In June, Newman wrote, " Lead Kindly 
Light " which has acted ever since as a kind of dark lantern to the 
English-speaking people. In July, Keble preached his famous Sermon 
on National Apostasy and before the year was over the Tracts had 
commenced. They carried the Church of England by storm. New- 
man's measureless intellect and acute pen might easily have been cast 
on the side of the rising Liberal School. But in the unknown germina- 
tion of his spirit he faced towards Catholicism. Then it was seen 
that he could raise but never lead a people. He inspired all who were 
thoughtful and liable to inspiration in the old Oxford. 

Pioneers, leaders and men of action are quickly and finally described, 
almost defined within their area of history. But men of thought 
endure for ever. While a Caesar or a Charlemagne can be historically 
analysed and pigeon-holed, no man can yet set limits to the influence 
of a Plato, an Aquinas, a Pascal or a Newman upon human life. 

The actual happenings, triumphs, disasters, friendships in Newman's 
life can be reckoned and two superb volumes of biography cover all 
that can be gleaned of Newman's terrestrial life. But his philosophical 
and intellectual life has not ceased. Every fifty or hundred years 
the historians of thought must make a new cast and endeavour to 
appreciate his influence afresh. That is where the eternal and undying 
Newman persists. That is why amid the majestic monuments of his 
dead contemporaries Whateiy, Wilberforce, Wiseman, Manning 
his legacy remains a living fountain. What Plato's w r orks were to the 
early fascinated Churchmen so are Newman's to English-speaking 
Catholics. 

That Life has been told and re- told. It is only necessary to sketch 
an outline. 

The conversion of Newman came in 1845 : tnat famous event which, 
Disraeli said, could so often be apologized for but never explained : 
a conversion which many disciples had reason to add to the Conversion 
of St. Paul in their Church Calendars. 

With his best friend, Ambrose St. John, Newman entered the 
Propaganda College in Rome. He was received by Pius IX at the 
beginning of the Pope's career and he met Cardinal Acton near 
the end of his. He was forty-five and he absorbed as well as he 
could, the theology and philosophy of the Church. He could not 
fashion himself into an Ultramontane Theologian nor really step into 
the current of thought which was running strong in the Church, 
and which shortly broke into one great Dogma and found high tide 
in another. Intellectually, Newman was a scout, furnished with all 



2g6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the deEcate gifts and acquisitions that are paralleled in a hero of 
Fenimore Cooper. He was certainly not a heavy artillerist in the 
Church's batteries. Dogma he was unready to define and excom- 
munication he was loath to see wielded. This metaphor of the scout, 
familiar as it reads, will explain much of the tragedy of Newman's 
Catholic life. At the Propaganda he was simply learning to line up 
as one of the Pope's grenadiers, when his talents were those of a free- 
lance. England was in need of religious Orders and the converts 
threw themselves into communities rather than into the dioceses. 
Newman entered the Noviciate of the Oratory. As a link with the 
past it is interesting that he met an old father who had enjoyed two 
conversations with St. Alfonso Lighori. 

Then followed the episode of the English Oratory, the Birmingham 
Foundation and the Oratory School ; the Lectures in Controversy 
and suddenly the restoration of the Hierarchy and the exquisite hailing 
by Newman of the second spring. Surrounded by imprudent and 
over-zealous converts with wary and suspicious Catholics of the old 
stock in the background, Newman found his way difficult. All his 
Hfe he was at the nominal head of enthusiastic but confused armies. 

As a thinker, a historian, a poet and philosopher, he needed the peace 
and walls of a sanctuary. His life would have been happier could he 
have been enclosed and kept behind the friendly fence of the Oratory. 
There he might have achieved one of two immense tasks, for both of 
which he was competent : a re-translation of Holy Scripture into 
beautiful but Catholic language or a restatement of the dogma and 
philosophy of the Church into language which would be intelligible 
and attractive to the modern English mind. 

Both these ideas he approached and though both paths were rich 
with pitfalls and difficulties, there can be no doubt that his wonderful 
subtle mind, his enthusiastic piety and his faultless English style 
would have combined to achieve either. Certainly no one on the 
Catholic side has appeared before or since capable of achieving success. 

It is needless to point out the place of a popular and yet literary 
version of Scripture in a country which has built not only its faith 
for three centuries but its opposition to Catholicism upon a supremely 
literary version. Newman seemed the divinely chosen instrument to 
meet the need. His failure was not due to his own talent or good 
will. The Church did not rally to the idea and a version by an 
American Archbishop was already in the field. Newman was bitterly 
disappointed. 

His life became a litany of disappointments. He lost the suit for 
libel brought against him by Dr. AchillL It was Wiseman who seemed 
to have let him down. He withdrew from his Dublin campaign which 
he hoped would inaugurate and leave a completely functioning 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 297 

Catholic University in Dublin. Cardinal Cullen and the Irish 
Bishops had let him down in this case. The episode produced 
intellectual works more than Halls and Academies. His University 
Lectures were an addition to English prose rather than to Irish Culture. 
But it was on the whole a bitter memory and Newman fell back on new 
undertakings in Birmingham. Still he was hedged by friends, disciples, 
subscribers and champions. Every scheme he initiated received 
immediate support, but history will be dubious whether he was wise 
ever to undertake practical schemes. His destiny lay in the intellectual 
and dim unforeseen future. Amid all the new Catholic schools and 
communities, amid new Bishoprics and a vast practical advance of 
Catholicism he seemed endowed with supreme gifts of apologetic and 
mastery of theory. Whatever troubles he had with certain books, 
w r hen his exquisite English was translated into Latin or Italian, he was 
safe in the world of the intellect. His works were obviously appealing 
to the English public. Manning might convert his fifties but Newman 
was converting his hundreds. 

Newman's method of conversion was different from any others and 
from the beginning it was so. Newman set out to make conversions 
by the intellect. Manning made them by colder reasoning and 
Faber by perfervid emotion. Already in 1846, Newman was writing 
with his " illative sense " in mind : t6 you cannot buy reasons for a 
crown piece you cannot take them in your hand at your will and toss 
them about. You must consent to think . . . Moral proofs are grown 
into, not learnt by heart." 

Newman believed that the intellectualism of the Liberal movement 
in Europe could only be met intellectually. Diamond only could cut 
diamond and by a Catholic Liberalism only could secular Liberalism 
be met. This was the key to his teaching life. It was unfortunate 
that his "floruit " lay between the end of the forties when the triumph 
of Liberalism in the State (often following revolutionary means) 
and the beginning of the seventies when the Church answered Liberal- 
ism in religion by the dogma of the Infallibility. But Newman's 
teaching was not for a period but for all time. 

His famous essay on Development was troubling the theologians 
from the day of his conversion. In time it was realized that the essay 
was turning the flank of controversy. The Unitarians used parts of 
it exactly as the Modernists used passages of Newman after his death. 
But taken as a whole he always kept a middle and indestructible 
course for intellects that sought and followed him. Rome was at 
that time clearing the decks and misunderstood Newman's preferences 
for the " probability " of circumstantial evidence to clear-cut demon- 
stration. Newman found this line of approach in the great De Lugo 
who compared belief in the divine authority to the human belief in 



2$8 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the existence of India, which must be proved morally but cannot 
admit downright demonstration. This side of Newman runs like the 
recurrent chorus through the tragedy of his life and is brought out 
with the most circumspect and amazing ability by his choir-leader or 
biographer, Wilfred Ward. 

It is best to accept the fact that Newman came into the Church 
at a difficult time for himself. When he wished to believe a thing, he 
could persuade himself with a wealth of parallel and a beauty of 
imagination, as for instance, in the Holy House of Loretto which was 
never a matter of Faith. In 1848 Newman wrote " I feel no difficulty 
in believing it, though it may be often difficult to realize." And 
probably the sceptic and the pious believer would equally accept 
his beautiful outburst on the subject : " He who floated the Ark on 
the surges of a world-wide sea and enclosed in it all living things, who 
has hidden the terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might move 
mountains, who sustained thousands for forty years in a sterile 
wilderness, who transported Elias and keeps him hidden till the end s 
could do this wonder also." 1 

Perhaps this passage as well as any other will expJain Lord Acton's 
remark that Newman was a Sophist. So he was iri a supreme sense 
and so was Plato ! It explains why he soon complained that he 
found so much courtesy in the Church and so little sympathy. Rome 
had been drawing in her ropes and she certainly did not believe in 
giving her most brilliant defender rope enough (as the extreme 
Ultramontanes thought) to hang himself ! Even new expressions 
of old truths were suspect. 

The disciple, the lover, the reader, the biographer of Newman, 
must make up his mind that he will only meet pricks and tears, 
rebuffs and raw reconciliations in reading the Catholic life of Newman. 
Only so can it be understood. Apart from the fragrance of prose 
which every separate crushing seemed to produce and the divine sense 
of humility which is so great a virtue in itself, the life of Newman was 
the slowly forming basis upon which intellectual defences of the 
Church have since been built. 

Fortunately Newman was never crushed. His grand old Bishop 
Uliathorne saw to that. But he was continually frustrated, disap- 
pointed and reduced even to barrenness of the spirit. These facts 
are no doubt the dead bones which protrude from any faithful bio- 
graphy. But the spirit of Newman is not a spirit of failure. It is a 
living emanation. The Church passes into no intellectual or philo- 
sophical controversy in herself without Newman being invoked by 
both sides. This was especially the case during the Modernist 
struggle under Pius X. The fact that both opponents appealed to 

1 W. Ward : Life ofMwman, Vol. I, p. 198. 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 299 

Newman showed that he had found a golden mean, which without 
being a compromise, is nearer the final line taken by a Church which 
is the Church of the Ages. 

The great controversy of Newman's time was not Modernism, which 
of course was posthumous to his life and labours. It was the 
Infallibility. It is known that Newman without denying its truth 
was on the side of those who wished to defer or at least extenuate 
the dogma. It is well known how in a famous letter to his Bishop 
he smote the extreme high Ultramontane view but he never accepted 
the corresponding Gallican lowness of view. He was able to accept 
the words of the final definition like so many others because of their 
sublime moderation. The dogma as Manning and Veuillot and the 
Jesuits wished it proved very different from the wording which the 
theologians like Cardinal Cullen and Dr. Murray (to name two 
Irishmen who dipped their fingers in the defining ink) finally imposed 
on so great and all-embracing an idea. 

The subtlety with which Newman entered controversy added fuel 
to his own side and flame to his opponents'. As Wilfred Ward wrote : 
" He could very rarely bring himself to employ the positive and 
confident tone, the strong expressions, the one-sided statements, the 
would-be demonstrative proofs of many popular Catholic contro- 
versialists. His fastidiousness and his accurate sense of fact forbade it. 5 ' 1 

The Infallibility was defined in 1870 and meantime he had harvested 
a good crop of seeming failures. There is no need to belabour the 
university he attempted to achieve in Dublin. Wilfred Ward wrote 
that <c Dr. Cullen seemed to dread freedom for science." He might 
have added freedom for Ireland. Newman was impartial and friendly 
both to the pious scientists or Liberal Catholics and to the Young 
Irelanders. He slowly realized that the Catholic University was only 
wanted as a political weapon against the mixed education which the 
government was bent on giving Ireland. And the result failure ? 
Again Wilfred Ward gives the final answer : " If the Rector failed, the 
Christian thinker succeeded." 

His troubles thickened when he dabbled in Catholic reviews. Lord 
Acton was connected with the Rambler and was inclined to take the 
same impartial line in history that Newman was taking in dogma. 
The Rambler had upset the bishops by declaring that St. Augustine 
was cc the father of Jansenism " in exactly the same way that Newman 
was after his death credited with the paternity of Modernism. The 
well-meaning and the well-informed could read through such over- 
whelming epigrams but the faithful were liable to be scandalized. 
There was a truth in such statements, perhaps even a half-historical 
germ, but they were not transcendently true. Newman accepted the 

1 Life of Newman^ Vol. I, p. 265. 



300 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Rambler not to propagate his views but as a duty to save a Catholic 
periodical from dying and from censure at the same time. He 
persuaded the brilliant editor, Mr. Simpson* to submit, which no 
bishop could have achieved. Before long he resigned himself in 
deference to his bishop. What had happened was " one more to 
the list of tasks he had undertaken in hope and which had been 
frustrated by those who failed to understand its importance." 

The failure of the Rambler was followed by that of the Home and 
Foreign Review. They seemed the only channels for Newman to 
express himself in and bishops condemned both. The Dublin Review 
was Ultramontane. It is clear that Newman was no more Gallican 
than Ultramontane but it was a time when he that was not on one side 
was supposed to be against it. The Temporal Power of the Pope 
was the burning question of the hour and Newman who believed the 
pen was a better weapon than the sword fell into a backwater. Sad 
years passed in which he felt convinced of failure. He had claimed 
a great mission twice in his life and twice the wave, which he should 
have ridden, had passed over his head. 

Newman had every reason to be irritated with the powers at 
Propaganda or at Westminster. It was fortunate that his irritation 
did not find vent against either but was drawn into his famous 
Apologia against Canon Kingsley. Newman answered an accusation 
of dishonesty by a swift turning of the argument. Kingsley, thoroughly 
nettled, loosed a fierce and blind rejoinder which he described as " a 
score of more than twenty years to pay." The nation's attention was 
drawn and Newman saw his chance to break through the clouds. He 
produced a white-hot classic which thrilled the entire intellectual 
public. To those who had shared in the Oxford Movement it was 
the drama of their own life. To those, who had been contemporaries 
in Church or State, here was an opening of the books so sincere and so 
revealing that the day of Judgment seemed forestalled. For the 
first time in his life Newman was lifted upon a pinnacle of fame. To 
his generation it was a brilliant charge and an echoing challenge. 
What echoes of the past it must have rung on the memories of every 
Oxford man and of every Anglican or Catholic who had passed through 
the religious troubles that made the Victorian age one of controversy. 

To the present day the Apologia is largely incomprehensible. It is 
only as autobiography, as logical defence, as an example of piercing 
English style that it survives. But the whole background reads to-day 
a little sepulchral and even the voice of Newman is as Manning said 
of the book " a voice from the dead." 

Public men are doomed to appear in their contemporary life as 
caricatures : not merely the victims of cartoonists but as the fantastic 
pen-sketches of critics and journalists. As a rule they leave posterity 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 301 

to strip the false from the real. Newman decided to achieve this for 
himself" that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead 
of me." But his philosophy, his piety, his wonderful subtlety of 
faith, his piercing sweep through history, the power he had to be a 
believing Gibbon must all be sought in his other works. The very 
fact that he was not a theologian made him so great and original an 
interpreter of the supernatural. If the English-speaking world ever 
approaches Catholicism, it will be through the words and steps and 
illumination of Newman. 

But the 'sixties were not so triumphant or easy-going for him. They 
brought Newman his difficulties at Oxford first of all. He had all a 
great thinker's wish to share in the practical. He was not content to 
sit and enounce Catholic theory suitable for British consciences. He 
hungered to return to the scene of his Oxford triumphs. Catholics 
were going to the university despite the prohibition of the Holy See. 
Newman felt an urge to open a house to care for them. He did not 
realize how many Catholic fathers, who had not dreamt of sending 
their sons to Oxford, would haste to place them under the shadow 
of Newman. To come under Newman seemed an education in itself. 
This was also only too well realized by the new Archbishop Manning 
and the Holy See. Newman had realized that " to write theology 
is like dancing on the tight-rope some hundreds of feet above the 
ground." He now preferred the terra fir ma of Oxford which he knew 
and which knew him still as her one-time apostle. To the lasting 
disappointment of English Catholics Newman was prevented by 
authority from opening house at Oxford even after purchase of the 
site. An Oratory at Oxford without Newman would have been the 
play of Hamlet without Hamlet and the idea was abandoned. 

Newman was sufficiently distressed by the continual opposition 
he met to send an embassage of friends to Rome to clear his 
orthodoxy. If he suffered from the downright criticism of his enemies 
he suffered more through imprudent friends who insisted on placing 
him at the head of a Liberal School which he was willing to guide 
but never to endorse. 

The period of tightening the reins drew to a climax with the mighty 
controversy of the Infallibility. The Ultramontanes under Manning 
and Ward had stirred such doubts at Rome concerning Newman's 
writings that the Pope asked Cardinal Cullen for his private opinion. 
Though he had shown himself a poor friend to Newman in Dublin 
days, Cullen performed now a most admirable service. He cleared 
Newman's name so thoroughly that Newman was invited to be one of 
the official Theologians at the Council. 

The outcome of the Council was a dogmatic triumph for Manning 
who had urged a definition in season and out of season. But for 



302 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Newman who had written to his Bishop a letter, which might be 
described as " ca'canny," the result was a moral victory, 

Newman evidently felt invigorated and not crushed by the con- 
troversy which he preceded with his matchless Grammar of Assent and 
followed with his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk giving the reasons whereby 
he accepted the findings of the Council. 

The Grammar of Assent is Newman's contribution to philosophy 
and it stands. For the logical sceptic it offers a by-pass to the Garden 
of Faith. Perhaps it is his most permanent and inexhaustib 1 v . 

Recognizing how difficult belief can be, he analyzes it under sucn 
categories as apprehension, inference, assent and certitude. And 
what might sound a dull and dry-as-dust book is illuminated by a 
dazzling beauty of metaphors and parallels mixed with touches of 
humour and poetry. At his age it was an astonishing achievement. 

His resilient mind met the definition of the Infallibility with private 
protest to his own Bishop, with submission (though almost the sub- 
mission of one stunned) when it was passed, but as soon as he read 
the exact terms he was " pleased at its moderation ! " 

The Council represented the high tide reached by the Ultramontane 
movement which had proved so inimicable to Newman's personal 
views. The rest of the 'seventies were to prove a reaction in his favour 
culminating in the Cardinalate itself from the hands of a new Pope. 

The sunset of his career was as bright and roseate as the dawn. 
He was one of the half-dozen Victorians who entered permanently 
into the religious history of England. 

Nearly half a century has passed since the death of Newman. His 
stature has grown visibly and it is realized that his frame was built 
for the centuries and not for the narrow-cabined 'sixties of the 
nineteenth. 

He set out to strengthen and to amplify the whole Christian position. 
He foresaw the rise of the sceptical and agnostic positions and had 
prepared the defences before the coming of the flood. 

He did not believe that reason was sufficient in its human workings 
to meet and defeat the attack on the Church. He knew too well the 
meaning of Pascal's famous saying that there are reasons which reason 
herself knows not. He drew additional pillars and breakwaters to 
faith from his philosophy of history and from his experiments in 
psychology. Thanks to his style he drew an imaginative aid from 
that poetic instinct which he could express in prose as well and as 
often as in verse. He endowed English-speaking Catholicism with a 
permanent library which contains models of writing in philosophy, 
history and controversy. 

The sorrows, frustrations and disappointments of his life are 
forgotten. They make the material of biography and they point 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 303 

the moralizations of the judicious. But Newman's monument Is in 
himself. The religious mind is not likely to have easier paths in the 
future than those which he followed. The memory of his intellectual 
wanderings and stabilities is always at hand to guide and enlighten 
the chosen thinkers who act as the scouts to the main body of Christian 
thought. But Newman was more than a scout although much of his 
life was spent in lonely pioneering. How far was it possible to allow 
the Catholic mind to explore ? Where exactly could the front lines 
be safest drawn between sympathetic orthodoxy and honest doubt? 
To those in need to-day of illuminating belief, or mystical refresh- 
ment his name stands for more than a guide or scout. To posterity 
he has become again w r hat he was to Oxford a hundred years ago 
an apostle the one radiant, discerning, unfailing, unageing apostle 
to all who seek Catholic truths in English speech. 



MICHAEL DE LA BEDOYERE, M.A. 

LEO THE THIRTEENTH 



A.D. 1810-1903 



"J'LL NEVER GIVE my vote save either to a great nobleman, like 
J^ Chigi, or a saint, like Martinelli," exclaimed Cardinal Randi after 
the death of Pius IX. 

Jovial, emotional, plain-spoken and practical Cardinal Bartolini 
was in despair. This Conclave in February, 1878, was unique : the 
first to be held after the loss of the temporal power, the first since the 
great secular world had wholeheartedly and finally accepted a 
philosophy of life that seemed in plain contradiction with Catholic 
Christianity. 

" The Pontiff to be elected must be dear to God, of that there is 
no doubt," exclaimed Bartolini's lieutenant, Fr. Calenzio, to whose 
diary we owe the inner story of the election, " but must also be useful 
to the Church. ... If you want a saint at any price, there's 
Ledochowski, Manning. . . Why not a diplomat, Ferrieri, Franchi, 
De Luca? But, whatever you think, this is essential . . . : that a 
Pope should be elected, first of all, well, and secondly, soon." 

Bartolini was right, and his candidate was duly elected in two 
days, the shortest Conclave on record. The elect Cardinal, Pecci, 
was neither a great nobleman, nor a saint. He was something 
between the two : he was, in the very best sense of the word, a 
gentleman. 

Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, Cardinal Bishop of Perugia and 
Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, was close on sixty-eight, 
frail and of only moderate health. " I cannot accept so enormous a 
burden," he muttered after the election, " I shall fall under it in a 
few days. It is not the Papacy but death that is offered to me." 

An early death ahead of him, and sixty-eight years of no more than 
a moderately successful life, as great ecclesiastics go, behind him ; 
only the virtue of the Holy Spirit guiding the deliberations of the 
unusually excited Cardinals could fully explain the choice* 

Who was this slight, dignified figure with that immensely intelligent 
head, those piercing black eyes set deep in a drawn, thin, stern face 

304 



LEO THE THIRTEENTH 305 

with a great Roman nose, and broad, firm mouth ? One painter's 
brush brought Voltaire back to life on his canvas when seeking 
to interpret those features. Another might have seen in them more 
than a trace of that scholarly and poetic spirit which seems shared 
by the features of Virgil, Dante and Newman. The wife of an 
Italian Prime Minister, passing a little earlier through Perugia, had 
studied that face and guessed that it was a papabile face : "I have 
seen few such expressive heads as his," she wrote, "on which firmness, 
resolution and strength are so clearly stamped. . . . One thing is 
certain he is no ordinary person. His voice is sonorous and full 
. . . His demeanour is majestic and full of dignity ; the chief 
impression one gets is that of asceticism and sternness, but this is 
softened by a certain benevolence especially when he unbends to 
children." 

It was a splendid choice, this choice of a grand gentleman who, 
seemingly 5 had done little to deserve it but be himself, fully the 
diplomat, fully the bishop and now to be fully the Pope for so long 
as the Spirit who had inspired the choice cared to preserve him on the 
throne of Peter. Not a soul could have guessed that it was to be for 
a quarter of a century, and few could have agreed that the Church 
would be more skilfully steered through the storms by an inexperienced 
cleric-gentleman than by a great nobleman, used to the ways of 
governments and courts ; more wisely steered by a simple bishop, 
unpromoted for thirty years, than by a great saint who could find 
guidance through the sole contemplation of celestial lights. - 



A gentleman, in the very best sense of the word ! Joachim Pecci 
was of a family of squires ; the lords of the little community that dwelt 
in the mountain town of Garpineto In the Papal States. There they 
had lived, cut off from the world, unchanged, seeking only to live 
decent Catholic lives of give and take (mostly give) among the people 
of whom they were the visible heads, and, maybe, hoping every so often 
that one of their sons should attain to outward fame by climbing the 
rungs of the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment, the only outlet in this 
ecclesiastically-ruled land. 

Joachim, the sixth child, was intelligent and ambitious. " To 
enhance the glory of the family," as he himself wrote, he embraced 
a Church career. A little later he explained that he desired s; to rise 
in the hierarchical branches of the prelacy, and thus to increase the 
just respect which our family enjoys in the land." So might a younger 
son of an English peer or squire enter the diplomatic service with the 
hope one day of seeing his portrait in the ancestral dining-room 



306 GREAT CATHOLICS 

as an ambassador. As an English gentleman, this spirited and 
intelligent younger son would fully accept all the values, the patriotic, 
the social, even the vague religious values that are involved in a great 
traditional career. So did young Pecci. But he was not English ; 
he was Catholic and Papal. In his very being, as well as in his career, 
the religious value was supreme, and after it came the value of learning. 
To a Catholic Papal gentleman the idea of being a great prelate 
without also being a holy and learned priest involved a contradiction. 
And therefore there was nothing odd or incongruous in the fact that 
the young cleric-diplomat, after some years of an almost purely secular 
career, should become an exemplary bishop and, one day, a great 
Pope. From careerist he grew into devout pastor, and from devout 
pastor into Papal holiness, and this growth was possible because, from 
the first, all the elements of a fully Catholic character, the desire to 
be holy, the desire to be learned, the desire to fulfil successfully any 
station in life that he might attain, were present ; all the true elements 
in fact of what we in England call being a " gentleman," but all 
transferred from the best English values to the best Catholic and 
Papal values. 

Between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-seven, Mgr. Pecci 
graduated in the knowledge of men and of the modern world. As 
Apostolic Delegate in Benevento and Perugia he was virtually ruler 
of primitive Latin communities, where secret societies, bandits and 
insolent nobles fought for money and power. Human nature at 
bottom is much the same all the world over, and when the young 
diplomat was trying to maintain order, throwing people into prison 
and even ordering out the army, he was learning the elementary 
lesson that authority and discipline, combined with understanding 
and sympathy, can never be replaced fully by learning and autonomy. 
There is an appetite in fallen man that can be repressed by learning, 
culture and progress, but never extinguished. 

From Italy he was transferred to the very different world of 
Brussels, capital of the new Belgian State and symbol of the modern 
democratic enlightenment. Here he was in the midst of the good 
and the bad that seemed so inextricably mingled in the new world. 
He was amazed and thrilled by the wonders of the new age : " What a 
miracle I " he wrote. " Six iron tracks which pass through Belgium 
in all directions furnish the kingdom with the most comfortable 
means of travel imaginable. . . . Nothing is more agreeable than 
riding like this at more than twenty miles an hour. The most 
delightful views, villas, country houses, and villages, sped past on our 
right and left like a dream or an optical illusion." Likewise he 
appreciated the greater freedom given to religion in this young country 
than had often been the case under reactionary rule. But the freedom 



LEO THE THIRTEENTH 307 

went deep and strayed far : " After the revolution of 1830 a section 
of the clergy," he wrote, " was led astray by the Ideas of independence 
and liberty preached by Lamennais, which had found many supporters 
in Belgium." Likewise the feudal lord was puzzled by the beginnings 
of " that division of society into two widely different castes " which 
appeared to be necessitated by industrial progress but was so much 
less good than the centuries-old social life of Garpineto and so much 
more evil than the human faults of Benevento. Whither were these 
gifts of God, these " sparks of the Creator/' this new knowledge, these 
admirable inventions, leading man ? Must man turn his back upon 
them and upon all the social and intellectual changes that went with 
them ? Or was he strong and wise enough to adapt himself and to 
use them in accordance with that great maxim written up ail over his 
old Jesuit school in Viterbo " For the Greater Glory of God ? " 

Such questions were the subject of his meditations and his studies 
during the long years when he ruled men's souls in Perugia. In some 
strange way, Mgr. Pecci seemed from the first to be waiting in a 
shadow for a day when his qualities of mind and character would get 
their chance. As Nuncio in Brussels he had endeared himself to many 
and shown his interest in a changing age, but Rome and Metternich 
were not too happy about him. After the promise of a brilliant 
diplomatic career, the young Nuncio was virtually retired at the age of 
thirty-six to Perugia and nominated Cardinal in petto. Thus he was set 
upon the summit of a low mountain in the expectation that he would be 
isolated yet not dishonoured. This in truth seemed likely to prove the 
case. Through the years of revolution and war during which the 
temporal power of the Papacy was broken and modern Italy created, 
Cardinal Pecci kept himself aloof from politics, handled with the 
greatest tact the awkward moment when Victor Emmanuel visited 
Perugia, and devoted all his energies to the spiritual rule of his flock ; but 
he also remained in the closest touch with the world, reading and studying 
every paper or periodical that he could obtain, seeing innumerable 
prelates from abroad so many of whom halted at Perugia on their 
way to Rome and, as it were, testing his own quality in a series of 
remarkable pastorals on subjects that bore closely on acute con- 
temporary controversies as between Church and modern civilization. 
The illusion that here, retired but active, was the man of the future 
was all the stronger in that the powerful but die-hard Cardinal 
Antonelli, Pius IX's Secretary-of-State, had no love for the exiled 
prelate. Pio Nono, though never a man of intellectual brilliance, was 
of generous disposition, and it had only been the bufferings he had 
received at the hands of young Liberal Italy which had forced him to 
set up a high barrier between Church and world. Antonelli, on the 
contrary, had never had doubts, either intellectual or natural, about 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

the answer to the questions which Pecci had been asking himself 
since the days of Brussels. But Antonelli predeceased Pius IX, and 
the latter looking back over his stormy Pontificate said : " I know 
there must be a change, but it will have to be left to my successor. 
I cannot break with the traditions of my reign." Meanwhile Cardinal 
Pecci's exile was over, for the ageing Pontiff in the year before his 
death had recalled Pecci to Rome and given him the high office of 
Chamberlain. 



in 

Great Churchmen live long and maintain their strength, but when 
one recalls the disappointment of Disraeli in having already reached 
the age of seventy before obtaining that power for which his whole 
life had been a preparation, one may understand the feelings of the 
keen and intelligent Leo on being elevated to the greatest position 
which it is given to man to hold at approximately the same age as 
the British wonder-statesman, and after that long career of disappointed 
promise. Not power to do good, but only death. " The exaltation 
of a ghost," said one observer. 

It was but a momentary sense of weakness, and Leo began at once 
on a programme of his own with a mind made clear through years of 
attention and one made strong through prayer and work. He was 
too much of a realist to give a clear-cut answer to the questions that 
had been shaping themselves in his mind ever since the Brussels days. 
Was this Brave New World better or worse than it had looked to the 
unchanging persecuted Vatican ? Was it possible to draw a clear 
and accurate line between the good and the bad in the new secularism 
and the new science ? But if Leo refused to commit himself, but 
rather made up his mind to deal with every concrete issue as it arose 
on its merits, he was most clear as to the positive constructive pro- 
gramme which was needed, whatever the practical answers might be. 
If there were evidences in the outside world of a vast scientific develop- 
ment, it was certain that the Church would be all the better able to 
deal with whatever it might bring if she too bent all her efforts to the 
study of the thought upon which her claims and her position rested. 
" We are living on the intellect of a former age," Newman exclaimed. 
It was due to Leo that to-day when a man makes his choice between 
theism and agnosticism, that choice is almost certainly one between 
the principles of Catholic Christianity at its intellectual best or nothing. 
It was due to him that the present Pope has been able to set into 
operation a programme of action, driven, as it were, by a highly efficient 
and smoothly running theological and philosophical engine. That this 
action, moreover, is rallying to the colours millions of indifferent and 



LEO THE THIRTEENTH 309 

thousands of Ignorant or hostile is due to the second part of Leo's 
constructive programme. 

A prelate in Rome had stated about this time : " We condemn the 
separation of the Church from the State, but we are running the risk 
of separating the Church from Society." In dwelling upon the contrast 
between the ancient unchanging Church and the aggressive, changing 
revolutionary Modern State, Rome had been in danger of conceding 
to the world the latter's claim to a monopoly of what the progressive, 
enlightened, humanitarian called good. Leo had not meditated 
upon a great development like the electric light, and called it " a 
spark of the Creator," in vain ; he had not directed his own poetic 
talents to the expression of wonder at the art of photography for 
nothing ; nor, on the other hand, had he contrasted the birth of 
the two nations in industrial Belgium with the happy relations of the 
people in his out-of-date home town without profit ; he had not 
omitted during his long years at Perugia to watch how a new spirit 
of hatred and selfishness among the strong and a new spirit of unrest 
and dissatisfaction among the poor were showing themselves to be 
the necessary accompaniment of emancipation, progress and outward 
wealth. What was called progress might raise many different 
questions for the Church, but it was certainly her opportunity. If 
the new State was determined to rebel against the religious spirit, 
then it meant that the Church alone could provide that justice and 
charity without which no society can endure and that final meaning 
of social life without which the very greatest of human inventions 
cannot be safely used and controlled. Separation of State from 
Church simply called for the need for a closer union between Society 
and Church, a union the need for which the Church could prove. 
" Only that can represent real progress," Leo said, " which leads to 
man's spiritual and moral perfection. 5 ' 

For these reasons the long and busy reign of Leo was given its 
positive character by two historic Encyclicals, Aeterni Patris, the charter 
of the Church's intellectual renalssance 3 and Rerum Novarum, the 
Church's challenge to the State and to secularism on behalf of the 
millions who make up the society that the State rules and that 
secularism enslaves. 

When Leo was planning to raise Christian thought and scholarship 
to the level claimed by the secular world, he made up his mind to open 
the Vatican archives to historians. The boldness of the step alarmed 
his entourage. What dangers there might be in revealing to the 
world the secrets of the Vatican past. " Teste piccole ! " (petty minds), 
exclaimed the irritated Pontiff, and a little later he declared to an 
audience of students : " Go back as far as you can, to the sources. 
We are not afraid of the publication of documents." It was in exactly 



j/0 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the same spirit that he ordered the whole body of Catholic teaching 
to seek again in the original text of Thomas Aquinas the intellectual 
springs of Christian theology and philosophy. 

Aeterni Patris, like the opening of the secret archives, was a command 
to dig deep into the past in order to strengthen the foundations on 
which the present and the future could be built. To the world, 
exulting in its own untamed progress and invention, it was a bold 
challenge, but one the wisdom of which has been made more and 
more evident by subsequent events ; to the Church itself, which had 
grown afraid of the future and ignorant of the riches of the past, it 
restored a lost heritage. The last thing Leo had in mind was retreat 
or a burying of the Church's brains in the sands of the past. A 
life-long student of St. Thomas he knew his to be the philosophy with 
the widest sweep and the soundest framework for incorporating the 
new discoveries which science was making ; " Far from denying," 
he wrote, " the conquests of experimental science, it fully admitted 
that the human spirit only rises to the knowledge of things spiritual 
through those apparent to the senses." 

But there was more to Leo's policy even than this. In telling 
scholars to go back to the original text, he was virtually telling them to 
go back to something new. There could be no better way of breaking 
through the superstructure of formalism and convention which were 
preventing Catholics from thinking for themselves. Just as at Oxford 
the young undergraduate is given profoundly important original 
texts to study for himself, rather than encyclopaedias to memorise, 
in the hope that his mind will be trained and his curiosity to seek for 
himself will be aroused, so this intelligent Pontiff was trying to stimulate 
the Christian intellect and rekindle its curiosity. The re-discovery 
of the Middle Ages and of pre-Tridentine Christianity with its pro- 
foundly important effects on secular as well as religious thought and 
the consequent almost aggressive nature of Christian criticism of 
contemporary philosophy were due to Leo's inspiration. Indeed 
many held that Leo moved too quickly and murmured that the Pope, 
who could tolerate the false conclusions of scholars on the ground that 
in the work of discovery mistakes must be made before the truth is 
laid bare, got no less than he deserved in the Modernist movement. 
Doubtless the story of Modernism would have been different had 
Leo lived another ten years, but perhaps the greatest tribute to Leo's 
inspiration is to be found in the fact that the summary execution of 
Modernism by his successor acted in the end, not as a deadly wound 
to Leo's programme, but only as a wholesome purge. The strength 
of the intellectual and devotional life created by Leo's breath can be 
judged from this episode. To-day that past which Leo called back 
to life is successfully challenging the present, but the world has 



LEO THE THIRTEENTH 5/1 

completely lost its faith in all the progressive liberal ideas which so 
terrified the piccole teste of the Vatican and so attracted those who had 
misunderstood the Leonine emancipation. 

But brilliant as was Leo's intellectual renaissance, it could not be 
as spectacular as his lead in the social question. It was here that he 
saw his chance of turning the tables, as it were, on the world. With 
it he struck at the Achilles-heel of the new age. 

Social disorder inevitably follows intellectual and moral disorder, 
but whereas men will be content for a long time to lead intellectually 
and morally disordered lives they will soon complain of the suffering 
that accompanies social disorder. Marx had not been wrong in his 
analysis of the situation and in his prophecy that the progressive world 
was heading for social disaster through the challenge of the proletariat 
for possession of the new wealth which it had created. Leo had 
watched the first stages of this revolution, and as an exemplary bishop 
for thirty years he had observed that the individual, forgotten when 
included in the discontented revolutionary masses, had genuine 
grounds for his grievances. Among the upper classes at the end of 
the nineteenth century this in itself was almost a revolutionary notion, 
so revolutionary that when the thought did really strike anybody he 
himself usually became a revolutionary, attacking both Church and 
State for the unjust order they had created. But the great majority 
were content either to appeal to the laws of economics or the laws of 
God, reluctantly retreating step by step when the masses began to 
look ugly. 

But for Leo, the same Leo who when faced by the world's progress 
had bade his subjects think for themselves and rediscover the 
intellectual riches contained in their own heritage, the observation 
of the world's social disorder was simply the opportunity for re- 
discovering the social order that once followed automatically on 
intellectual and moral order. Agreeing with Marx in his analysis 
of the situation, he profoundly disagreed with his account of its causes. 
Social disorder was the consequence of moral disorder, not its cause. 
When the world was intellectually and morally ordered, what were 
the consequent principles of social order ? Re-assert those principles, 
work towards the restoration of religious, intellectual and moral order, 
and the problem of social disorder will be solved. Here then the 
Church, the sole inheritor of those principles and the sole possessor 
of the truth whence the principles themselves derive, could alone bring 
to the world the solution for which the masses, Society, craved. The 
separation of Church from State was the means of reconciling Society 
with Church. 

It was simple enough in theory, but the results of the rigorous 
application of the theory were surprising, not to say, scandalizing. 



312 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Rei'um Novaruni) the Church's solution to the social question, remains 
in 1938 a veritable Workers' Charter ; in 1891, it was almost a 
monstrosity, coming as it did from what was considered the most 
die-hard and reactionary body in the world. 

Here are some of the surprising things it said : 

The condition of the working people is the pressing question of 
the hour. . . . Misery and wretchedness press unjustly on the 
majority of the working class. * . . Society is divided into two widely 
different castes : those who manipulate for their own benefit all 
the sources of supply, and the needy and powerless multitude, sick 
and sore in spirit. . . . Working-men have been surrendered to the 
hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competi- 
tion. ... A small number of the very rich have been able to lay 
upon the teeming masses a yoke little better than that of slavery 
itself. ... It may be truly said that only by the labour of working 
men do States grow rich. ... It is shameful and inhuman to treat 
men like chattels to make money by. ... A workman's wages 
should be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, 
his wife and his children. ... It is just and right that the results 
of labour should belong to those who have bestowed their labour. 
. . . If the State forbids citizens to form associations, it contradicts 
the very principle of its own existence. . . . Wage-earners should 
be especially cared for and protected by Government. . . . God 
has granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that 
all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that 
no part of it has been assigned to anyone in particular, and that 
the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man's 
own industry, and by the laws of individual races. The law should 
therefore favour ownership, and its policy should be to induce as 
many as possible of the people to become owners. ..." 

Rerum Novarum, nearly fifty years after it was written, remains 
as fresh, and for the " haves " as novel and scandalous, as it did 
then. 

The only difference perhaps lies in the fact that to-day no one can 
dismiss it things have gone too far whereas then it fell on deaf 
ears. Leo's fearless appeal to the truths that lay hidden in the past 
of Christianity, had it been faithfully acted upon, would have gone 
far to reconcile the Church and society. Unfortunately, the power 
over society held by wealth proved a much tougher proposition than 
the power of the intellectuals, and it has required, not the spiritual 
and economic programme of Leo, but the threat of socialist dynamite 
to weaken that grip. Unfortunately, too, members of the Church 
proved almost as reluctant as did the rest of the " haves " to apply 
their great leader's programme. It is only fifty years after the 



LEO THE THIRTEENTH 313 

Encyclical that the social teaching of Leo is taking its place as an 
integral part of that intellectual, spiritual and moral re-birth of which 
Leo was the inspirer and Pius XI the leader in the field of action. 
It is because of what has taken place since Leo's death that the Church 
as a whole has been moved to follow his inspiration and the world 
has taken some notice of the only alternative to despair or crude 
power-worship . 

These two great constructive answers to the world's challenge were 
not the fruit of deep scholarship, on the one hand, nor of any special 
study of sociology on the other ; they represented rather the brilliant 
insight and fearless confidence of the born statesman, the gentleman 
of learning and experience, the rooted, traditional CathoHc mind, 
faced with the need of a masterly handling of a complex and difficult 
situation. Looking back from to-day with the experience gained 
through half a century of worldly stress and disillusion we can observe 
the remarkable fact that, whereas the philosophies, whether materialist 
or idealist, and the political theories of Leo's time have been exploded, 
the revitalized Christian theology and philosophy whose inspiration 
was Aeterni Patris have become the centre round which all who 
believe in a supernatural meaning to life gather ; the social and 
economic problems, too, for which he found the true solution in Rerum 
Novarum have remained the real ground on which men fight one another 
under the banners of Socialism, Fascism, Communism and even 
Christianity itself. It is the simple truth that Leo XIII in under- 
standing the true nature of the challenge of his day and in answering 
it by an order to dig deep into the past and, on the basis of what was 
there discovered, to think again for oneself, put himself fifty years 
ahead of his time. 

Time only has shown that these two Encyclicals were truly flashes 
of inspiration ; Leo could not have been aware of the fact. They 
were his simple contribution where he saw his way perfectly clear. 
They fitted into the events of his long reign along with other actions 
and decisions of a less striking character. 

Those twenty-five years of Supreme Pontificate were a splendid 
fulfilment, the ripening fruit of a balanced life. " Holiness is 
sanctified politeness" is a saying attributed to St, Francis of Sales. 
Leo XIII in his great office found the opportunity to sanctify the life 
of a Catholic and Papal gentleman and thus to make it holy, strong 
and commanding. Though he feared that death would result from 
his election, he seemed actually to grow stronger, and even when 
advancing age emptied his skin of the flesh within, that skin seemed 
to grow tauter and stronger like the finest parchment and the bared 
bones revealed more and more the firm steady chiselling of his striking 
face. The disciple of Aquinas, he became himself an example of the 



314 GREAT CATHOLICS 

consubstantiality of body and soul, the body itself expressing the 
changes and growth of the spirit. 

That balance of character, which in his early youth had manifested 
itself almost paradoxically in his making a clerical career the avenue 
of ambition and success, yet never allowing these ends to diminish 
or weaken the priestly quality of his vocation, showed itself again 
in the temporal side of the Papacy. He was artist enough to love its 
pomp and splendour, and he delighted in the fervent cheers of the 
crowds as he was carried in state on the sedia gestatoria with the great 
fans waving at his side. For a great occasion or to receive a 
distinguished visitor he would dress with special care and choose 
with a loving taste from the many gorgeous rings in his possession those 
that would best suit the occasion. Yet with this appreciation of 
magnificence in all that was public in his role, he lived the simplest 
of personal lives, just as he immediately broke through formality 
with a visitor, always asking him to be seated and to chat in comfort. 

With the like dignity and commonsense he approached every 
question, and if he ever was in danger of losing that balance, it was 
through too great informality and trust, as when he once granted 
a personal audience to a famous journalist who wished to interview 
him, and found himself saddled with statements he had never made. 
In redressing the balance he was apt perhaps to react a trifle too 
sharply, as a sensitive yet generous man will. This often accounted 
for certain manifestations of unexpected severity that were disconcerting 
and made people feel that in matters of detail he tended to withdraw 
with one hand what he had given with the other. 

It was unavoidable that during those twenty-five critical years 
of new dawn for the Church Leo should have to give practical answers 
to concrete difficulties, particularly in the political and social field. 
Though here one may miss something of the imagination and sweep 
of his constructive leads, he felt his way firmly and courageously. 
For a lifetime he had puzzled over such questions : now he decided 
as wisely as circumstances permitted. In Encyclicals, Diuturnum 
Immortals Dei and Libertas, he expressed the principles which guided 
him when deciding so practical a question as " what should a French 
Catholic do under a liberal, republican regime, or an Italian under a 
government bitterly hostile to the Church ? " Let it be remembered 
that the vast majority of Catholics whose voices could be heard found 
nothing to puzzle them in sucji questions. The " old regime " and 
" no compromise " were the obvious answers. But Leo, on the one 
hand, stated that " the Church does not condemn any form of govern- 
ment, nor does she condemn those Governments which for some 
weighty reasons, either for the sake of a good to be obtained, or an 
evil to be averted, tolerate various religions," and, on the other, 



LEO THE THIRTEENTH k 

reminded mankind that civil society did not create human nature, 
but that only from the laws, originating in God's eternal law, could 
men find an ultimate protection against the inevitable oppression 
that must come from man-invented legislation. With these truths 
as his guide, he did not fear to scandalize many by making peace with 
laicized France, and he began a series of negotiations with the great 
powers which together have been described as " a signal monument 
of suppleness, of penetration and of unerring judgment in regard 
to that re-grouping of forces in Europe," thus, in a word, restoring 
the Vatican as the watch-tower of Europe and indeed, of the world. 

How far ultimate success, in fact, attended these many and complex 
negotiations, how far Leo's generous faith in mankind, balanced 
of course by his supernatural faith in God's Revelation and His Church, 
teaching the forgotten dogma of Original Sin, was right in leading him 
to support even erring scholars or over-sanguine Christian democrats 
and then, towards the end, forcing him to draw back with some sharp- 
ness owing to abuse of his generosity how far, in a word, he was as 
wise in detail as he was sublime in his leadership is an unfair question 
to ask. At the age of ninety he saw the beginnings of the new century, 
the century which with its swift and dramatic changes, its staggering 
reversal of values, its despair and its crude hopes, its meaning and 
destiny still unknown, has confounded all -the prophets, and has left 
standing, out of all those giants of the nineteenth century, only perhaps 
Marx and Leo : Marx who saw the coming catastrophe and the rise 
of social State despotism seeking or pretending to seek for a paradise 
on earth ; Leo who saw that only within the rich and varied heritage 
of Christianity, restored by him to new life, were to be found the 
principles of action that in leading man to a paradise of fulfilment in 
heaven could assure him a tolerable comfort in this world. Marx's 
option may be winning, but mankind has yet to realise the devastating 
consequences of that victory, consequences fully foretold by Leo, 
consequences that could still be avoided if Leo's voice carried further 
even to-day. 

Three years after the opening of the century that could appreciate 
his greatness as his contemporaries could not, Leo muttered : '* I do 
not know how men will judge me, but I know I have always greatly 
loved the Church and have tried to procure her good. So I die 
tranquil." Even in that supreme moment, especially for one chosen 
by the Holy Spirit to be Christ's Vicar for twenty-five years, Leo with 
calm and balance summed up his long life's work. Undramatic, 
untheatrical, not rising to the heights of saintly exaltation, nor to the 
depths of a sinner's self-reproach, quietly repeating to himself the 
true Christian's safest prayer : " Lord, I am not worthy," he relapsed 
into unconsciousness and gave up his soul to God. 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

He died, as he had lived, displaying that essential simplicity through 
which can shine greatness of Faith, greatness of tradition, greatness 
of culture. A great Christian gentleman, that is, a man to whom came, 
with equal poise and serenity, the greatest as well as the lowlier of the 
stations in the career he had chosen, a man who fully co-operated 
with the high gifts and opportunities willed for him by God s a man who 
in being chosen to fill the highest office on this earth almost inevitably 
grew to the sanctity, wisdom and, indeed, genius that that office 
requires. " He had," in the words of Cardinal Ferrari, " the gifts 
and merits of the great Popes of old, and at the same time the deeds 
and characteristics of a great Pope of our time." 



PETER F. ANSON 



AUGUSTUS WELBY PUGIN 



A.D. 1812-185-2 

" JN THE LONG gallery of those who, in the last hundred years, have 
J[ saved and increased, and handed down whatever there is of 
artistic life in England, one picture has been badly hung. It deserves 
to be hung in a better light. It contains the figure of a tough little 
man, with dark hair, and flashing eyes, and a hearty laugh> dressed 
in semi-nautical clothes." 1 

With these words Mr. Trappes-Lomax concluded his life of the man I 
have chosen for insertion in this gallery of great Catholics Augustus 
Welby Pugin one of the most neglected figures of the Catholic 
Revival in England, and one of the greatest architects of the last 
century. Until Mr. Trappes-Lomax published his biographical study 
of Pugin in 1933 this remarkable man had been allowed to fall into 
the background. We Catholics were largely to blame. We had been 
content to let Ruskin's opinions about Pugin and his work pass 
unchallenged. Ruskin hated everything that savoured of " Roman- 
ism/' at least modern Rome, and believed that nothing good could 
ever be produced by a contemporary who had been so foolish as to be 
ensnared by the wiles of the Scarlet Woman. It was strange that he 
was quite oblivious that all the medieval Italians about whose work 
he wrote so enthusiastically in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, 
and The Stones of Venice were practising Catholics in communion with 
the Holy See ! 

Augustus Welby Pugin was the son of a French architect who 
came to England at the time of the Revolution, at least so it is supposed. 
He belonged to a family which claimed a noble origin, even if remote. 
In 1802 the elder Pugin married Catherine Welby, who belonged 
to an old Lincolnshire family. Their son, Augustus Welby, was born 
in London on March ist, 1812. 

He was educated at Christ's Hospital, and afterwards went into his 
father's office, wfoere he found himself in company with a number of 
other young students of architecture. His father often took him to 
France on sketching tours. He soon became a rapid and dexterous 

1 M. Trappes-Lomax, Pugin: A Medieval Victorian, p. 328. 

3** 



AUGUSTUS WELBY PUGIN 319 

draughtsman. But he was more interested in the theatre. For a time 
he was employed as a scene painter at Covent Garden. Then his 
ambitions shifted in quite another direction ; he decided to become a 
sailor, and bought his first boat, in which for a year or two he made 
trips to and from the continent. To the great disgust of his fastidious 
parents, he adopted not only the dress, but also the habits of a common 
seaman. At the early age of nineteen he married Anne Grant who 
died the following year. In 1834 he married a second time, and his 
wife, Louisa Burton bore him five children. After her death in 
1844, Pugin remained a widower for four years, and in 1848 married 
Jane Knill as his third wife, who became the mother of two more 
children. 

Pugin's mother a rigid Protestant of a Calvinistic type, had been 
a follower of Edward Irving. But the study of medieval art led her son 
to consider the claims of the Catholic Church, with the result that 
in 1834 he took the then most* unusual step of becoming a Catholic. 
" I became perfectly convinced," he afterwards wrote, " that the 
Roman Catholic Church is the only true one. I learned the truths 
of the Catholic Church in the crypts of the old cathedrals of Europe. 
I sought for the truths in the modern Church of England, and found 
that since her separation from the centre of Catholic unity, she had 
little truth, and no life ; so without being acquainted with a single 
priest, through God's mercy, I resolved to enter His Church." 

It must have been a great sacrifice to Pugin to leave the Church 
of England, and the step cannot have been taken without grave 
reflection. A century ago Catholicism in England was " the religion 
of small shopkeepers in the towns and peasants in the country who 
congregated round the chapels of their scattered manorial lords." 1 

He knew quite well that such a step would mean the loss of work 
and social status, for English Catholics in 1834 were indeed a body 
despised and rejected by their fellow countrymen. It must have been 
a wrench to give up worshipping in Salisbury Cathedral, even if the 
rendering of the Prayer-Book services was not very inspiring. The 
bare room with an altar at one end which then served as the Catholic 
chapel in the city was a poor substitute. After his conversion Pugin 
started to build himself a curibus medieval house near Salisbury, 
which he called St. Marie's Grange, It was about this time that 
Sir Charles Barry obtained the collaboration of the young architect 
in the designs he was preparing for the new Houses of Parliament 
at Westminster. This collaboration continued with brief intervals 
for the greater part of Pugin's life. Barry did his best to destroy any 
evidence to prove just how much he owed to Pugin, and it is only 
within recent years that it has been discovered that not only the 



320 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Gothic umbrella-stands, ink-pots, blotting-pads, and other trivial 
details, but also the river facade and the clock tower are actually Pugin's 
work. He was also kept busy on other domestic work at this period, 
including the vast Gothic mansion Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire. 
He also found time for writing, and in 1 836 published his first important 
book entitled Contrasts, or a parallel between the noble edifices of the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar buildings of the present day ; 
showing the present decay of taste. In the writing of this vehement 
and critical volume Pugin found a congenial outlet for his artistic 
convictions and his newly-found Faith. 



The opening of the chapel of Oscott College on May sgth, 1838, 
not only ushered in, as it were, the Second Spring of Catholicism in 
England, but established Pugin's fame as the leading " Christian " 
architect of the time. 

He had been called in a few months earlier to advise on its decora- 
tion. Not content with this Pugin pulled down the east wall and 
inserted an apsidal sanctuary. Full of enthusiasm he went over to 
Belgium. Here he managed to secure the reredos, brass lectern, 
communion rail, and many other treasures from old churches. 

The great day came at last. Bishop Ullathorne tells us how Pugin, 
with his dark eyes flashing, and tears on his cheeks, superintended 
the procession of the clergy, and declared that it was the greatest day 
for the Church in England since the Reformation. Certainly nothing 
had ever been seen in England so gorgeously decorated as the new 
chapel at Oscott. Its walls were blazing with gold and colour," the 
light passing through the windows that were as yet unclouded by the 
blown grime of Birmingham." 1 

The twenty-five-year-old Pugin was appointed professor of 
Ecclesiastical History at Oscott. Not only did he lecture to the 
students, but found time to design chairs, tables, cupboards, the 
paschal candlestick, the statue of Our Lady in the chapel, the outdoor 
shrine on the terrace, and the lodge gateway. The stone pulpit 
in the chapel became famous in later years, for it was here that John 
Henry Newman preached his famous sermon on the Second Spring. 

The ghost of Augustus Welby Pugin seems to haunt Oscott even 
to-day a hundred years since the opening of his chapel. He has 
left a permanent mark on the college, even if he did not actually 
design the buildings. It is a pity that the Milner Chantry was never 
carried out. From the drawings which still exist, one can see that 
it was a most original conception. 

1 Trappes-Lomax, op. cit., p. 146. 



AUGUSTUS WELBY PUGIN 321 

Pugin was now hard at work all over the country. St. Mary's, 
Derby, Is noteworthy as being the first large building which was 
entirely Pugin's own work. It is also one of the few churches in which 
he employed the Perpendicular style of Gothic, another being 
St. Alban's, Macclesfield (1839-41). 

Bishop Wiseman preached at the opening function at Derby in 
October, 1839. ^ e described the church as " without exception 
the most magnificent thing that Catholics have yet done in modern 
times in this country, and quite worthy of ancient days. It is all of 
stone with three aisles, a glorious tower, and a very rich sanctuary 
ornamented with beautiful stained glass windows, and rich broad 
hangings ; all given, as well as very splendid vestments, by Lord 
Shrewsbury." 

But Wiseman did not mention that these " very splendid vestments " 
were not worn at the opening Mass, For the donor refused permission 
unless the full orchestra and choir, which included female singers, 
were dismissed. Unless plainchant was sung, Lord Shrewsbury 
would not allow his vestments to be worn. Bishop Baines, always an 
enemy of Pugin and hating everything Gothic, said that it was too late 
to make any changes. In fact he and the sacred ministers had already 
started to vest in the sacristy. However, Lord Shrewsbury was 
adamant. So the cloth of gold vestments had to be set aside, and a 
dingy old set of French shape put on instead. 

Six weeks later the foundation stone of St. Chad's, Birmingham 
was laid. It was solemnly opened on June 23rd, 184.1, when once 
again, to the horror and disgust of Pugin and his noble patron, a full 
orchestra and mixed choir " performed " the music of the Mass. 

The architect was much hampered by lack of funds when building 
St. Chad's. Rigid economy had to be practised, especially on the 
exterior. The style is of the utmost simplicity. The material of 
the walls is red brick, now toned down to a mellow brown by nearly 
a century of Birmingham smoke. There are two twin spires, and the 
whole grouping of the masses is very effective, particularly when 
viewed from the canal, above which the apsidal sanctuary of the church 
projects with striking effect. 

In spite of Pugin's pathetic remarks in a letter to March-Phillips ; 
" I have given up all hope now of the church coming to anything 
really good ; it will look very well, but it will not be the thing " ; the 
interior is wonderfully impressive. The nave columns rise almost to 
the level of the roof and give an impression of great height. But 
the chief feature is the great rood screen, which Bishop Wiseman did 
his best to abolish. No matter how often one may revisit St. Chad's, 
one always derives a fresh pleasure from the study of this building. 
It is difficult to realise that it is the work of a young man not more 



$22 GREAT CATHOLICS 

than twenty-seven years of age ; even more difficult to remember 
that what one actually sees is no more than a poor makeshift when 
compared with the original design. 

During his brief career, which lasted little more than fourteen 
years, Pugin built a large number of parish churches and chapels all 
over England. How he found time to supervise so much work, when 
one considers the difficulties of travel in those days, will always remain 
a mystery. 

Among these churches should be mentioned the following : St. 
Wilfrid's, Manchester (1839) ; Keighley, Yorks (1840) ; St. James, 
Reading (1840) ; Warwick Bridge, Cumberland (1841) ; Ackworth 
Grange, Yorks (1842) ; Old Swan, Liverpool {1842) ; St. Mary's, 
Stockton-on-Tees (1842) ; Brewood, Staffs. (1844) ; Highfield Street, 
Liverpool (1845) ; King's Lynn, Norfolk (1845) ; Kirkham, Lanes. 
(1845) ; Marlow, Bucks. (1845) ; Salisbury (1847) ; St. Thomas's, 
Fulham, London (1847). 

Several of the smaller churches have been pulled down, and replaced 
by modern structures of doubtful merit. These include King's Lynn, 
Shepshed, Leics. (1841) ;' Whitwick, Leics. (1837). 

Ambrose de Lisle March-Phillips, who was one of Pugin's chief 
patrons, became a Catholic at the early age of seventeen. He owned 
vast estates in Leicestershire, and in 1835 built himself a manor house 
at Grace-Dieu from the designs of William Railton. It included a 
Perpendicular Gothic chapel, complete with rood screen. When 
Pugin saw this for the first time, he threw his arms round the neck 
of his host, and exclaimed with delight, " Now at last I have found a 
Christian after my own heart." 

He not only found a rood-screen and a Christian after his own 
heart, but also services such as he loved. There was a surpliced choir 
of men and boys, cantors in copes, and plainchant. For no " cock 
and hen s> choirs were tolerated by the squire of Grace-Dieu. Pugin 
made several alterations and improvements in the chapel which 
can still be seen. He rebuilt the chancel arch ; gilded and coloured 
the figure on the rood, (said to have belonged to Syon Abbey before 
the Reformation), and put in the graceful stone baldachino above 
the altar in the Blessed Sacrament chapel. He always regarded 
this as one of his most successful works. 

Within a few miles of Grace-Dieu is the famous Cistercian monastery 
of Mount St. Bernard. It was founded by a small group of Irish 
monks from Mount Melleray, just over a century ago, and was the 
first community of this order to be re-established in England since 
the Reformation. Encouraged by March-Phillips, the ever-generous 
Lord Shrewsbury defrayed almost the total cost of the buildings. The 
plans were entrusted to Pugin, who must have revelled in such a 



AUGUSTUS WELBY PUGIN 323 

congenial work. The first part of the monastery was opened in 1844. 
As they are to-day the buildings give only a poor idea of what Pugin 
intended them to be. For many additions and alterations were made 
after his death, including an awkward-looking octagonal-shaped 
chapter-house. Pugin's design, as may be realised from his drawings, 
conveyed the whole spirit of Cistercian austerity and simplicity. After 
being incomplete for nearly a hundred years except for the nave, 
the church has at last been finished, more or less according to the 
master's designs. But it would be interesting to hear what he would 
have to say about putting the High Altar beneath the central tower, 
with the people's nave at the east end ; a startling departure from both 
" : *ional orientation and English Cistercian planning. 

rugin also prepared two designs for Downside Abbey, which were 
never carried out, although a start was actually made. The scheme 
was on a most ambitious scale, and would have been even more 
impressive than Mount St. Bernard's. Interesting examples of other 
monastic buildings he executed can be found in the Convents of the 
Sisters of Mercy at Bermondsey, Liverpool, and Birmingham. 

It has already been stated that Pugin got into touch with Lord 
Shrewsbury, who afterwards became his most generous patron and 
employer. John, sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury, (the " millionaire- 
saint " as he was often called), who spent over 500,000 on building 
Catholic churches in England, summoned Pugin to Alton Towers in 
Staffordshire about 1836 and engaged him as his architect ; wishing 
to make " the gorgeous halls of his glorious Palace still more gorgeous, 
and the Palace itself still more glorious " (Trappes-Lomax, op. cit. } p.Q8). 
Pugin was kept busy for several years altering and adding to the 
" princely towers and enchanted gardens " at Alton, as Cardinal 
Wiseman once described this fantastic place. But how are the mighty 
fallen ! To-day the Arabian Nights dream of Gothic has become a sort 
of popular " Road House." Its halls and gardens in summer time are 
thronged with crowds of trippers from the neighbouring Potteries, and 
the lovely chapel is closed and derelict. 

More fortunate has been the fate of the restored Castle which 
crowns the opposite side of the narrow gorge on the summit of a 
hundred-foot cliff. This re-creation of the Middle Ages as Pugin 
visualized them is now used as a school for little boys, in charge of 
the Sisters of Mercy. The same Order occupy the Gothic buildings 
of St. John's Hospital, erected by Lord Shrewsbury in 1842 as a home 
for aged priests, with " twelve poor brethren, a school master, and 
an unlimited number of poor scholars." 

Even in its incomplete state the group of buildings is full of charm. 
The dim little church, with its rood screen, and painted glass windows, 
is a real gem and one of the most satisfactory of all his creations. 



324 GREAT CATHOLICS 

The group of buildings on the rock at Alton shows us, writes Mr. 
Trappes-Lomax, " how fine and simple the Gothic Revival might 
have become, and how the support of Lord Shrewsbury must some- 
times have made it appear to Pugin, in spite of the hostility of the 
" Romanisers," that it was given to him to restore in England, both 
the spirit and the practice of medieval men " (op. '*., p. 108). 

It is only a few miles from Alton to Cheadle, a small market-town 
dominated by the lofty spire of Pugin's Catholic church. Heret he 
architect was faced with quite unusual difficulties in having too 
much money to spend on a comparatively small building. Lord 
Shrewsbury suddenly decided to increase the original 5,000 when the 
church was nearly completed. The result is that St. Giles 5 is a small 
parish church containing enough decoration for a large cathedral. 
The dim, dark interior can hardly be taken in at a first glance. Every 
window :s filled with stained glass, and every inch of the walls, columns, 
arches, and ceilings, are covered with painted decorations ; sadly 
faded and tarnished after nearly a century. There can be no other 
church in England compared with Gheadle for such a reckless lavishness 
of decoration. 

Even to-day one almost gasps at such a display of " le luxe pour 
Dieu " (as Huysmans would have described it, and how he would have 
revelled in this church ! ). But it is difficult to imagine what must have 
been the effect on the large congregation who took part in the con- 
secration ceremonies on that September morning in 1846. What did 
the Vicars Apostolic of England make of this church, for they were 
all present at the consecration. Those older folk, who could recall 
the Penal Days, maybe even the Gordon Riots, must have rubbed their 
eyes in amazement when confronted by this amazing building, so 
utterly unlike the typical Catholic church to which they were 
accustomed ; seldom more than a large room, more akin to a Methodist 
chapel. What did they make of the gilded lions on the blood-red doors ; 
the great screen and rood loft ; the shining brass grilles round the 
Blessed Sacrament chapel ; the stained glass in the windows which 
effectually excluded most of the day-light, and above all, the blaze of 
gold and colour, no matter where the eye wandered ? To them it 
must have seemed that the " Second Spring " was already over, 
and that it was the time of the Harvest. 



Work was now pouring in all over England, even abroad, for Pugin 
was being employed on several big jobs in Ireland, as well as on the 
chapel of St. Edmund's College at Douai in France. From 1840 
to 1848 he was directing the building of St. George's, Southwark. 



AUGUSTUS WELBY PUGIN 325 

His original design showed a magnificent cruciform church with a 
central tower, obviously inspired by Lincoln Cathedral. But it was 
rejected by the committee on the grounds of expense ; also because 
it would take too long to build. Pugin was furious, and only after 
endless negotiations, agreed to a compromise. At last he promised 
to provide a church to hold 3,000 people at the maximum cost the 
committee could run to. But he took good care to make it clear 
that he could not build a cathedral with the limited funds at his 
disposal. 

The result is nothing more than a spacious parish church. It 
would have been a striking building if the lofty tower and spire had 
ever been completed. But the exterior still remains in the same state 
as when the church was opened in 1848, and the effect is mean and 
sprawling. The interior is spoilt by the lowness of the roof, so designed 
from motives of economy. The side chapels and the three chantries 
contain some lovely Gothic detail, but the whole effect and proportions 
of the interior were completely ruined by the removal of the rood 
screen in 1885. Until this is replaced it is Impossible to obtain any 
idea of what the architect intended this church to look like, for it 
was the chief feature of the interior. Once again poor Pugin had to 
endure an orchestra at the opening Mass, and even more than 
this the advertised attraction of the famous singers, Mario and 
Tamburini, from the Italian Opera ; to hear whose voices thousands 
were willing to pay for admission. 

Pugin built four other cathedrals besides Birmingham and Southwark 
St. Mary's, Newcastle-on-Tyne (1844) ; St. Barnabas', Nottingham 
(1844) : Enniscorthy (1843-48) ; and Killarney (1842-55). New- 
castle-on-Tyne recalls Southwark in some respects, and has been much 
altered in later years. But fortunately the rood screen still remains 
in position. Nottingham is a dignified cruciform structure in the 
Early English style, definitely planned as a cathedral, and not merely 
a large parish church. Both the Irish cathedrals are fine buildings, 
but Pugin bitterly complained of what he had to endure in connection 
with their erection. Of Enniscorthy he wrote, " It has been com- 
pletely ruined. It could hardly have been worse if it had fallen into 
the hands of the Hottentots. I see no progress of ecclesiastical ideas 
in Ireland. I think it is possible that they get worse. It is quite 
useless to attempt to build true churches for the clergy have not the 
least idea of using them properly." 

" Architect and Something More " was the title of a Illuminating 
study of Augustus Welby Pugin contributed by Mr. Trappes-Lomax 
to the American magazine Liturgical Arts in October, 1933. The author 
reminds his readers that only a few months before his death Pugin 
himself had written : " I believe as regards architecture, few men 



326 GREAT CATHOLICS 

have been so unfortunate as myself. I have passed my life, in thinking 
fine things, studying fine things, designing fine things, and realising 
very poor ones." 

Although one cannot go so far as to agree that all Pugin's buildings 
are " very poor " stuff, yet it is true that owing to circumstances over 
which he had no control, the actual realization of his designs, which 
look so beautiful on paper, often falls short of the original conception. 
But Pugin was not chosen for insertion in this gallery of great Catholics 
because he left behind him any really outstanding buildings, secular 
and religious, but because he was something more than an architect because 
of his life-long fidelity to those ideals and principles, for which it can be 
truly said he laid down his life. 

Had he lived longer he might have realized that he had been 
largely mistaken in his estimate of himself and of his mission to his 
contemporaries. As Mr, Trappes-Lomax has aptly expressed it. 
" He was like a man walking steadily forward while gazing fixedly 
back over his shoulder. He was in the uncomfortable position of 
being the first of the moderns, while looking on himself as the leader 
in a revival. As indeed he was. But he was the first of the moderns 
too," He suffered throughout his life from two very definite delusions. 
He believed that art and religion are identical, and that Gothic is the 
only kind of Christian art. 

He was perfectly sound on the principles of architecture, but failed 
to see that if these principles are carried out, they do not necessarily 
produce Gothic architecture. He was only twenty-nine when he laid 
down the following axioms : " The two great rules for design are 
these ; (i) that there should be no features about a building which 
are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety ; (2) 
that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential con- 
struction of the building." And further on he emphasises these points : 
" In pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning 
and serve a purpose, and even the construction itself should vary with 
the material employed, and the designs should be adapted to the 
material in which they are executed." 

This all sounds so " modern " that it is almost impossible to realize 
that it was written in 1836. One might compare Pugin to a John the 
Baptist in a mid-nineteenth-century wilderness, preparing the way 
for the " functionalists," whereas all the time he himself thought he was 
merely helping to rebuild the walls of a medieval Jerusalem. Pugin's 
writings and drawings help one to understand his character far better 
than the buildings themselves, for few of them have not suffered badly 
from the unconscious vandalism of those who ought to have had more 
respect for the work of a great master. So it requires a good deal of 
imagination to picture what the architect himself intended them to be. 



AUGUSTUS WELBY PUGIN 327 

especially the interiors, only very few of which now retain the original 
altars and other liturgical fittings. 

But fortunately the vehemence of his prose writings has not been 
tampered with in the same manner as his churches have been hacked 
about. Not many writers of English have ever equalled Pugin in his 
mastery of vituperation. He wrote just what he felt, and paid not the 
slightest attention to the feelings of his readers nor cared how much he 
might offend them. He was utterly convinced that what he wrote was 
true ; perfectly sure that his opponents were wrong. There is some- 
thing about Pugin's writing that reminds one of William Cobbett. The 
latter has the heavy bluntness of the country farmer ; the former the 
breezy vigour of the seaman. Pugin's French ancestry may have helped 
to give an extra keen edge to the razor-like logic of his prose. The 
most important of his published works are : (i) Contrasts (1836) ; (2) 
The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) ; (3) An 
Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843) > (4) 2Tk 
Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (1843) ; (5) Glossary 
of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (1844) ; (6) A Treatise on Chancel 
and Rood Screens. 

They are all illustrated by drawings of exquisite delicacy and 
precision. Few men have ever surpassed Pugin as an architectural 
draughtsman. He had a style all his own which it is difficult, if not 
impossible to imitate. 



It was a life-long hunger for the sea that urged Pugin to start 
building himself a house on the chalk cliffs of Ramsgate in 1841. He 
was never so happy as when he was in the company of fishermen and 
sailors, and as has already been stated, from the time he was a lad chose 
to dress in semi-nautical clothes, which gave him the appearance of a 
deck-hand on a fishing smack, so that few persons who met him would 
have guessed that this burly figure was none other than that of the 
famous Catholic architect. Those early years spent on the sea during 
which he was wrecked off the coast of Scotland, not far from Leith, 
helped to form Pugin's character and influenced his whole after-life. 
They were certainly the happiest years of his life, and no doubt he often 
looked back, and regretted that he had not remained a sailor. 

So there was good reason for his deciding to make a permanent 
home for himself as near to the sea as possible. Having decided 
on the spot, the first thing was to build a church, for at that time the 
nearest Catholic place of worship was at Margate. A small chapel 
would have sufficed to accommodate both residents and summer 
visitors at Ramsgate. But Pugin remembered the French fishermen 



328 GREAT CATHOLICS 

who often put in to this port ; they too must hear Mass. What is 
more, it would be a help to sailors if there was a church with a spire 
visible many miles out to sea. So he decided to build a church which, 
for once in his life-time, would be the complete expression of his deepest 
religious and artistic convictions ; not merely a half-hearted com- 
promise, like most of his previous works, where he was hampered either 
by lack of funds or by tiresome and difficult clients. 

The foundation stone of St. Augustine's was laid in 1845, and 
not until six years later was it ready to be opened. It is unique 
among Pugin's churches, and unlike any others he built. It is best 
described as four-square and solid ; tough and dark, like the man him- 
self ; its windows flashing like those eyes which used to flash when he 
was roused. The flint exterior is as homely and simple as the rough 
seaman's coat and trousers which Pugin wore. The interior^ despite 
the graceful and delicate workmanship of the stone walls and columns, 
hardly suggests that over 15,000 had already been spent on it before 
the opening. But everything reveals sincerity of purpose and good 
craftsmanship. The tower and spire have never been completed. 



Pugin did not long survive the opening .of this church. He died on 
September I4th, 1851, worn out by mental strain and worry, for 
as the doctors had told him, he had worked one hundred years in forty. 

Was there ever an architect, either before or since, who managed to 
carry on at the same time, and in face of such intense opposition, such a 
prodigious amount of work as Pugin ? Certainly few men have erected 
the number of churches that he did in the comparatively brief space 
of little more than sixteen years before his final mental breakdown 
at the early age of forty. There was always something flame-like 
about his best work, both in his writings and in his buildings. And 
the flame burnt itself out all too quickly. The over-stimulated brain 
and overworked body collapsed under the strain. 

His mortal remains were laid to rest in the south transept of St. 
Augustine's, Ramsgate, within sight and sound of the sea, which next 
to Christian architecture, was the only thing in life which he felt to be 
worth living for. 



THE REV. SIR JOHN R. O'CONNELL, M.A., LL.D., M.R.I.A. 



ANTOINE FREDERIC OZANAM 



A.D. 1813-18^3 

OZANAM WAS born on April 23rd, 181 3 at Milan, then under 
the sway of France. He was the third son and fifth child of 
Antoine Ozanam and Marie Nantas, daughter of a prosperous silk 
merchant of Lyons, of which city both were natives. Antoine Ozanam 
had fought gallantly in the Napoleonic campaigns indeed it is 
recorded that he took his share in no less than sixteen battles before 
severe wounds compelled him to retire from active service at the early 
age of twenty-five. 

Antoine on his retirement settled down with his young family 
probably as a silk merchant in Paris, but unfortunately he was too 
generous and too confiding ; he signed some bills for an impecunious 
but pertinacious relative who, as not unusually happens, defaulted, 
with the result that Antoine Ozanam, being required to make good 
the default, was reduced to beggary and had to give up his business. 
Feeling that he could not remain in Paris, Antoine Ozanam emigrated 
to Milan, where he made a livelihood as a tutor while he took out a 
course of medical studies with a view to qualifying to become a doctor. 
Despite all sorts of obstacles he passed his medical examinations 
brilliantly and soon attained a position of some distinction as a capable 
and much respected doctor. And here in Milan Frederic, the future 
Founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, was born. 

The French domination of Italy was not destined to be of long 
duration. With the disaster of Waterloo in 1815 the Napoleonic 
Empire collapsed and shortly afterwards the triumphant Austrian 
armies entered Milan and the French occupation came to an end. Dr. 
Antoine Ozanam was too patriotic a Frenchman to continue to live 
under an alien flag and shortly after he returned with his wife and young 
family to his native Lyons where he settled down as a medical doctor. 

The Ozanams were far from affluent but Antoine and his saintly 
wife had qualities which raised them above the need of, or the desire 
for, great riches. They were deeply and sincerely religious, most 
charitable to all their poorer neighbours, helpful in all their troubles 
and trials, and united in the strongest bonds of love to each other and 

330 



ANTOINE FR&D&RIC OZANAM 331 

to their children. At a much later period of his life Frederic Ozanam 
recorded his gratitude that he had been brought up in his childhood 
and youth in a home of that middle class which was neither harassed 
by grinding poverty nor demoralized by too lavish wealth. Before 
everything else Antoine Ozanam and his wife, during all their days, 
manifested a noble sense of duty, an unwearied practice of charity 
to the poor ; and it was in this atmosphere and under this inspiration 
that the young Frederic passed his boyhood and his youth. 

Although there was in the first half of the eighteenth century a 
widespread feeling of unbelief and of antagonism to Christianity 
throughout France, it was fortunate that at Lyons there was an 
excellent school, the Royal College of Lyons, staffed by learned and 
sympathetic teachers of whom the Superior ; the Abb6 Rousseau ; had a 
widespread reputation. Another professor, the Abb6 Noirot, the 
teacher of philosophy, was declared by the famous Victor Cousin to 
be " the best professor in France," and he it was who taking a special 
and understanding interest in his young pupil Frederic Ozanam, 
dispelled those ideas of unbelief which were beginning to cloud the 
intellect and depress the spirit of the young student, and restored him 
to the stability of his belief. Dr. Antoine Ozanam was no mean 
classical scholar. He delighted especially in Homer, Virgil and 
Horace, and he took great pleasure in training his three sons in classical 
knowledge. When Frederic at the age of nine became a day-pupil 
at the Royal College of Lyons he was, for his years, exceptionally well- 
prepared to benefit by the excellent teaching at that school. To this 
he added an insatiable thirst for knowledge and an unwearied diligence. 

These qualities were manifested in a very remarkable degree some 
few years afterwards when Frederic Ozanam had at his father's 
urgent desire become a student of law in Lyons. In April, 1831, 
two followers of Saint-Simon, Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, 
arrived in Lyons to preach Saint-Simonism and " to announce the fall 
of the Christian God." They declared that the Christian God was 
out of date, that whatever benefit Christianity had been in earlier and 
simpler days it was now no longer of any use, and that it was 
incapable of coping with the terrible problems presented by the 
growth of modern industrialism. 

Frederic Ozanam, then a youth of eighteen, alone entered the lists 
against these champions of Saint-Simon socialism, and first in two 
articles contributed to the Liberal journal the Precursor in May, 1831, 
and subsequently in a pamphlet which appeared in the following August, 
entitled " Reflexions sur la doctrine de Saint-Simon" he showed with an 
amazing extent of knowledge and of detailed information that the true 
solution of the problems presented by Saint-Simon, was not to be found 
in any form of socialism or communism, but in the widespread and 



332 GREAT CATHOLICS 

organized practice of charity based on the brotherhood of Jesus Christ, 
taught and observed in the Catholic Church. In this early pamphlet 
Ozanam already manifested those qualities of sympathy and courtesy 
which all through his life were to characterize his work, qualities which 
while maintaining to the full his opinions yet respected the views, how- 
ever erroneous, of those with whom he was in conflict ; and he struck 
the keynote of his future life work when appealing to the young men 
of his day he declared of the mission of the church " Cette ceuvre est a 
votis jeunes gens " " You have experienced the emptiness of physical 
satisfaction and hungered after truth and justice, seeking them in the 
schools of philosophy or running for them to the modern apostles 
who have nothing to say which can fill the void in your hearts. Behold, 
now, the religion of your fathers offers herself to you freely. Do not 
turn away, for she too like yourselves is generous and young. She 
does not grow old with the world but always new, puts herself in the 
forefront of human progress to conduct it to perfection. Already in 
the distance the dawn of beautiful days is breaking and religion, 
resting no more on a feeble sceptre and crumbling thrones but supported 
by the strong arm of science and art, goes forward like a queen to the 
centuries of the future." 

In the autumn of 1831 Frederic Ozanam went to Paris to pursue 
his legal studies. Paris at that time was the most godless of cities, 
" a rubbish heap ", as he describes it in one of his letters, " no life, no 
faith, no love ;" religion was neglected, the churches were empty, 
the clergy timid and neglectful ; " the age of reason/' a cynical critical 
attitude to Christianity, everywhere rampant ; and not least in the halls 
and lecture-rooms of the Sorbonne which Ozanam had to attend. 
Ozanam, always sensitive and lonely, felt intensely lonely in this friend- 
less, godless material city far from the -happy home in which he had 
grown up and the affectionate parents and brothers who had all been so 
closely bound together in what there can be no doubt was an ideal 
Christian family. Yet one happy circumstance tended to relieve his sad- 
ness. He had a friend in Lyons named Perisse who had a cousin living 
in Paris. Frederic, in his yearning to see a friendly face, called on 
Perisse's cousin and found in him the great scientist Andre Marie 
Amp&re. Ampere with his quick gift of sympathy soon realized 
how lonely was this young man, away from his home for the first time, a 
stranger in an unknown city, and he invited Ozanam to make his home 
with him. Great as was Ampere's intellect and subtle as was his 
mind ; yet they were united to something finer still, a heart which 
declared " I should possess everything in the world to make me happy 
did I possess nothing at all but the ' happiness of others.' " Who 
can say how deep was the influence on Frederic Ozanam of this great 
hearted scientist, who served God with all his heart, who worked so 



ANTOINE FRDRIC OZANAM 

unweariedly in the pursuit of knowledge, and who in all his ways ever 
manifested the noblest ideal of a Christian life. 

The first battleground of his faith had been in Lyons, when after 
much travail of spirit his doubts had been dissolved and his faith had 
been confirmed by " the best professor in France," the Abbe Noirot. 
The second battle was staged in the lecture-halls at the Sorbonne. 
One of the professors, Letronne, announced to his pupils that " the 
Papacy was only a transitory institution born under Charlemagne, 
dying to-day," and from this text proceeded to demolish the Papacy 
and all that the Papacy stands for. Another professor, Jouffroy who 
lectured on philosophy assured them that Christianity was quite 
passe, quite dimode^ and that mental science could only be acquired 
from the teaching of the Scotch philosophers. This perversion of truth 
in history and philosophy had gone on unchallenged until Frederic 
Ozanam appeared in the lecture-halls. He soon found that there 
were other Catholic students there as well as himself who resented the 
anti-Christian tone of the lectures and although they were then a 
minority they presented to the professors a considered protest against 
some of the teaching, with the result that the professors modified their 
anti-Christian attitude and Jouffroy, one of the ablest of the free- 
thinkers, a professor in the Sorbonne, apologized to the students and 
assured them that never again would he offend any form of religious 
belief. " Gentlemen," he said, " for five years I have received nothing 
but objections dictated by materialism. To-day, there is a great 
change : the opposition is all Catholic." 

These protests of the Catholic students had a result more far-reaching 
than the influence on the professional lectures. It brought the students 
together and revealed to them their sympathy and their strength. 
Although at first comparatively few in number they were united by a 
great ideal and an inspiring mission. They began to meet for the 
discussion of all sorts of problems and as they made these meetings 
open to all students irrespective of class or creed or political bias it is 
needless to say that there were often violent and heated debates. 
Gradually, but more and more, the discussions, however they began, 
veered round to religion and it was usually on some aspect of religion 
that the discussion finally settled and ended. In all these debates 
Ozanam was the recognized leader and he came to be accepted by 
his friends, the young Catholic students of the University, as their 
leader and their spokesman. No choice could have been more happy 
or more beneficial to the cause of Catholic Truth. Ozanam brought 
to the task many of the ideal qualities of a Catholic leader of thought 
or of action. He was essentially a seeker after truth ; he was eminently 
fair-minded ; he was gifted with an insight and a sympathy which 
enabled him to see his opponent's point of view, and the best side of 



334 GREAT CATHOLICS 

that point of view, even when he was about to demolish it. He had a 
well-furnished mind to which he was constantly and voraciously 
adding new stores of knowledge of all kinds. Above all, he had that 
Faith which moves mountains and a charity, all-embracing and never- 
failing, coupled with a charming modesty which disarmed all criticism 
and everywhere won hearts. 

About this time Ozanam, casting about him for a centre where the 
Catholic students could make their headquarters, was fortunate enough 
to make the acquaintance of M. Baily, a devout Catholic layman 
who had just founded a new religious journal La Tribune Catholique, 
non-political and inspired with generous sympathy for the workers 
and the poor. M. Baily introduced Ozanam to the then languishing 
remnant of the once flourishing Societe des bonnes etudes and he irs 
his turn brought in a number of his student friends, including hi 
companions Lallier Lamarche, Le Taillandier and Devaux, who were 
later on destined to play such a beneficent part in the foundation and 
development of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. M. Baily, though 
now middle-aged was blessed with a sympathy for young men and he 
gladly gave the use of the rooms of his paper for the meetings of 
Ozanam and his friends ; and he himself presided at their discussions. 

It was at one of these discussions, when those assembled were 
warmly discussing the Catholic Church and its position in France at 
the time, that a young waiter of Voltairean propensities hurled a 
bombshell into the meeting by insistently demanding " Show us your 
works. " " By their works shall ye know them," He declared that it 
was of no use to speak of the tradition of the Church, of the great 
history of the Church in the past, of the claims of the Church in France 
at that time. He asked what the Church was doing for the poor, the 
desolate, the suffering ? How was she trying to make life happier and 
better here and now ? How, in a word, was she fulfilling her first and 
most insistent duty to God's poor ? 

Ozanam answered as best he could this frontal attack, but he could 
not fail to be conscious that in the France of the 'thirties and especially 
in the Paris of that day, there was much to justify all that the anti- 
Catholic had alleged against the Church if it did not lack Faith it 
was woefully wanting in good works ; it was allied to the Monarchy 
instead of serving the poor, it had fallen into a cold and apathetic 
formalism which took no account of the fact that the poor were drifting 
further and further away from a Church that had apparently ceased 
to have any regard for their sufferings or their welfare. 

As Frederic Ozanam left the meeting sadly and thoughtfully with 
Lamarche and Devaux, he uttered the phrase which became the 
war-cry of the new movement : " Allons aux pauvres." He became 
at once acutely conscious that the battle for religion, the struggle for 



ANTOINE FR&D&RIC OZANAM 

the soul of France, was ,not to be fought in the lecture-halls of the 
University, but in the slums of the cities and in the poverty-stricken 
tenements of the poor. The cry " Allons aux pauvres " continued 
to make itself heard in Ozanam's heart. Two ideas were deeply 
impressed on his mind; one, the conviction that the battle for the 
Faith must be fought by the young men of France, and especially by 
the young men of the student and professional or business classes ; that 
this was a struggle in which the clergy could take little part and which 
must be carried on by the laity. Secondly, that in this crisis it was not 
sufficient to have Faith, to have loyalty to the Church, to have pride 
in her glorious past but that if Christianity was to be saved it must 
prove its mission by good works. In a word, that if the social order 
was to be saved from ruin it could only be by the Church devoting 
itself to good works of all kinds, inspired and directed in the spirit of 
Christian charity. Ozanam continued to discuss the need of some 
such active lay charitable work with his friends, who on their part 
were only too ready to undertake any work of the kind under his 
leadership and he obtained the cordial support of M. Baily who placed 
his rooms at their service, and promised to preside at their first meeting. 

An inspiring chapter in the history of Christian charity was opened 
on that memorable day in May, 1833, when in the offices of M. Baily's 
journal, La Tribune Catholique^ there was held the first meeting of the 
Society of St. Vincent de PauL M. Baily was in the Chair and 
including him there were seven persons present, the others being 
Ozanam, Lather, Lamarche, Deveaux, Le Taillandier and a recent 
convert from Saint-Sirnonism named Clare. The essential ideas which 
were in the minds of all those present have never varied and continue 
to-day to guide the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, with its hundreds 
of thousands of members throughout the world, as it did those six 
young men who assembled under the guidance of M. Baily in his 
rooms in May, 1833. The Society was to exist for the personal 
sanctification of its members, attained by prayer and pious reading, by 
mutual edification, by fraternal charity and by charity manifested 
to the poor and suffering, who were to be visited in their own homes, , 
where they were to be helped with food, raiment, fuel, even money, 
and any other help, spiritual or material, which might be necessary. 

When visiting the homes of the poor, their spiritual and moral 
reformation was to be the first concern of the brothers of St. Vincent 
de Paul and it was towards the accomplishment of this essential aim and 
object that all their efforts were to be directed but, subject to this, the 
material benefit of the poor and the suffering was to be ever borne in 
mind. From this two-fold aim, the spiritual and the material, a 
number of other duties arose. Thus, if in their visits to the poor, the 
brothers found that those whom they visited had not been married 



336 GREAT CATHOLICS 

they were to endeavour to have the union regularised by inducing 
the parties to go through the ceremony of matrimony ; if they were 
neglectful of the Sacraments they were to be persuaded to enter on the 
habit of Confession and Holy Communion. If their children had not 
been baptized or confirmed they were to be persuaded to have these 
Sacraments administered. If the children were not going to Mass or 
to school every effort was to be made to get the children to go to Mass 
and to attend school regularly, and some of the brothers usually 
volunteered to accompany the children to Sunday Mass or to super- 
vise their attendance at that ceremony. 

From the intimate sympathetic charitable association with the 
poor incidentally arose all sorts of other subsidiary charitable works. 
The deaths of the parents rendered necessary one of the earliest of 
these subsidiary works in the erection of orphanages for boys and girls, 
the latter usually undertaken by the French sisters of St. Vincent de 
Paul, sometimes under the general supervision of the numbers of the 
St. Vincent de Paul Society. The proverbial improvidence of the poor 
early indicated the need for the institution of penny-banks or savings- 
banks, managed by the members of the Society, where the scanty and 
hard-earned savings of the poor might be safeguarded. The sadly- 
neglected spiritual condition of Catholic sailors evoked the sympathy 
of the members of the Society, with the result that at various ports 
the Society maintains Sailors' Homes where the spiritual and material 
needs of seamen are provided for while their ships are in port. In 
like manner boys' clubs fitted with gymnasia, facilities for games, 
reading, music, etc., have been founded and are being maintained 
in various centres of population. Wherever there is a special need, a 
special form of charitable work has been begun and maintained 
there to meet it and no form of charitable work has been excluded 
from the list of the Society's activities. 

It is unnecessary to say that when those seven men met for that 
first meeting they had little thought of the growth and development 
of the Society or of the multifarious activities in which it would 
engage in some branch or conference in response to some exceptional 
need. But it may quite truly be claimed for its original members that 
they started with the principle which has ever guided the work of the 
Society from that day to our own : that no work of Charity should ever 
be regarded as outside the scope of the work of the Society of St. 
Vincent de Paul. 

After the first meeting Ozanam went home and having chopped 
up firewood, brought it to an old couple whom he was in the habit 
of visiting. The other members knew no poor people whose needs 
they could supply but this was speedily remedied by Soeur Rosalie, 
a valiant and devoted nun, a Sister of St. Vincent de Paul, who knew 



ANTOINE FRlfiDfiRIC OZANAM 337 

all the poor people in the district. Soeur Rosalie speedily put the 
members in touch with the deserving poor and soon they were as busy 
as they could be. Assuredly there was no dearth of poverty in the 
slums of Paris in 1833 any more than there is a hundred years later. 

And then within a very short time the most amazing thing happened. 
Quickly and almost imperceptibly the Conference grew and grew. 
Many and desirable men offered themselves for membership of that 
Society which demanded frequently tiresome and fatiguing work and 
offered nothing in exchange except the reward of charity. The 
original seven were reluctant to admit any more until Ozanam 
persuaded them to do so. In a short time the original seven had grown 
to a hundred so that the Society had to be split into three divisions 
allotted to separate parishes. Still the numbers grew and again had 
to be subdivided ; until the system was adopted of attaching a Con- 
ference to each Parish or to each Church or Chapel of a Parish. 

Hardly less rapidly did the Society spread to other countries. In 
Italy there were Conferences established in Florence, Milan and 
Turin at an early date and also in Belgium and Holland. Just ten 
years after the foundation of the Society, a branch was erected in 
London, the first meeting being held in a house in Leicester Square 
belonging to a Mr. Pagliano, whose interest in the work which was 
being done in Paris by Ozanam and his fellow-workers had been 
aroused by a series of articles which had appeared a few weeks earlier in 
the Tablet. At the preliminary meeting Mr. Frederick Lucas, the 
editor of the Tablet, was present and took a leading part. ^ After a 
second meeting a Central Council was constituted of which Mr. 
Pagliano became President, and he was succeeded in 1852 by Mr. 
George Blunt who occupied this position for many years. Shortly 
after the election of the Central Council in 1844, Conferences were 
established in the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick 
Street, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, and 
at Lincoln's Inn Fields. They still continue their beneficent and useful 
work. 

It was typical of the retiring and humble character of Frederic 
Ozanam that although repeatedly pressed to become president of the 
Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he consistently refused this position 
although it is beyond question that his inspiration brought the Society 
into being and his ideals were impressed on all the work of the 
Society. It is well known that one of the cardinal principles of the 
Society is that its relief shall be given and all its help shall be provided 
entirely irrespective of religious distinction the only claim recognized 
by the Society being the need of the poor. This principle Frederic 
Ozanam laid down at the earliest moment and insisted on as a funda- 
mental rule of the Society which has ever consistently and invariably 



338 GREAT CATHOLICS 

been observed. The essential idea of the Society was the law of 
charity, charity which unites the brothers to each other, and to the 
poor whom they serve for the love of God and in the spirit of the 
common brotherhood with Jesus Christ in the Sonship of Almighty 
God. 

During these years Fr6dric Ozanam was diligently pursuing his 
studies in the University of Paris. His capacity for work was immense 
and his curiosity insatiable, but he was torn between two rival and 
as he thought hostile interests, law and literature. His father was 
anxious that he should become a lawyer and qualify for admission 
to the Bar as soon as possible, possibly influenced by the knowledge 
that he could not provide for him or even for Madame Ozanam should 
he predecease her, while Frederic was attracted to literature, to 
history, to poetry, especially in so far as these subjects related to and 
threw light on the origins and development of the Catholic Faith. 
Notwithstanding the time which he devoted to the active practice of 
charity in the work of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Ozanam 
spent most of his time in the study of law to prepare himself for his 
professional future though he could not entirely overcome his strong 
attraction to literature and especially to poetry. Speaking Italian 
with ease and fluency, he early became attracted to Dante whom he 
revered not only as one of the greatest poets but also as a great 
Christian philosopher. While it was then as it has been since the 
fashion to think of Dante as the disillusioned critic of a disappointed 
and dissatisfied age, Ozanam saw in the great Florentine a Christian 
poet inspired by the noblest aspirations of Catholic Faith and ideals. 
It was therefore with peculiar pleasure that in the summer of 1833, 
some months after the founding of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, 
that Ozanam made a journey with his father and mother and elder 
brother Alphonse to Italy where they visited Milan, his birth-place, 
and Bologna and Florence, which had a profound influence on his 
studies and his life-work. In later years Alphonse, recalling their 
sojourn in Florence, wrote " From this first visit to Italy he drew the 
inspiration for his studies on the philosophy and literature of the age of 
Dante. From this time dates that passionate love which grew on him for 
that great philosopher and wonderful poet whose elevating doctrines he 
continued to study for the rest of his life. One may say that after his 
first visit to Florence the shadow of Dante followed him everywhere. 
The Divine Comedy became for him an inexhaustible source of treasures, 
so much so that, when one considers the whole of his literary work, 
it is easy to realize that the philosophy of the thirteenth century is at 
the back of all his writings. Thus the philosophical ideas of Dante 
which he chose as the subject for his degree in Literature, became the 
foundation stone of a magnificent edifice which he set himself the task 



ANTOINE FR&D&RIG OZANAM 

of building, not for his own glory, but for that of God and as a 
vindication of Catholicity. 35 

At the end of this journey in Italy Frederic Ozanam returned to 
Paris where he devoted himself to the preparation for his two inter- 
mediate examinations in law and in literature, both of which he passed 
brilliantly. In the meantime, during the summer vacation which 
he spent in Lyons, he wrote an essay on Two Chancellors of England : 
St. Thomas a Becket and Bacon in which he contrasted the conduct of 
these two great Englishmen, pointing out that a Becket was a noble 
product of Christian civilization, while Bacon failed because he was a 
victim of rationalism. It would have been of even greater interest 
if Ozanam had dealt with another Lord Chancellor of England, St. 
Thomas More, for it cannot be doubted but that the character, life and 
martyrdom of this great English Lord Chancellor would have appealed 
even more strongly to the spirit of Frederic Ozanam than either of 
those of whom he wrote. In the eighteen thirties however the character 
of this, the greatest Englishman that ever lived, had not yet come to 
be realized in its true significance. In April, 1836, Ozanam took his 
degree with honours in Law and thereupon became entitled to enter 
on the active practice of the law. Ever obedient as he was to the 
wishes of his father, he returned to Lyons to begin his professional 
career while still in his spare moments which were not few at that 
early period preparing the two theses required for the degree of 
Doctor of Literature, one in Latin and one in French. While thus 
engaged a sad blow befell the family in the death of Dr. Ozanam 
who had sustained a severe fall on a steep staircase leading up to a 
garret to which he had climbed on an errand of mercy. He died as 
he had lived, serving and succouring the poor. 

" The keen edge of our sorrow,' 3 wrote Frederic Qzanam, " is 
blunted when we remember my father's piety, deeped as it was during 
the closing years of his life by frequent use of the Sacraments. His 
virtues, his work, his sufferings, the dangers through which he passed 
during his life, must all have helped him to reach more easily the 
heavenly homeland where we too, if we are good, shall soon find him 
once more, in that eternal resting-place where there shall be no more 
death." The necessity of providing for the support of his mother 
owing to Dr. Ozanam's death in something akin to poverty caused 
by his benevolence to the suffering poor, decided Frederic Ozanam 
to settle down in Lyons, where as an addition to his practice as an 
advocate he obtained the professorship of Commercial Law in the 
University of Lyons. The Rector of the University of Lyons was not 
slow to realize that in the young professor of Commercial Law he had 
secured the services of a man of more than ordinary ability and 
character and in order to bind Ozanam more closely to the University 



34P 



GREAT CATHOLICS 



he offered him the additional Chair of Foreign Literature. The offer 
which was gladly accepted involved consequences little foreseen at 
the moment. The appointment, like all appointments in that 
bureaucracy-ridden country, had to be ratified by the Minister of 
Education, then the celebrated French philosopher Victor Cousin. 
Cousin had known Ozanam in his student-days in Paris and had been 
favourably impressed by him but he found a difficulty In making the 
appointment as there were other candidates in the field and other, 
unfavourable, influences were at work. Ozanam realizing the 
obstacles which were working against his appointment, went to Paris 
and called on Victor Cousin who received him cordially and told him 
that his appointment would be ratified but only on the condition that 
he would qualify for the post by competing for the Chair of Foreign 
Literature at the Sorbonne in Paris in an examination which was to 
be held in the ensuing September. 

This Chair of Foreign Literature was one of much importance and 
it attracted the best intellects in France amongst all those devoted to 
foreign literature, and as the course was long and difficult all the 
candidates had been preparing for at least a year. Ozanam realized 
that he had less than six months to prepare for the examination but as 
Cousin promised that whatever might be the result Ozanam should 
be appointed to the professorship at Lyons if he sat for the examination, 
he could not well refuse. With that capacity for intense application 
which was one of his qualities Ozanam set to work, studying eighteen 
hours a. day, during which he worked at four foreign tongues English, 
German, Spanish and Italian. Completely worn-out by intensive 
study, the candidate seemed to himself to fail in the long written tests 
of the first day but when it came to the oral examination he manifested 
such wide and general reading that the examiners were quite carried 
away and when he had finished his discourse on Dante the crown was 
won. The public who crowded the hall burst into loud applause 
and the Minister of Education, Victor Cousin, expressed only the 
general opinion when he declared : " M. Ozanam, it is impossible to 
be more eloquent than you have been. 35 This triumph had an 
unexpected but far-reaching effect on Ozanam's career, because instead 
of finding himself appointed to the professorship in Lyons, he had 
gained amidst universal applause the coveted position of Professor 
of Foreign Literature at the Sorbonne, the intellectual centre of Paris 
and of France. 

From this time, although at the commencement he was only 
assistant professor to Professor Fauriel, Ozanam's life and work was 
centred in Paris, in the lecture-halls of the Sorbonne, and in the 
offices of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, until his death some 
thirteen years later in September, 1853. 



ANTOINE FRfiDfiRIC OZANAM 341 

The appointment to this professorship, carrying with it as it did, the 
probability, if not certainty, of ultimately attaining to the full 
professorship of Foreign Literature, brought great joy into the life of 
Frederic Ozanam. It justified him in abandoning the practice of 
the law for which he had no taste ; it definitely allied him with those 
studies in literature, history and philosophy to which he had always 
been so closely drawn ; and it enabled him to devote himself more 
and more to the direction and organization of the great charitable 
work of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul which was then continuing 
to grow and spread with a truly wonderful activity. Yet there were 
times when Ozanam could not but feel conscious of a loneliness which 
yearned for sympathy and companionship. He was too serious- 
minded to find the ordinary amusements of Parisian life congenial 
and too studious to make friends readily with those less intellectual 
than himself. Happily for Ozanam, he found in Amelia Soulacroix 
an ideal wife, affectionate, intelligent, accomplished, attractive, 
unselfish. She was the daughter of the Rector of the University of 
Lyons. Her parents were somewhat shocked at the idea of then- 
daughter marrying a man so slenderly endowed with this world's 
goods as the young assistant professor at the Sorbonne and they pressed 
him to devote himself to the pursuit of the law in Lyons s which with 
the two professorships then at his disposal there would provide a 
sufficient income. 

Ozanam, however, was not prepared to sacrifice all the opportunities 
which his lectureship at the Sorbonne gave him of putting the Mission 
of the Catholic Church, her great achievements for the betterment of 
humanity, her immense services to the education and happiness of 
the race before an age which had been taught only that the Church 
was the enemy of progress and the determined foe of enlightened 
thought. Nor was he willing to weaken his connection with his 
beloved Society in which he had such hopes for the improvement, 
both spiritual and material, of the conditions of the poor. Whatever 
the ambitions of her parents may have been, Amelia Soulacroix, unlike 
most French young ladies of that secluded age, was willing to face the 
future with the man she loved and accordingly they were married 
in the Church of St. Nizier in Lyons on June 23rd, 1841, by 
Frederic's elder brother Alphonse, who had become a priest ; Charles, 
the younger brother, acting as server at the Nuptial Mass. 

The remaining years of Frederic Ozanam's life were spent in^the 
discharge of his duties as Professor of Foreign Literature in the 
Sorbonne and in guiding the ever-growing activities of his beloved 
Society of St. Vincent de Paul. But in both these absorbing duties 
there was a difference between the way in which Ozanam fulfilled 
them and the manner in which most men would have been satisfied 



342 GREAT CATHOLICS 

to perform them. Frederic Ozanam approached his duties as 
professor as the discharge of a sacred trust. He felt that a great serious 
mission had been committed to his charge to make known the Truth ; 
to explain the Mission of the Catholic Church, to manifest her civilizing 
influence, her elevating work, to mankind throughout the centuries. 
To do this adequately involved not only a statement of her spiritual 
labours and of her moral teaching but also an examination of all that 
the Church of God has contributed to the happiness and elevation 
of mankind in Poetry, Science, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture 
and Music. It was under this influence that he repeatedly lectured 
on Dante, and his influence on medieval thought, and that he devoted 
so much labour to the task at that time so unpopular and yet so 
necessary of demonstrating the learning and the sanctity of the 
Church in the Middle Ages. The influence of Ozanam's lectures 
on the thought of his time was much increased by his wide and 
accurate knowledge, which enabled him to marshal all kinds of facts 
in support of the opinions which he expressed. While other professors 
spoke in vague generalities unsupported by anything except their own 
theories Ozanam could call on his wide knowledge and ready memory 
for the facts of history necessary to support his teaching. But he 
brought other qualities not less valuable to enhance his position as a 
teacher of history. He brought an obvious sincerity, a manifest 
desire for the Truth however it might affect the question, a singularly 
lucid power of exposition, and a most moving gift of eloquence. 

Drawn as he was to Italy may it not have been that the birth of 
this Frenchman in Milan made him half an Italian he went there on 
his honeymoon in 1841, when he visited Naples, Salerno, Palestine, 
Capri, Pompeii and Rome. Again in 1846, Ozanam with his wife 
and young daughter, his only child, spent several months of the 
winter and the following spring in Florence and its neighbourhood. 
The result of these visits to Italy was Frederic Ozanam's delightful 
work The Franciscan Poets in Italy of the Thirteenth Century, a work which 
as an eminent Catholic writer has said, " remains to this day one of the 
indispensable authorities for the history of literature, of Catholicism, 
and of Italy." This work at once placed Ozanam in the front rank 
of Franciscan students. " No other book/ 5 writes a modern critic, 
" reproduces so sincerely and truly the spirit of the Franciscan move- 
ment with all the glow of its religious ecstasy and all the charm of its 
innocent simplicity ; no other book expounds so clearly the gradual 
evolution of that spirit, or testifies so convincingly to its influence on 
all aspects of human life and art." To Ozanam we are indebted for 
the discovery of that most wonderful of all the Franciscan poets, 
Jacopone da Todi that wild saintly Jongleur, echo of the Poor Little 
Man of Assisi himself who gave to the world that most tender and 



ANTOINE FRfiDfeRIC OZANAM 

melodious lyric Stabat Mater Dolorosa and that other touching poem 
so different in its sublime note of maternal joyousness Stabat Mater 
Speciosa, in which we see the Virgin Mother exulting in the birth of 
her Divine Babe. Ozanam believed that he had been the fortunate 
one to recover this exquisite lyric and he has in this delightful book 
done much to remind us of the debt of gratitude which we all owe to 
that mystic Jacopone da Todi, the greatest of the Franciscan poets, 
a servant of God the greatness of whose sufferings was only equalled 
by the sublimity of his inspiration. All lovers of St. Francis and his 
age must ever be grateful to Frederic Ozanam for a work at once so 
original, so scholarly and so human, which has thrown a new light on 
the poetic aspect of the Franciscan movement* 

In the twelve years which passed between his marriage and his 
early death, Ozanam continued his lectures at the Sorbonne. In 
1843-1844 he lectured on the history of Italy during the so-called 
Dark Ages from the fall of the Roman Empire until the time of 
Charlemagne. In the following year he lectured on English literature 
and in 1844 he succeeded Professor Fauriel as Professor, he having 
been up to that time assistant professor. Many of his students have 
left grateful testimonies of his capacity and popularity as a professor, 
not the least being Ernest Renan, who though unhappily refusing that 
Faith which so strengthened and consoled Ozanam, records " I never 
leave one of fris lectures without feeling strengthened, more determined 
to do something great ; more full of courage and hope as regards the 
future. Ozanam's course of lectures are a continual defence of 
everything which is most worthy of our admiration. Ozanam, how 
fond of him we were ! What a fine soul ! " 

We have already seen that the condition of affairs in France could 
not fail to call for deep anxiety on the part of anyone to whom the 
welfare of the Church or the stability of the constitution was a matter 
of concern. It is true that during most of Ozanam's working life, 
from 1831 when he went as a student to Paris until the revolution of 
1848, there had been a comparative lull in the unrest which preceded 
and followed this short period of quiescence. No one, however, who 
took the wellbeing of France to heart could fail to be profoundly 
concerned for a condition of affairs which was so threatening and so 
unstable. It is needless to say that Ozanam was full of anxiety and his 
apprehensions caused him to redouble his efforts to allay or anticipate 
the storm which he felt was rapidly approaching. In all his lectures, 
so carefully thought out and laboriously prepared, in his frequent 
addresses to conferences and meetings, in his innumerable contribu- 
tions to the Catholic press, and in his work for the Society of St. Vincent 
de Paul, he laboured to prevent the social debacle which he feared was 
imminent. In these unceasing efforts he overtaxed his strength and 



344 GREAT CATHOLICS 

made himself vulnerable to the attacks of tuberculosis which later 
on seized hold of him. He went through the trying experiences of 
the Revolution of 1848 without apparent injury, even when Monsignor 
Affre, the Archbishop of Paris, yielding to Ozanam's request to 
negotiate between the insurgents and the soldiery, was done to death. 

But the pressure at which Ozanam lived could not continue and 
in the. autumn of 1852 he had a severe breakdown. Learning that 
the students were complaining of his neglect of his duties, Ozanam 
insisted in getting up from a sick bed in spite of the protests of his 
devoted wife and delivered at the Sorbonne a most brilliant and 
touching lecture. It was the last occasion on which he ever spoke. 
Shortly afterwards with his wife and child he sought the milder 
climate of Italy and settled down at Pisa where he passed the winter 
and the spring of 1843. In the summer he took a villa at Antiguano 
outside Leghorn. Here he gradually got worse. Early in September 
he made up his mind that he would like to end his days on the soil 
of France and he was brought by boat from Leghorn to Marseilles 
and here, surrounded by his family and strengthened with the Sacra- 
ments of that Church which he loved so deeply and served so faithfully, 
he peacefully breathed his last on the 8th September, the feast of the 
Nativity of Our Blessed Lady, 1853. 

There are few men of whom it can be said with such absolute truth 
as of Frederic Ozanam that " their works do live after them." There 
can be no question but that to Frederic Ozanam we owe the 
inspiration, the origin, and the foundation of the world-spread 
organization of Charity, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. If his 
humility prevented him from allowing himself to be elected as President, 
he nevertheless was the moving spirit, the driving force, the capable 
director of the Society from its foundation until his death over twenty 
years later. During this period he superintended its workings not only 
in France, but, wherever in Italy he could establish or encourage it. 
In the years which have passed since his death, thanks to the blessing 
of God and the wise and prudent system of charity laid down by 
Ozanam, the Society has marvellously spread throughout the entire 
world. There is hardly a corner of the Old World or of the New in 
which the Society is not established. Its members are counted by 
hundreds of thousands and are ever increasing. Their activities are 
ever multiplying, and as the needs of the day vary and change so do 
the activities of the Society, so that in very truth it fulfils the earliest 
rule laid down by its founder : that there is no form of charity which 
shall be considered foreign to the objects of the Society. All this 
great work has been accomplished, this wonderful spread of its 
activities has been achieved, because the Society from its foundation 
has ever and always been guided by the Spirit of Charity for the love 



ANTOINE FREDERIC OZANAM 

of God and of Humility in honour of His Name. So long as those two 
principles abide in the Society its days shall not end. 

In these days there is no less need for Catholic action than in the 
days of Frederic Ozanam. To-day, as a hundred years ago, the 
Catholic Church is being challenged " to show her works " and the 
need is no less great for the laity to take part in a widespread move- 
ment of Catholic action. The Catholic manhood of England are asked 
to give themselves, their leisure, their experience, their energy, their 
devotion and their initiative, as did the Catholic young men of Paris 
under the inspiring leadership of Ozanam, to the service of God's poor, 
the betterment of their lives, the improvement of their conditions, the 
education of their children, the brightening of their coming years, 
inspired to undertake this splendid mission by the same spirit which 
guided Ozanam and his companions, the love of the poor in the 
Brotherhood of Jesus Christ. 



W. R. THOMPSON, F.R.S. 



GREGOR JOHANN 



AJD. 1822-1884 

\\ T E ARE so accus tomed to rely on the technical resources of the 
y Y civilization in which we live, that few of us ever come to realize 
how feeble is our grip on them, as individuals how imperfectly 
we possess them. But it is pretty certain that an average non- 
technical citizen, if shot back by the time machine to the twelfth 
century, would find himself quite surprisingly incapable of making 
important material improvements in his surroundings. He could not, 
for example, even if he were a radio fan, construct a wireless set of 
the very simplest type. He might find a piece of galena, and he 
could easily build a simple condenser, but the coils and head-phones 
would, I fancy, defeat him, if only because of the difficulty of pro- 
ducing insulated copper wire. In any case, he would certainly be 
incapable of building a transmitting station. Even the making of 
such a simple thing as a box of safety matches would probably be 
quite beyond the technical powers of the average householder. It 
involves the manufacture of a box out of very thin slices of wood, 
covered with coloured paper and bearing a printed label which, in 
the one I happen to have before me, is decorated with a figure of a 
sailing ship, made, I suppose, from a zinc cut. The matches bear 
at the tip a rounded blob of some hard brownish substance which, 
when rubbed on the layer of material covering the sides of the 
match box, ignites. Though I have had a fairly comprehensive 
scientific training and have a theory about the composition of the 
material on the sides of the match box, I should not care to bet that it 
is correct, and though I think I could make matches with phosphorus 
and potassium chlorate, I should not like to be set the task of hunting 
for them in the twelfth-century world. 

The fact is, that since society is in a sense an organism, which goes as a 
whole through a developmental process involving all its parts or elements, 
the discoveries made by its members require for their apparition, 
certain settings or predispositions and cannot come into being until 
their hour has struck. Though Roger Bacon looked forward to a time 
when men should fly through the air and move under the sea, we 



GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 347 

may doubt that this was in any true sense a scientific prevision or 
prophesy such as we find in The Sleeper Awakes or The Servile State, where 
the acute minds of WeUs and Belloc have followed existing poten- 
tialities or tendencies to their natural conclusions. Bacon seems 
indeed to have rendered real services to science ; but though he says 
in his Opuscula de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturale that it is possible to 
make vehicles which " without the help of any animal, will run with 
measureless speed/' yet he could not have had any definite idea as 
to how this was in fact to be accomplished. 

It has often been remarked that when the time for a scientific 
discovery has arrived, it tends to break out simultaneously in several 
places like measles. Sometimes, as seems to have happened with 
wireless, we have the apparition in rapid succession of bits and pieces 
that are eventually assembled in the final product. Sometimes the 
new idea emerges full fledged, but independently from a number of 
minds. A classical case is that of the theory of Evolution by natural 
selection, formulated in almost exactly the same terms by Charles 
Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, the evidence of independent 
origin being so clear that communications from the two authors were 
presented at the same meeting of the Linnean Society. The history 
of the differential calculus is another. The origins of this tremen- 
dously powerful mathematical method can actually be traced back 
through the works of Pascal, Fermat and Descartes to Nicholas 
Oresmus who died as Bishop of Lisieux in the latter part of the 
fourteenth century. But it attained its full development only in the late 
seventeenth century, through the work of Newton and Leibnitz. Each 
of these two great men claimed for himself the credit of the discovery 
and a bitter controversy ensued, lasting many years ; but good modern 
authorities consider that Newton was led to the idea through the 
lessons of his master, Barrow, while Leibnitz reached it through the 
study of a figure in Pascal's Traite des Sinus du quart de cerde. 1 The 
truth is that the fullness of time had come and that a natural con- 
vergence of forces was tending, almost inevitably, toward the creation 
of the new thing. 

But though at such moments (as we can see after the event) the 
elements of the discovery lie, as it were, in the open and fully exposed 
to view, it is not given to everyone to pick them up. " It behoves us 
always to remember," says Sir D'Arcy Thompson 2 , " that in physics 
it has taken great men to discover simple things. They are very 
great names indeed that we couple with the explanation of the path 
of a stone, the drop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in 
a cup. 55 Once the discovery is made a very ordinary person can 

1 M. Andoyer et S. Humbert, in Gabriel Hanotaux's Histoire de la nation Franfaise, T. xiv. 
* Growth and Form, p.8. 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

expound it and the pedestrian exploration of its implications may 
occupy a whole generation of workers. But the plucking of the 
intelligible whole out of what appears on the surface as a meaningless 
agglomeration is a work of genius. There is no doubt that certain 
individuals have an innate aptitude for it. We see them move from 
one subject to another, illuminating everything they touch, transforming 
every problem. It does not seem that the faculty can be created, 
though it can doubtless be developed. It does not necessarily imply 
either extraordinary erudition or deep philosophical insight. Its 
essential element appears to be a kind of intuitive process, by which 
we must not understand either the mere apprehension of the concrete, 
characteristic of sensory life, or the direct vision of essences that 
belongs to the intellects angelicus but that instantaneous process of 
reasoning whereby the mind leaps from principles to conclusions 
without any formal enunciation of the arguments that logically 
connect them. In this process, it seems, the whole man is involved. 
The bodily predispositions play a part so that though the power of 
discovery and invention develops with exercise and may be favoured 
by circumstances, the conscientious labour of the ungifted will not 
of itself engender it. The writer was once told, of a well-known 
biologist, distinguished rather for the mass than for the brilliance of 
his writings, that he laboured every day into the small hours, searching 
the literature for new ideas. But his power of original thinking did not 
notably develop and though his name is associated with certain striking 
advances, the exact nature of his connection with them remains obscure. 
No amount of taking pains will replace genius. On the other hand, 
the great scientific figures have very generally possessed along with 
their originality, the ability to do a great deal of hard and extremely 
accurate work, without which, indeed, the most fruitful hypotheses 
remain sterile. The great discoverers are not in any pathological 
sense abnormal. They are, in most respects, typical products of their 
time, preoccupied with its problems and driven by its energies. But 
their insight and power of achievement surpass those of common men, 
so that they not only can foresee the new thing but can also bring it 
into being. To this little company belongs Gregor Johann Mendel. 
We suffer a good deal nowadays from a superabundance of 
Sorcerers' apprentices, drawn from the ranks of science and its 
popularisers, each advertising and urging on us his special formula 
for the dissipation of our ills. One of the most objectionable of these 
is certainly the Eugenist of the simple-minded but very vocal school 
that equates hereditary value with cash. There is something to be 
said for the worship of the county family, now, alas, almost vanished 
away ; and one might even perhaps find some strange excuse for the 
adoration of Germanic Blood. But it is difficult to sympathize with 



GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 349 

those who make mere money-getting ability the touchstone of progress, 
as the Eugenists do when they suggest that if we can only prevent the 
poor from having children, everything will soon be all right. The 
remedy for social ills favoured by these would-be geneticists might 
actually have prevented the appearance of the Founder of Genetics, 
since Johann Mendel was in fact, the product of one of those poor and 
hard-worked families of peasant farmers particularly disliked by 
many of our modern Eugenists. The facts of his life so far as they are 
known to us, might, indeed, be drawn from one of those tales dear to 
the Christian story-tellers because they reflect or epitomise the spirit 
of Christian civilization, ordered yet free, hierarchical yet hostile to 
caste. Mendel was the clever poor boy who rose to be an abbot. 
It is moreover, a singular and significant fact that the career of 
Mendel, which meant so much to science, was made possible only 
through the institution of the family, in its humblest expression. One 
of his sisters sacrificed a large part of her small dowry to the payment 
of Mendel's school fees. Everyone acquainted with continental life 
knows what such sacrifices may mean. But the important point is 
not that the sacrifice was made, but that it could be made ; that there 
was within the family circle, the resource with which an emergency 
could be met. The opening of careers to talent by the institution of 
state scholarships is a thing that everyone with any democratic feeling 
must applaud ; but schoolmasters are not infallible judges, nor the 
examination system the only test of intellectual worth. It is well 
that the intimate judgments of the family should have some weight 
in deciding the careers of its members as against the impersonal selective 
mechanism of the state. It may be said that parents are notoriously 
subject to delusions about the capacities of their children ; but in 
this case, at all events, there was no delusion ; never was an invest- 
ment more fruitful than the investment of the Austrian girl's dowry 
in the career of Mendel. 

One of the most common complaints made against the Roman 
Church is that its clergy are sometimes not gentlemen : not, as the 
saying goes, out of the top drawer. This accusation often comes 
from persons fond of posing in other circumstances, as friends of 
democracy and is a good index of their real feelings. We need not 
attempt to refute it. In so far as it indicates a lack of those superficial 
characteristics that derive from the long-continued possession of 
wealth, it is simply an expression of the fact that the Church offers 
to those who have a genuine vocation for her work possibilities of 
personal development that they could find nowhere else. Mendel 
came at an early stage in his studies under a monastic teacher ; and 
it can hardly be a coincidence that when his studies in the gymnasium 
of Olmutz were concluded, he applied for entrance into the order 



35 GREAT CATHOLICS 

wMch had given him a teacher at his former school in Troppau. He 
entered the Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brann 1 in 1843, 
passed successfully through the hard tests of the monastic novitiate 
and was ordained priest in 1847. In 1851, he was sent, at the 
expense of the monastery to the University of Vienna, for three years* 
work in mathematics and the natural sciences. It was apparently 
after his return from Vienna that he began, in the gardens of the 
Abbey, his celebrated experiments in heredity. 

The education of Mendel was thus in large part not only religious 
but ecclesiastical and monastic. Now it is certainly a mistake to 
suggest that there is a necessary connection between religious orthodoxy 
and scientific ability. When we consider, says Maritain 2 , that the 
Creator of the human mind has allowed some of Ms great contem- 
platives, St. Hildegarde, for exaifaple, to retain such erroneous ideas 
on cosmology, we seem led to infer that He is rather indifferent to our 
knowledge of the conformation of the universe or the laws of the winds. 
On the other hand, it does seem that the progress of a mind specifically 
devoting itself to the search for natural truths, cannot be positively 
hampered and may indeed be facilitated by its view of ultimate 
philosophical questions. The violent energy that the adherents of 
Communism devote to the extermination of religious doctrines in 
general and the idea of God in particular clearly shows that they, at 
all events, have no doubts about the matter. That one of the great 
biological discoveries should be made by a Catholic monk is from 
their standpoint, a disagreeable paradox. When Christians refer to 
the religious beliefs of early scientific workerSj they are often met with 
the reply that in those days the implications of science were not fully 
realized. Nothing of this kind can be said about Mendel. During 
the period covered by his experimental work, which he began in 
1854 and embodied in papers presented to the Natural History Society 
of Brunn in 1865 and 1869 the Darwinian revolution had swept over 
Europe. The daily work of Mendel must necessarily have brought 
him in contact with it since he was, during this time, a teacher of 
science in the Realschule of Brunn. Furthermore it seems that 
MendePs investigations were to some extent stimulated by his 
dissatisfaction with the Darwinian doctrines. 

There is no doubt that a great deal of the enormous modern 
development of biology is due to the doctrine of evolution and to the 
simple and plausible theory of natural selection which enabled Darwin 
and the Darwinian propagandists to ensure its acceptance by the 
general public. But it is also true that a good deal of the research 
engendered by the theory has consisted in chasing will-o'-the-wisps 
and has enriched biology per accidens, not through the attainment of 

1 Now Brno. Reflexions swr /' Intelligence, p. 184. 



GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 551 

the ends sought, but by the incidental results of the search. From 
1870 to 1900, says Caullery, 1 biology moved with the impetus given to 
it by Darwin along lines established by HaeckeL " The whole effort 
during the latter part of the nineteenth century, was devoted to an 
attempt at an effective reconstitution of the evolutionary process, to 
retracing the decent of the various animal groups with the help of 
the data of comparative anatomy and especially of embryology." 
Haeckel who must, on the whole, be reckoned a charlatan in spite of 
his admirable work in some fields, had formulated after his usual 
manner, his " Fundamental Biogenetic Law," according to which 
the life history of the individual retraces the history of the race. The 
story of embryology for some decades afterwards, consists in 
the main in its disproof. The results of the effort to reconstruct 
phylogeny from the data of comparative anatomy, extracted from 
existing forms are now seen to be largely illusory and unverifiable ; 
and though the material results of these chimerical researches may be 
considered as a justification of them it seems that embryology and 
comparative anatomy could have been more profitably studied in and 
for themselves. 

The problem of heredity is one of the fundamental biological 
problems. It is also quite obviously one of the vital problems of 
evolutionary theory. Nevertheless the tide of evolutionary speculation 
carried biological work away from it. Investigators working in the 
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries succeeded in establishing 
some vague and unsatisfactory general principles such as that a cross 
between pure breeds gives offspring similar among themselves, while 
a cross between hybrids produces forms showing a wide range of 
variation ; and that hybrids are generally more vigorous than the 
parents but tend to be sterile. But as the literature on the subject 
increased in volume, the results became ever more confused and 
unintelligible. The work of Mendel, admirably planned and bril- 
liantly executed, cut straight through the indigestible mass accumulated 
by his predecessors and in the short paper published in 1865 he 
transformed genetics from something little better than an anecdotical 
rubbish-heap into an exact science provided with a perfectly definite 
method. 

The great scientific figures of the present time live in a blaze of 
publicity. Of one of them it was said by an irritated colleague, that 
his fame surpassed that of Carpentier or Battling Siki ; that he went 
on tours like an actress ; and that pretty ladies stood in queues" to see 
him. Their mental processes are exhibited to us in detail. But 
Mendel is an obscure figure and we do not know exactly by what 
steps he proceeded to his discovery. He tells us in his 1865 paper 

1 JLes conceptions moderws de UHeredttS : Paris, Flammarion, 1935. 



352 GREAT CATHOLICS 

that he was led to It through attempts he made by artificial fertilisation 
to obtain new .colours in ornamental plants. " The remarkable 
regularity with which the same hybrid forms returned, whenever 
the same species were crossed/ 5 suggested to him, he says, " The 
idea of new experiments having as their object the determination of the 
descendants of the hybrids." But others had doubtless made the same 
observations, without any spectacular consequences. The originality 
of Mendel's treatment of the problem had perhaps something to do 
with the fact that he taught mathematics and physics, as well as 
biology. At all events, his application of exact, quantitative methods 
to biological problems clearly marks him as one of the first of the 
moderns. Instead of trying to deal with the organism as a whole, 
which in this case inevitably leads to almost inextricable confusion, he 
concentrated on certain clearly definable characters occurring in sharply 
differentiated forms in the different varieties he had at his disposal. 
Thus, he crossed tall plants with dwarfs ; plants having green seeds 
with plants having yellow seeds ; plants whose seeds are wrinkled 
with plants whose seeds are smooth, and so forth. The progeny of 
such crosses show variations likely to confuse a novice in experiment, 
in characters other than the one selected for study. But Mendel 
avoided these difficulties by attending rigorously to the character 
chosen and following it through a long series of generations. Twenty- 
two strains of peas were used in the experiments and they were grown 
and studied throughout the whole period of the work so as to make 
sure of their constancy and genetic purity. These laborious and 
difficult investigations occupied eight years, but when they had been 
concluded, Mendel was able to make an absolutely fundamental 
statement of the laws of heredity in regard to characters of the type 
studied ; and the basic principles he established remain valid to this 
day and constitute the permanent foundation of all the modern work 
in genetics. He showed that the differential characters between 
varieties occur, so to speak in couples, now called allelomorphs and 
that the various couples are inherited independently in crosses. Each 
pair dissociates in the sex cells so that each of these contains only 
one element of the pair and is pure in respect to the character considered. 
The recombination of these elements takes place according to chance, 
following the laws of statistical probability. If we have n differential 
characters there will be 2 n categories of gametes, 4* different possible 
combinations of gametes giving 2 n distinct " phenotypical types," 
the frequency of which is given by the coefficient of the terms of the 
expansion of the binomial (a+b) n . Mendel also established, for the 
characters he studied in his peas, the law of dominance according to 
which a character that appears in the descendants of a hybrid may 
be apparently non-existent in the parent, where it must, nevertheless 



GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 353 

" exist " in some sense, though it is, so to speak, masked or dominated 
by its opposite. This law is not an absolutely general one, but the idea 
connected with it, of the independence and continued existence of 
characters or " character-factors " remains the key-stone of the 
Mendelian system. 

Mendel was thus the founder of the analytical and bio-mathematical 
treatment of the problem of heredity. The difference between his 
conceptions and that of the orthodox Darwinians of the time is seen 
very clearly, says Emanuel Radl 1 , if we compare Galton's theory 
of heredity with that of Mendel. " According to Galton, who in 
this respect was only expressing the views of his time, the characteristics 
of the parents have a resultant effect on the descendant, like that of 
two forces working simultaneously on one body. The result is uniform 
and nobody could resolve it into its components unless he knew the 
nature of those components from some other source. Following 
out this idea further, Galton believed that every individual is influenced, 
in a greater or less degree, by all his ancestors, so that no ancestor 
can appear pure in any descendant. According to Mendel, however, 
the characters of the parents are combined in the descendants, but 
do not fuse, so that they exist there, side by side, and can separate 
again in future generations. No fusion of characters takes place, 
and hence the ancestor can reappear unadulterated in his descendants." 

Mendel's fundamental paper on heredity appeared in 1865. He 
made the mistake of publishing in the journal of the local Natural 
History Society. Nevertheless, this journal was accessible in the 
libraries attached to a number of the great scientific centres and his 
work cannot altogether have escaped attention. Furthermore, Mendel 
carried on a long correspondence with the distinguished botanist 
C. Von Nageli who published in 1884 a theory of heredity based on 
the idea of representative particles and containing even the idea of 
dominance ; but he could not persuade Nageli to take any interest in 
his discoveries. It was not until 1900 when the intoxication induced 
by Darwinian theory was beginning to wear off, that work on hybridiza- 
tion was resumed, Mendelian principles discovered simultaneously 
by de Vries, von Tschermak and Gorrens and the genius of Mendel 
finally recognized, sixteen years after his death. 

Radl expressed in 1909 and reiterated in 1930, his belief that 
Mendelian studies were undermining the foundations of Darwinism. 
It is probable that feelings of this kind were responsible for the long- 
continued antipathy for genetics displayed by many Darwinians. 2 

The mathematical treatment of Mendelian data developed by 
neo-Darwinians like R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane seems to have 
satisfied many of the doubters. In so far as the Mendelian conception 
1 The History of Biological Theories. 2 cf.J. S. Huxley, Nature, April, 12, 1924. 



254 GREAT CATHOLICS 

implies an " atomistic " view of the organism, regarded as a mosaic 
of " characters," it is certainly much closer to orthodox old-school 
Darwinism than it is to C holistic 5S doctrines such as neo-Lamarckism, 
as is clearly shown by the attitude of biologists like Professor MacBride 
to the gene-concept^ which is a modern development of Mendelism. 

But in spite of the mathematical neo-Darwinians, it is not by any 
means certain that a satisfactory theory of evolution can be constructed 
on a Mendelian basis. The distinguished French biologist M. Cauilery 
in his admirable little book devoted to Mendelism 1 which he fully 
accepts, nevertheless considers that while Mendelian genetics throw 
light on the notion of the species, on intraspecific variation and, to 
some extent, on the origin of closely related species, yet the data 
provided by genetics cannot really be the basis of the evolutionary 
process. Genetics, he says, is the study of the living thing in a state of 
specific stability. This is also the opinion of the American biologist 
HL S. Jennings, who concludes, after an exhaustive examination of 
the facts of Mendelian genetics, that they really throw no light on 
in and that we are still looking for the unknown cause of Evolution 2 . 
But Professor J. B. S. Haldane has asserted that " the uniformity of 
the nuclear mechanisms can be extrapolated with great confidence 
into the past, and that we can be reasonably sure that an Acanthodian 
or Pteridosperm nucleus was organised on modern lines." From 
this, it follows, he thinks, that " the principles of genetics and the 
method of evolution were very much the same in remote geological 
epochs as they are to-day." 3 This suggests that the difficulties 
of the Mendelian evolutionist are not restricted to the present 
as authors like Cauilery are inclined to think, but are radical 
difficulties. 

This is also the view of Lamarckian evolutionists like E. Rabaud 
and E. W. MacBride, who consider that it is impossible to extract 
either a theory of evolution or an intelligible notion of vital activity 
from Mendelian principles if these are given an all-embracing and 
fundamental significance. If the Mendelian idea is pushed to the 
extreme limit, the organism appears as a mosaic of characters, assembled 
according to the laws of chance. But the organism is an assemblage 
in which the possibility of vital action depends on certain precise 
co-ordinations and relations between the various parts. Lamarckians 
and Darwinians agree on this point but while adaptive power is causal 
in the Lamarckian theory, it is an effect in the Darwinian system and 
in spite of long-continued efforts and many subterfuges the Darwinians 
have never been able to produce an intelligible and convincing 
explanation of this effect. Mendelism has not alleviated their 

1 loc. cit. z Genetic Variations in Relation to Evolution. 
3 In Darlington's Recent Advances in Cytology. 



GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 555 

difficulties and when one considers the position as a whole one feels 
inclined to sympathize with those who say with E. S. Russell 1 that 
the phenomena of Mendelian inheritance are simply incidental and 
accessory phenonema and that we have not yet found a way of dealing 
scientifically with heredity in its basic aspect. 

But the difficulties created by the impact of Mendelism on the 
theories of adaptation and evolution were not difficulties createH by 
Mendel. Mendel was a man who followed his nose. He liked facts, 
and the only theories that seem to have appealed to him were those 
that emerge immediately from the facts. Radi says of him that he 
imagined " that the organism is made up of characters, somewhat 
as substances are made up of atoms " ; but I cannot find. any such 
statement in the papers he published, so that while he must be given 
the credit of discovering the most workable and scientifically fruitful 
method we possess for tackling the problem of heredity, the puzzles 
arising out of the philosophical development and extension of his 
results, cannot fairly be laid to his charge. If he had. continued his 
work he might eventually have encountered and dealt with these 
problems, to the advantage of posterity. But he was obliged to give 
it up when, in 1868, he became abbot of his monastery and he was 
never again able to return to it. At the time of his election he was 
engaged in an attempt to confirm, on plants of the genus Hieracium, 
the results he had obtained with peas. Technical difficulties which 
were not cleared up till thirty years later, made the material unsuitable 
for study. The biographers of Mendel, who are inclined to regard 
the latter part of his career as a defeat and decline, usually suggest 
that chagrin due to the neglect of his discoveries and the unsatisfactory 
results of his Hieracium work, had a good deal to do with his withdrawal 
from the scientific field. 

One may, however, venture to suggest that the biographers have not 
considered the position from the standpoint of Mendel. Mendel 
was a priest and a religious, and though he was, no doubt, greatly 
attached to his scientific work and much disappointed by the lack 
of interest shown by the scientific world in his results, we cannot doubt 
that, having a vocation for the things of God and putting first things 
first, his work as a botanist would appear to him as a very light thing 
when weighed against the responsibilities and opportunities of the 
abbatial office in a great religious house, and that he abandoned his 
scientific investigations simply because of his devotion to duties that 
he sincerely and rightly felt to be of a far higher order. 

These duties were onerous and the responsibilities of office, in 
normal circumstances, a heavy burden. But in Mendel's period of 
office they were greatly increased by the action of the Austrian govern- 

1 The Interpretation of Development and Heredity. 



356 GREAT CATHOLICS 

ment, which imposed a special tax on monasteries. Abbot Mendel 
refused to submit to this tax, maintaining that all citizens are equal 
under the law. Other monasteries at first sided with him but gradually 
they weakened and one after another consented to pay the tax. 
Mendel continued to resist and though great pressure was brought 
to bear on him, he refused to give way, even allowing the goods of the 
monastery to be distrained upon by the fiscal authorities. The later 
history of anti-clerical operations in Europe shows clearly that Mendel 
behaved with good judgment, for the principle on which he acted was 
again and again proved to be the only practicable basis for the defence 
of the elementary rights of religious communities, Mendel's resistance 
was ultimately effective. The objectionable law was repealed. But 
before the Austrian government decided to take this step,, Abbot Mendel 
died of Bright's disease, at the age of 62, on the 6th of January, 1884. 
It is said that toward the end of his life, under the influence of 
difficulties, disappointment and disease, the temperament of Mendel 
deteriorated. To him, his career may well have appeared in a 
temporal sense, a failure. His great scientific effort, brilliantly planned, 
admirably executed and fundamentally successful, attracted no 
attention from the learned world. Those who should have been his 
allies in his religious battle, deserted him and he did not live to see its 
successful issue. But looking back from our vantage point in the 
present we see that he was, in the scientific field, the initiator of one of 
the most fruitful of scientific movements, and in the religious field, 
the defender of a position of pivotal importance. Gregor Johann 
Mendel was a great Catholic. 



REV. MARTIN D'ARCY, S.J., M.A. 



MANLEY 



A.D, 1844-1889 

IN THE TWENTY years since the first volume of Fr. Hopkins' poems 
appeared the literary world has come more and more to believe 
in the high quality of his genius. There is as yet, however, no such 
agreement about his character. From the poems themselves and 
certain anecdotes often retold a legend of a poet born out of due 
time, very sensitive and very eccentric, has sprung up. That he was 
a priest and Jesuit gave a fillip to the imagination, and on the strength 
of the later sonnets some critics conceived a vast pity for him this 
tender plant in the rough plantation of the Society of Jesus and the 
Catholic Church ; they even suggested that his poetic gifts were 
stifled in the vocation he chose, and that at the end he had misgivings 
about his vocation and his faith. It is perhaps natural that those who 
know little of the ways of God with individual souls especially those 
of predilection should so interpret at first the sonnets of affliction. 
Now however that, thanks to the industry of Mr. Humphrey House 
and Professor Abbott, we have editions of his diaries and notes and 
letters to Robert Bridges and Canon Dixon, there is less excuse for such 
a view, and there is abundant material for a just estimate of Hopkins' 
character. Nevertheless, Professor Abbott in his introduction to one 
volume of the letters can write that, " it is our good fortune that his 
name belongs to literature and not to hagiography." By this I suppose 
he means that Hopkins can stand the test of poetic genius but not of 
holiness. That this is his meaning appears from a comparison which 
he makes between Milton and Hopkins. " There is a kinship of 
spirit between the two poets. But what was possible to the resolved 
will of Milton the heretic was beyond the powers of Hopkins the 
priest. He lacked, so it seems to me, just that serene certainty of how 
to serve God." It is always dangerous to make guesses about a 
person's spiritual life, and Hopkins was never one to " tell secrets," 
but we may well ask whether the spiritual suffering of the priest did not 
rest on a much closer intimacy with Christ and Him crucified, than 
the grim and cantankerous outlook of a Milton. 

358 



GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 359 

As the Impression of Abbott Is shared by others and the legend of his 
frailty is still current, it is important to test this preconception by the 
evidence of the diaries and letters. Now on reading them dis- 
interestedly no one, I think, can help feeling himself in the presence 
of a man of the highest sincerity and simplicity, a most delicate 
conscience and sense of honour and of steadfast loyalty to his vocation. 
On the other hand his poems show the marks of great interior conflicts 
and their great individuality does, it must be confessed, pass over 
into the eccentric at times. In the diaries again the observation is 
never weakly impressionist and seldom emotional ; It Is so direct 
as to be almost impersonal, and from the effort to be truthful comes a 
minuteness of detail and singularity of language. This singularity of 
look would betoken strength, were It not that often it is the unusual 
in nature which attracts his attention. To my mind It Is here the 
problem of his character is clearly marked. What was his virtue 
could also be his weakness. He was interested in others and what 
they could tell him,, and he loved the conversation of his Irish 
brothers, in the novitiate, for instance. But throughout his life, he is 
far more the keen observer than the victim of introspection, and 
It is to be seen in the diaries written before he became a Jesuit. Were 
it not so, I might be tempted to see in this habit, his usual conscientious 
attempt to carry out the rule and regulations of St. Ignatius which 
emphasized the need of scientific and businesslike accuracy even in 
self-examination. 

The letters to Bridges and Dixon betray this same combination of 
robust discrimination and singularity. In the correspondence with 
Dixon it is delightful to come across the gentle understanding of his 
friend and the wisdom of many of his observations ; but he worries 
the older man at times by the scrupulosity which even to his fellow 
Jesuits appears exaggerated. The story is told of him that when he 
was professor in Dublin, some friends asked him to stop for tea and he 
excused himself on the ground that he had not leave to do so. The 
same over-conscientiousness is seen in the fuss he makes about the 
possible publication of any of his poems, and in his reluctance as a 
priest to spend any time writing poetry for fear it would interfere with 
his job of teaching or preaching. In all this he is literal minded and 
refuses to distinguish between the serious and the light or fantastic, 
duty and that happy love which enables the children of God to act in 
full liberty of spirit. Quite possibly the fact that he was a convert and 
that he had been brought up in the atmosphere of rectitude which 
belongs so especially to Victorian religion, may help to account for 
some of the puzzles of his character. He was in sentiment and by 
education a thorough Victorian, and it was through this habit of mind 
a genius quite un- Victorian had to work. Other converts have 



360 GREAT CATHOLICS 

exhibited the same unresolved tension. They have startled, and still 
startle the traditional Catholic by their inability to unbend. 

But this at best is only a partial explanation, and we can get closer 
to the truth by looking for clues in the material provided by the 
diaries, letters and evidence of friends. From his photographs, 
Hopkins might be thought almost effeminate, and from these and the 
tradition that he was a delicate and unpractical poet, many have 
paid too little attention to evidence which contradicts this. In a letter 
of Mr. C. N. Luxmoore giving reminiscences of Hopkins' schooldays, 
we learn that " once roused by a sense of undeserved injustice, he, 
usually so quiet and docile was furiously keen for the fray, and only 
bristled the more, when as was usually the case, the authorities tried 
force and browbeating to silence his arguments and beat him down." 
There are clear traces of this same strength and passion for justice 
in his letters. It is joined with a very masculine taste in literature. 
He liked Dryden because " he is the most masculine of our poets ; 
his style and his rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature 
on the naked thew and sinew of the English language. 5 ' Again 
it is not the Hopkins of popular fancy who could write : "I was fond 
of my people, but they had not as a body the charming and cheering 
heartiness of these Lancashire Catholics, which is so deeply comforting ; 
they were far from having it. And I believe they criticised what 
went on in our church a great deal too freely, which is d d impertin- 
ence of the sheep towards the shepherd, and if it had come markedly 
before me I should have given them my mind." 

It is fair to argue from these and similar passages that he had 
substantially a robust soul. I use the word " substantial " deliberately 
because it comes near to the kind of distinctions he would himself have 
used. (It would be well worth while to make a study of Hopkins 
in terms of the psychology he himself loved and thought true). He 
looked out and away from himself straightforwardly at things and 
persons ; he is stirred by the " inscape " of things and roused by wrong 
done to others. He looked, too, for " a dexterous and starlight order " ; 
he gives glory to God for " dappled things," the u Kingdom of daylight's 
dauphin," " The skies between fire mountains," and like the Queen 
of Heaven,," All things rising, all things sizing," he sees, " sympathizing 
with that world of good, Nature's motherhood." 

When he had to decide on his vocation and chose, in Bridges' quaint 
description, to be " a housecarl in Loyola's meinie," Newman con- 
gratulated him, saying that the Jesuit discipline was not too hard 
and that it would bring him to heaven. Evidently Hopkins had said 
something to Newman about the hardness of this discipline, and it 
had occupied his thoughts. Mr. C. Devlin in a penetrating essay 
has pointed out how intimate is the connection of the thought in 



GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 361 

the poems with the Exercises of St. Ignatius. Now those exercises 
start with the idea of the service of God and pass on to the service of 
Christ the King, and they are a military handbook of sanctity, stating 
with stark clarity the rules and discipline of Christ's army. The 
robust mind of Hopkins delighted in this and he lived and thought 
by those rules. It is not without significance that in seeing a soldier 
he should always be inclined to bless him, and that one of the tenderest 
of his poems should be about a bugle boy from barrack. Moreover, 
the inspiration from early years and his true love was Christ. In the 
early diaries occur these lines. 

" And other science all gone out of date 
And minor sweetness scarce made mention of : 
I have found the dominant of my range and state 
Love, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love." 

At first this love was no doubt mixed with romantic feelings ; he had 
been swayed by Keats and Tennyson and was touched by Dolben, 
In a sonnet on Easter Communion the thought and language are 
romantic, and he is sure that God " for sackcloth and frieze and the 
ever-fretting shirt of punishment " will " give myrrhy-threaded golden 
folds of ease." But he was too honest even in his youth to have 
romance without the test of fact. At the time he was writing in this 
way he sets down in his diary : " For Lent. No pudding on Sundays. 
No tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar. Meat 
only once a day. No verses in Passion Week or on Fridays. Not 
to sit in armchair except can work in no other way. Ash Wednesday 
and Good Friday bread and water." 

When he became a Jesuit the Exercises of St. Ignatius gave a 
steely strength and purpose to this love of Christ. For some years I 
think he was still like his Bowman Arthur. " His three-heeled timber 
'11 hit The bald and bold blinking gold when all's done Right-rooting 
in the bare butt's wincing navel in the sight of the sun." He was to 
find that God disposed of him in no such simple fashion. But through- 
out trials and disappointments he is quite clear of his vocation in 
the service of Christ and regards with abhorrence as disloyalty and 
treachery any suggestion of falling out of the ranks. In 1881 he 
writes to Dixon : " As for myself, I have not only made my vows 
publicly some two and twenty times, but I make them to myself every 
day, so that I should be black with perjury if I drew back now. And 
beyond that I can say with St. Peter : To whom shall I go ? Tu 
verba vitae aetemae habes" In a letter of the same year he says again 
that he leaves questions like the publication of his poems to his 
superiors and tries to live on the principle of resting in the providence 
of God. " If you value what I write, if I do myself, much more does 



362 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the Lord. 35 This trust despite all appearances was not in vain, though 
Hopkins was to go into a darkness which left him no romance and not 
even faint rays of consolation. We can see the change and watch his 
constancy. In 1879 he tells Bridges that he has not the inducements 
and inspirations that make others compose. And then follows the 
revealing sentence. " Feeling, love in particular, is the great moving 
power and spring of verse and the only person that I am in love with 
seldom, especially now, stirs my heart sensibly and when he does 
I cannot always ' make capital * of it, it would be a sacrilege to do so.' 5 
The writer of that sentence surely has a name " which belongs to 
hagiography " and he is wiser and more heroic than the youth who 
wrote of the ^ myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease, 5? which Christ 
was to give. 

In the last years even this rare stirring of the heart was, so he thought, 
withheld. His body is against him in Ireland, his work is a tread- 
mill, his companions wound him by their political antipathies. He 
knows that he is misunderstood and feels that those who are friendly 
think of him as a harmless eccentric. He sees himself an exile, doing 
nothing for Christ, " breeding not one work that wakes," and fighting 
against melancholy he is ware of" a rack where, self-wrung, self-strung, 
sheathed and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind." 
Yet, as Mr. House } with his customary understanding points out, 
" at a time when he was most despondent, when the drudgery of 
routine work, marking examination papers, was threatening his eyes ; 
and his body was weak ; and plans for his own work all interrupted 
and deferred, he wrote in a notebook : 

" Man was created to praise, etc, 53 (these are the first words of the 
Exercises of St. Ignatius), " Praise by the office expressly meant 
for this ; by the Mass, especially the Gloria." 

And the other things on earth take it that weakness, ill-health, 
every cross is a help. Calix quern Pater meus dedit mihi non bib am 
illud ? Facere nos indifferences with the elective will, not the effective 
especially ; but the affective will follow. 

I must ask God to strengthen my faith or I shall never keep the 
particular examen. I must say the Stations for this intention. 
Resolve also to keep it particularly even in the present state of 
lethargy." 

No wonder Mr. House writes that " no single sentence better 
explains the motives and direction of Hopkins 9 life than this * Man 
was created to praise. 5 He believed it as wholly as a man can believe 
anything ; and when regret or sorrow over anything in his life comes 
to a critic's mind this must be remembered." It is perhaps because of 
critics' ignorance of the Exercises of St. Ignatius that they have not 



GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 365 

followed Mr. House's wise advice. From beginning to end Hopkins 
remained faithful to the teaching in that book, and the quotation 
just given shows what is really a heroic resolve to follow out even 
its most difficult details. In the light of this no one should again raise 
the question of Hopkins' sincerity in his vocation or take the evidence 
of the sonnets as reason for doubting the firmness of his faith. Mr. 
G. W. Stonier in a review of his poems In The New Statesman is much 
nearer to the truth when he says that " religion hardened him morally 
and intellectually, provided him with a background infinitely better 
suited to his genius than Greek myth, and brought Into his poetry 
the polyphony of style, parti-colour of pattern, and expanding, 
realistic and passionate force of his great work. In the face of this 
it seems to me absurd to speak of damage done to him by conflicts 
of art and religion, sensuousness and asceticism.' 5 If this be true 
then Mr. Abbott's contrast of Hopkins with Milton and his remark 
that Hopkins " lacked just that serene certainty of how to serve God ?s 
fails of the mark. Hopkins never swerved from a very definite rule 
and Ideal of how to serve God, that, namely given in the book which 
begins with the praise of God and goes on to the way of serving and 
following Christ as a King. There is a problem, but It is not where 
Mr. Abbott would find It ... Mr. Stonier accepts the verdict of a 
friend of the poet who wrote : u His mind was too delicate a texture 
to grapple with the rough elements of life." This perhaps Is the 
Impression which many must carry away after reading the poems and 
hearing something of his life story. But the emphasis, I think, is 
wrong, and it Is not true to say. that he did not grapple with the rough. 
Substantially he Is robust and he has his eyes always open. There is no 
trace of fear ; he does not turn Inwards to escape reality and substitute 
an imaginative and emotional world for the real one. In order, 
therefore, to understand his melancholy and the impression of broken 
nerves we must begin not with an emphasis on these latter traits, 
but on the natural wholesomeness of the man. He begins life open- 
eyed and cheerful and as Luxrnoore tells us with a passion for fairness 
and truth. The cheerfulness never quite dies, as the tone of many 
of the letters to Bridges and their breeziness and slang prove. He 
remains also open-eyed to the end, but what is noticeable is that he 
preserves the delicacy and innocence which goes with childhood and 
suffers for it. Age did not bring him a harder skin, so that what was 
too ugly and harsh for a child had the same effect on him in middle 
age. The very chastity of mind which was his strength, proved also 
his torment. Just because, he kept that fresh and singular outlook 
and was perhaps incapable of becoming common, of adapting himself 
to the mentality around him, he was unable to build up defences 
and be worldly wise. For most men, life has an element of hide-and- 



364 GREAT CATHOLICS 

seek. They economize and make use of conventions to keep off 
what is hostile and hurting in order that they may seek out what they 
want and feel that they can do or be. Public opinion and conventional 
manners and ways are a mixed blessing. Hopkins missed their 
blessing ; he was left unprotected and grew more and more singular 
despite his own hatred of eccentricity. He gained, however, in this, 
that what he thought and wrote was marked by intense originality. 
Inevitably, however, what interested him was not what the chorus 
sang of, and so he grew by habit as well as nature to love " all things 
counter, original, spare, strange " and to use a language which 
scandalized his contemporaries by its obscurity. His moral and 
spiritual conscience too began to suffer for its isolation by growing in 
delicacy to the point when it became over-conscientious and almost 
scrupulous. The process, indeed, can almost be described in a set 
of words ; a pure and innocent outlook grows more distinctive and 
original and at the same time more singular, rare and unconventional 
and odd. At a critical moment of his development he came across 
the subtlest of philosophers, Duns Scotus, and there can be no doubt 
that " the rarest-veined unraveller of realty," as he described Scotus, 
had an immense influence on his subsequent habit of thought. Few 
at the time knew anything of Scotus and the Scotist Hopkins convinced 
his friends all the more that he was eccentric and of no use for the 
hurly-burly. The Scotist doctrine of individualism fitted too well 
with his own habit of mind, and when his innocence had grown so 
delicate that he could no longer decide without weeks of agonizing 
concentration whether the fourth decimal point in an undergraduate's 
marks were correct or not, he had reached a degree of singularity 
which left him without protection against the rough elements of life. 

Hopkins suffered, therefore, because of the very quality of his 
mind and soul, and one cannot easily separate his triumphs from his 
sufferings. But I doubt whether spiritually or practically he would 
have been so haunted by failure had it not been for the exhaustion 
and collapse of his body. If one takes the trouble to notice in his 
diaries and letters the number of times he has to confess to physical 
weakness and consequent depression, the weariness unto death of his 
spirit, so manifest in the later sonnets, will not come with a surprise. 
" I can no more." " All life death does end and each day dies with 
sleep." Of many passages let these suffice : 

In 1877-8, " Life here is as dank as ditch-water and has some of the 
other qualities of ditch-water : at least I know that I arn reduced to 
great weakness by diarrhoea, which lasts too, as if I were poisoned." 

In 1880, " I take up a languid pen to write to you, being down with 
diarrhoea and vomiting, brought on by yesterday's heat and the long 
hours in the confessional." 



GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 365 

In 1880, " But I never could write ; time and spirit were wanting ; 
one is so fagged, so harried and gallied up and down. And the 
drunkards go on drinking, the filthy, as the scripture says, are filthy 
still : human nature is so inveterate. Would that I had seen the 
last of it." 

In 1883, " Since our holidays began I have been in a wretched 
state of weakness and weariness, I can't tell why, always drowsy and 
incapable of reading or thinking to any effect. 35 

In 1884, " I am, I believe, recovering from a deep fit of nervous 
prostration (I suppose I ought to call it) : I did not know but I 
was dying. n 

In 1885, " The long delay was due to work, worry, and languish- 
ment of body and mind ... to judge of my case, I think that my 
fits of sadness, though they do not affect my judgment, resemble 
madness. 53 

Here is a sad record and it is clear that his body and nerves failed 
him, and at that time there was no cure, if indeed there is now, for 
nervous prostration. The melancholy caused by weakness and nervous 
depression was bound to invade his mind and spiritual life, and in 
the last years he had this as a more or less constant persecution. It 
tempted him to think of his whole life as a failure and himself as 
" time's eunuch " and in the name of the justice he had always loved 
to plead pitifully with Providence. " Thou art indeed just, Lord, 
if I contend with thee ; . . . why must disappointment all I endeavour 
end ? " But what should strike the reader is the evidence of his 
unswerving loyalty and fidelity to the ideal of the Exercises of St. 
Ignatius throughout this trial, and the robust quality of the letters 
even at this time. He may have thought himself a failure, and some 
readers and critics seem to have been deceived by the tone of the sad 
sonnets and the superficial appearance of excessive fragility in his life. 
Because of his open-eyed innocence he could not but be hurt dread- 
fully by the sight of evil, whether physical or moral. " The filthy are 
filthy still." His senses and his conscience had become so thin that 
what would not have hurt his friends caused him untold suffering. 
But for this depression and pain he is surely hardly accountable. 
They came through his chastity, the perfection of his sensibilities and 
the burden of a body which drooped. Where he was truly himself, 
in the intimacy which as he believed and as Scotus taught, existed 
between Christ and himself, where Christ plays, " lovely in limbs, 
and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men's 
faces," he was, as the evidence shows, utterly faithful. Providence 
did not allow his heroic abstention from publication and readiness to 
sacrifice fame to be without their rew r ard. It is surely remarkable 
that poetry so hidden from the world, so fated apparently to die, 



$66 GREAT CATHOLICS 

should now be praised wherever the English language is understood. 
It Is time, I think, that his character should also be vindicated. He 
thought his spiritual life a failure and had many moments of dereliction. 
But amongst his last poems there Is one In which he had a glimpse 
of his worth in the sight of God, which he was too humble to apply 
to himself. In the sonnet on the saintly, obscure lay brother, Alphonsus 
Rodriguez, who was afterwards canonized, he compares the glory 
which is flashed off exploits all the world can acclaim with a hidden 
martyrdom. " But be the war within, the brand we wield unseen, 
the heroic breast not outward-steeled, earth hears no hurtle then from 
fiercest fray." 

It was his lot not only to think himself a " eunuch " and produce 
immortal poetry, but to feel himself a spiritual failure and be exalted 
on his cross. The poems express his anguish ; his letters and life 
show his heroic endurance. He had a body and temperament which 
exposed him to suffering. The childlike simplicity, which magnified 
the originality of his vision and character, made the sight of evil, 
physical and spiritual, shocking to him. But he never broke faith 
with his ideal ; he never turned in on himself and made a cult of his 
emotions ; he never left the ranks to whine in the ditch. In that poem 
" in honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez " he used once again the image 
of the soldier and announced that no trumpet was to salute his part 
in the battlefield. But the last lines of the poem were, though he knew 
it not, prophetic. God (that hews mountain and continent, earth, 
all, out ; who, with trickling increment, veins violet and tall trees 
makes more and more) could crown career with conquest ..." 
Hopkins 5 career was crowned with conquest, and that crowning 
seems to me more like the making more and more of tall trees than the 
veinlng of the violet. 



DOM BEDE CAMM, O.S.B., M.A. 

DOM HILDEBRAND DE HEMPTINNE 

First Abbot Primate, O.S.B. 

A.D. 1849-1913 

MTHE FIRST TIME I saw Abbot de Hemptinne was at the crisis of my 
J[ life, my conversion to the Catholic Faith in July, 1890. It was at 
Maredsous Abbey a near Dinant in Belgium. I had been received 
into the Church by the then Abbot, Dom Placid Wolter, on June i8th 
of that year. Shortly after, Dom Maurus his elder brother, who was 
Arch-abbot of Beuron in Germany, died, and Dom Placid was elected 
to succeed him. 

There was never any doubt at Maredsous as to who would be the 
next Abbot there. It was a Belgian monk, who was acting as secretary 
to the late Abbot Wolter. In fact, he was elected unanimously, and 
greeted with joy and jubilation by the whole Community. The Abbey 
owed its existence mainly to him. His history was a striking one. 
As a boy of sixteen, Felix de Hemptinne, as he was then called, had 
enlisted as a zouave in the Papal army, in defence of the patrimony 
of Peter. 

Among his fellow-soldiers in Pius IX's little army, were two great 
friends of his, Victor Mousty and Jules Desclee. The latter was 
wounded in a skirmish outside Subiaco, the monastic home of St. 
Benedict, and was nursed back to health by the monks. He resolved 
that if God gave him the opportunity, he would, in gratitude to 
St. Benedict, found a monastery of the Order in his native land. 

Meanwhile, Felix, in his camp on the Roman Campagna, had had 
a mysterious call to become a Benedictine. He knew nothing of the 
Order, had never seen any monks, yet as he knelt in prayer, he heard 
most distinctly an interior voice that told him he was to be a Bene- 
dictine. He often told me the story himself. His father, who was a 
most pious and devout Catholic, did all he could to help him. He 
went round Europe visiting the various Benedictine Abbeys, and at 
last he found at Beuron, on the Danube, the monastery which appealed 
to him as the most faithful to the observance of the Holy Rule. This 
was but recently founded. He advised his son to enter there, which 
he did, and he duly became Dom Hildebrand. His heart, however, 

3 68 



DOM HILDEBRAND DE HEMPTINNE 369 

did not cease to yearn after his native land, and lie prayed and 
laboured for the foundation of a Benedictine house in Belgium. 

Meanwhile Rome had fallen, and the Papal army been disbanded. 
Mousty and Desclee returned home, and, to please his son, old Mr. 
Desclee appointed Mousty to be the steward or agent of his property 
at Maredsous. There was, however, no chapel or church where the 
Desclees could assist at daily Mass. " We need an Abbe* to say 
Mass for us." " To have an Abbe you must have an Abbeye" said 
Mousty. The half-jesting words bore fruit, and the result was the 
splendid Abbey of Maredsous. 

Its first Abbot was Dom Placid Wolter, one of the founders of the 
Congregation at Beuron. His brother, Dom Maurus, Arch-abbot 
of Beuron, died in July, 1890, and Dom Placid was elected to succeed 
him. This left Maredsous vacant, and the abbatial throne was filled 
by Dom Hildebrand, whose wonderful vocation had been the cause 
of its very existence. 

This was how I first came to know this great man. I had been 
received into the Church by Dom Placid, and I was still there when 
the change came. I shall never forget my first meeting with Dom 
Hildebrand. I was longing to become a monk, and Dom Placid 
had been more than kind about it. He gave me over to Dom 
Hildebrand, and in August of that year I was received into the 
novice-ship. 

Dom Hildebrand had a great future before him. He was destined 
to become the first Abbot Primate, or Superior General of the whole 
Order of St. Benedict ; a new dignity devised by Pope Leo XIII. 
And not only was he Abbot Primate but Abbot of the international 
College of Benedictine monks, that of St. Anselmo on the Aventine 
at Rome. He made the plans for this great building, for he was a 
born architect, as he also made those for the Abbey of St. Scholastica, 
near Maredsous, for Benedictine nuns, and the School of Arts and 
Crafts at Maredsous, which was dedicated to St. Joseph. They were 
both beautiful buildings and marvellously well adapted to the ends 
for which they were designed. 

St. Joseph's School, close to the Abbey, had an interesting origin. 
When Abbot Hildebrand was elected, he found the novitiate almost 
empty. He therefore made a solemn vow to St. Joseph, in which he 
promised that, if novices came in sufficient numbers, he would make 
this foundation in honour of the Artizan of Nazareth for the benefit 
of orphans and poor boys. From that day, novices began to flow in 
in large numbers, so that before long the Abbot was able to accomplish 
his vow, St. Joseph's School became a wonderful success. The 
Abbot designed for it a beautiful group of buildings, with its own 
chapel, refectory and dormitories, grouped round a central glass- 



37 GREAT CATHOLICS 

roofed hall, containing large, airy workshops, in which the boys, 
taught by monks of artistic ability, exercise their crafts with really 
remarkable success. They have earned medals in international 
exhibitions and their work is acknowledged by all who examine it 
to be extraordinary good. 

At Tyburn Convent in London, an altar carved in oak by these 
boys, contains six beautiful oak statuettes of English martyrs. The 
embroidered curtain behind the altar, and the jewelled lamps which 
hang around it, are also the work of these young craftsmen of 
Maredsous. 

All this was the work of Dom Hildebrand, a born artist. He also 
built the Abbey of Maredret for Benedictine nuns. It is more ornate, 
and to my mind much more beautiful than the neighbouring Abbey 
of Maredsous. His own sister became the first Abbess of this lovely 
Abbey, so that brother and sister ruled over the adjacent monasteries, 
recalling the days of St. Benedict and his sister St. Scholastica. 

But a greater work was before him, in the planning of the great 
Abbey of Sant* Ansdmo at Rome. I well remember seeing him 
working at this in his cell at Maredsous. It was to be, as it now is, 
a central house of studies for young Benedictines of all nations, and it 
was also to be the home of him who was to be elected Abbot Primate 
of the Order. It was only fitting that this new office, planned by 
Leo XIII, should be destined for him who had laid the foundations 
of his home. 

Abbot Hildebrand became the first Abbot Primate. At first he 
retained his old and much-beloved home at Maredsous, and used to 
pass between it and the new College at Rome, spending as much 
time as he could spare at Maredsous. But after a time this became 
impossible, and he had to resign the charge of Maredsous, though it 
was a real grief to him. I had the honour and the happiness of being 
with him, both at Maredsous and at Rome. The magnificent building 
he had designed for Sant 5 Anselmo was not completed till after my 
ordination to the priesthood (in March, 1895) so that I lived only in 
the temporary college which preceded it. Still I saw it rising on the 
Aventine Hill, and marvelled at its beauty. 

The college was then in the Via Bocca di Leone, just off the well- 
Iqiown Piazza d'Espagna. We had a very happy time there. The 
Rector was a well-known monk of Maredsous, Dom Laurent Janssens, 
who afterwards was promoted to the Episcopate. But Dom Hilde- 
brand was not only the Superior, but also the life and soul of the 
place. The sad days of the Petrine imprisonment kept the Pop^ 
immured in the Vatican, but we were admitted sometimes to an 
audience. 

Doin Hildebrand, meantime, was engaged in the plans for the new 



DOM HILDEBRAND DE HEMPTINNE 371 

and permanent Sant* Anselmo, which gave great satisfaction to Pope 
Leo XIII. I received from him the Minor Orders, and later on 
became a priest at Rome, being ordained by H. E. Cardinal Parocchi. 
I had made my Solemn Vows of Religion also at Rome, in the hands of 
my beloved Father-in-Christ, Dom Hildebrand. We all expected 
and hoped that he would have been created a Cardinal, but it was 
not to be. I suppose he would have had to leave his work at St. 
Anselmo, if this had happened, so it was no doubt for the best as 
it was. 

We were a band of monks of many countries and Congregations, 
English, Belgian, Austrian, French and American, and Dom Hilde- 
brand seemed perfectly at home with us all. It was the English he 
specially loved, as it seemed to us. He had spent some years as the 
Superior of a small Community of Beuron Benedictines at Erdington, 
near Birmingham. He had learnt to speak English perfectly, and he 
told me that it had been a special joy to him that the first postulant 
to whom he gave the habit, when created Abbot of Maredsous, should 
have been an Englishman and a convert, myself. 

So, although I had joined a foreign Community, I was completely 
happy and at home under his fatherly and enlightened rule. I was 
destined to be sent to Erdington as soon as I was ordained priest. 

The ex-papal zouave was perfectly at home in Rome, and was 
always persona grata to the reigning Pontiff, the great Pope Leo XIII. 

Pope Leo had a special affection for the Order of St. Benedict. His 
intention and desire was that this great Order should flourish once 
again in all its primitive splendour. He meant the College of St. 
Anselm to be a link between the various Congregations of the Order 
and a powerful support for the whole Order. And it was this intention 
which led him to create what was then a complete novelty, the office 
of an Abbot Primate, which should unite them under one head. He 
realized that he had found in Dom Hildebrand that wideness of 
spirit and depth of charity which were required for an Office which 
was at once a novelty and a link of union. 

The Primate was not to be a General of an Order, he was to be a 
leader suited to the peculiar circumstances, who was to guide his 
brethren in religion to the unity which was so necessary in those troubled 
times, and serve as a central power in the .Eternal City, to whom all 
could have recourse in the difficulties that might disturb their peace. 
As Abbot Butler has said, Abbot Hildebrand was far from content with 
the labours which the rule of his own Abbey, and the presidency 
over the whole Order assigned to him. 

The great Catholic University of Louvain gave him the opportunity 
of new labours and new foundations. The Prior of Maredsous, Dom 
Robert de Kerchove, was sent to Louvain, to take charge of the 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

young monks who made these their theological studies. Dom 
Columba Marmion, an Irish priest, who had joined the novitiate at 
Maredsous, went later to assist him in the work. Dom Golumba 
was a man of extraordinary piety, and deep learning. He had been 
one of the foremost students at the College of the Propagation of the 
Faith at Rome. His entering the novitiate at Maredsous was, it 
seemed, a special grace of God's Providence, and it was soon evident 
that he was destined to become famous in the land of his adoption. 
He was a thorough Irishman, witty, bright and charming, and at the 
same time a man of prayer, a marvellous preacher, and a most learned 
theologian. His vocation to the monastic life at Maredsous seemed 
quite extraordinary. He was a complete stranger, knowing no one 
in the Community. He returned from Rome as a young priest, went 
back to Ireland for a time, and then left everything to become a 
monk in this Belgian Abbey. (He had visited it with a fellow-student 
on his way back from Rome.) He had a peculiarly difficult novitiate 
in this foreign land, but he knew that God called him there, and he 
never wavered in his obedience. He was my guide and my friend, 
when I came to Maredsous as a young parson, and but for him I 
might never have responded to God's call. 

Louvain, to which he was sent, as Prior of the new monastery there, 
became for some years his home, till God called him back to 
Maredsous to take the throne left vacant by Dom Hildebrand's death. 

It was in 1896 that Abbot Hildebrand founded the great monastery 
of Mont Caesar at Louvain. It was on a hill overlooking the University 
town, and here the Abbot erected in a few years, from his own designs, 
a truly magnificent Abbey. Dom Robert in due time became its 
first Abbot. Happily he still survives, though at a great age. I am told 
that though he is over 90, he still rises every morning to Matins, at 
5a.m. 

The Abbey of Mont Cesar was one of the. greatest works of Abbot 
Hildebrand, worthy to rank with St. Anselmo itself. But it was 
built by stages. It was in 1899, that Dom Robert de Kerchove took 
possession of the Monastery, which Abbot Hildebrand had named 
Regina Co?//, for the Queen of Heaven was to be the patroness of this 
new house of God. A few months later Dom Robert was created 
Abbot. He was blessed at Maredsous on September 8th, 1899 the 
feast of the Birthday of the Queen. 

Another great work for the Benedictine Order was accomplished 
by Dom Gerard van Calcen, a monk of Maredsous. In the spring 
of 1893, he received a missive from Rome, signed by Dom Hildebrand, 
enjoining him to set out for Brazil, there to work for the restoration 
of the Benedictine Order. 

Dom Gerard was a really great man. Born of a noble Flemish 



DOM HILDEBRAND DE HEMFTINNE 

family^ he had been one of the very first monks to join Dom Hildebrand 
at Maredsous. He had been founder and first Rector of the Abbey 
School at Maredsous, Prior of the Abbey, and later on Prefect of the 
young monks who made their studies at St. Anselmo. He was chosen 
by Leo XIII to undertake this very difficult work of reformation in 
Brazil. Curiously enough I was his companion at a Papal audience 
in the spring of 1893, when he first was told of his future work by 
Leo XIII himself. It was the Feast of Candlemas, when it is 
customary for the various Colleges and Religious Orders to present a 
taper to the Holy Father. 

The Pope received most graciously the splendid wax candle we 
presented to him, and told Dom Gerard that he was sending him 
to Brazil. It was an extraordinarily difficult mission which was 
entrusted to him, but he fulfilled it magnificently, and is now con- 
sidered in Brazil with reverence and affection as the Second Founder 
of the Order in that country. He was eventually created a Bishop, 
with jurisdiction over Rio Branco. But he had already been Abbot 
of Rio de Janeiro, and he had transformed a land of desolation into 
a flourishing centre of monastic life. He was consecrated at Maredsous, 
under the title of Bishop of Phocaea, April i8th, 1906. 

Dom Hildebrand was accustomed to leave Rome and return to 
Maredsous about mid-Lent. He thus spent Holy Week and Easter 
in his Monastery, presiding at all the functions, and then returned to 
Rome, until the end of June, when he came back to his dear monastic 
home for the summer months. It was a busy time, for the novitiate 
was then crowded with new postulants, and there were many young 
monies preparing for the priesthood. Thus on August soth, 1903, 
nine deacons, all monks of Maredsous, received the priesthood from 
the Bishop of Namur. And there were then more than 50 priest- 
monks to lay their hands on the young Levites. 

Many of the monks of Maredsous were employed at Rome. The 
Rector of St. Anselmo, Dom Laurent Janssens, later Secretary of 
the Biblical Commission, Dom Pierre Bastien, Professor of Canon Law, 
Dom Ursmer Berlire, Director of the Belgian Historical Institution 
at Rome, were notable names among them. 

Dom Hildebrand passed the months of August and September in 
England in order to get to know more intimately the ancient and 
venerable Anglo-Benedictine Congregation. He came, as he said, 
" not as a visitor, whose chief duty is to look, but as a father whose 
great duty is to love." His visit was a great success. On both sides 
there was an equal desire, an equal zeal to arrive at definite constitu- 
tions. Three years after his visit appeared the famous bull Diu quidem, 
which can be considered as the charter of the English Benedictines. 

In the year 1895, he visited Cluny and the other foundations due to 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

Dom Mayeui Lamey. There was a very happy outcome of his visit 
to the English monasteries: our Priories became Abbeys, and a decree 
of the Sacred Congregation of Bites raised to the honours of Beatifica- 
tion those of our English Martyrs who were represented in the famous 
painting in the English College at Rome. Not only that, but St. Bede 
the Venerable, " the torch of the Church lighted by the Holy Ghost 
among the Anglo-Saxons/ 5 was made a Doctor of the Church, and 
his Office extended to the Universal Church. Thus English Catholics, 
and English Benedictines in particular, have much to be grateful for 
to the labours of the Primate. 

Dom Hildebrand also had great sympathy for the Oriental Churches, 
and did all he could to help on their reunion to the Catholic and 
Roman Church. The principal result of these endeavours was the 
foundation of the Monastery of the Dormitio at Jerusalem, the spot 
which marks the place of the falling asleep of the Mother of God. 

On the feast of St. Martin of Tours, November i ith, 1900, there was 
celebrated with truly Roman magnificence, the Consecration of the 
Church of St. Anselmo on the Aventine Hill. The Prelates and 
Abbots of the Order were invited to this ceremony. Cardinal 
Rampolla del Tindaro, as Legate a latere, presided, and there assisted 
twelve archbishops and bishops, seventy prelates, nearly all of them 
abbots, while in the Tribune, twelve cardinals, and the diplomats 
of foreign countries accredited to the Holy See, found their place. 
The Abbot-Primate offered the Holy Sacrifice in the crypt. On 
November i3th, Feast of All Saints of the Benedictine Order, he sung 
Pontifical High Mass in the new Basilica, which had been designed 
by his own hands. On the octave day, Leo XIII gave a private 
audience to Dom Hildebrand and to the Benedictines who had taken 
part in the consecration ceremonies. The aged Pontiff received them 
with the greatest possible kindness, and in his speech begged them to 
do all they could to help the College of St. Anselmo. 

Meanwhile a new persecution was raging in France. In the summer 
of 1901, Dom Hildebrand received some of the victims at Maredsous: 
the Abbots of Liguge, St. Wandrilla and Glanfeuil. He helped them 
with funds as far as he was able, and offered them the new building 
of St. Joseph. But as their time of exile promised to be a long one, 
they preferred to seek more permanent places of refuge. Solesmes 
was already settled at Quarrin the Isle of Wight, and those of Marseilles 
in Italy. The other communities established themselves in Belgium. 

In 1903, the great Pope Leo XIII died. Six days before his end, 
his trembling hand had written a Latin poem in honour of St. Anselm, 
which he sent as a last pledge of his paternal affection to Dom 
Hildebrand. He had intended to make him a Cardinal before he died, 
but he yielded to the opposition of certain important persons. 



DOM HILDEBRAND DE HEMPTINNE 

He was succeeded by Pius X, who made a point of receiving Dom 
Hildebrand in special audience before the year was out. The Abbot 
addressed the Holy Father in moving terms. He thanked the new 
Pope for having, like his predecessor, taken over the protectorate of 
the Order. He offered him the filial devotion of all the sons of St. 
Benedict. " If we must fight, suffer, die perhaps to uphold the truth 
and defend the Pope from his enemies, we are ready, as we always 
have been ready. 55 

Great feasts had already been prepared for to celebrate the thirteenth 
centenary of St. Gregory the Great. Pius X was determined to use 
this occasion to restore to the Church the ancient and venerable 
Gregorian Chant, which was one of the special legacies of the great 
Apostle of the English. The flood of modern music used in the Roman 
Churches, and indeed throughout Europe, had all but extinguished 
the work of St. Gregory. But Pius X was to restore it to its ancient 
glory. The Benedictines, especially in France, had been working 
on it for years. And it was an immense joy to them, and to the whole 
Order, when the new Pope took the chant under his special protection, 
and did all he could to make it known and used throughout the 
Catholic Church. 

Dom Hildebrand was naturally anxious to do all he could for the 
furtherance of the Holy Father's wishes with regard to the ancient 
chant. The thirteenth centenary of St. Gregory the Great culminated 
in a magnificent Gregorian festival, a Papal Mass sung in St. Peter 5 s, 
on April i ith. There were no less than 1,250 in the choir, which was 
formed by seminarists and religious from all parts of Rome, led by a 
choir of 150 cantors (the Schola Cantorum] from the Benedictines of 
St. Anselmo and St. Paul's outside the Walls. The Pope assisted in 
person at the ceremony, and after all was over he received in private 
audience the famous Dom Pothier, to whom the resurrection of the 
ancient chant was mainly due. Dom Hildebrand presided at a 
similar solemnity at St. PauFs, the Primate being authorized to use 
the Papal altar, the high altar of the Basilica usually reserved strictly 
for the Pope. 

Meanwhile Dom Hildebrand devoted himself to his enormous 
correspondence. He wrote, as he said, " from morning to evening ; " 
he replied to all his correspondents, however simple and unknown. 
It was said of him later that " he had killed himself by writing letters." 
He wrote in many languages, English, French, Italian, even in German, 
though that he always found difficult. 

In 1907 he decided to convoke the Abbots-President of the various 
Congregations to a Synod, in which the various needs of the Order 
could be discussed, and a decision taken on difficult points. Among 
the important works undertaken at this assembly was the Commission 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

to deal with the Vulgate. It was desired to restore it as far as possible 
to its original text. The work was entrusted to Dom Aidan Gasquet, 
afterwards Cardinal, and to Dom Laurent Janssens, who was already 
Secretary of the Biblical Commission. Later on, the principal figure 
connected with this work was Dom John Chapman, who was destined 
to become Abbot of Downside. 

In 1909, Dom Hildebrand ceased to be Abbot of Maredsous, the Pope 
wishing him to be fixed at Rome. It was a great grief to the monks 
of Maredsous to lose their beloved Father, but it was impossible to go 
on combining in one person two such important charges. 

Abbot Hildebrand spent the last years of his life in Rome. In 1913 
he made a pilgrimage to Monte Cassino to pray our Holy Father 
St. Benedict that his successor as Primate might be a worthy President 
of the Order he loved so dearly. His prayers were heard when the 
choice of the electors fell on Dom Fidelis von Stotzingen, Abbot of 
Maria-Laach, who is still happily reigning as Primate, having been 
but recently re-elected to his post. 

Dom Hildebrand retired to the Abbey of Beuron. He spent his 
time in prayer : his Mass, celebrated with heroic sacrifice, was now 
always the same, the Mass of Our Lady De Beata. His love and 
devotion for the Blessed Virgin had always been the keynote of his 
life. It was on the Feast of the Assumption, in 1870, that he had 
made his monastic vows. The ring he wore, given to him by M. 
Desclee, had engraved inside it, Hildebrand servus Maria, but a few years 
before his death, he had the inscription altered to Filius Maria. He 
loved indeed the Mother of God with a truly filial devotion. But 
his health gradually declined, and it was evident that he was 
approaching his end. He had been hoping to return to Rome in 
October, but it was not to be. 

From the 2Oth July, of this year (1913) he was worse and it was 
clear that the end was near. He received the Last Sacraments on 
August nth, and he prepared to meet death with serenity and indeed 
with supernatural joy. To the infirmarian he said "It is the will 
of God, I must depart, I am happy." Wednesday, August I3th, was 
to be his last day on this earth. That evening he blessed with the 
Sign of the Cross those who were gathered round his bed. After 
kissing the crucifix, he was given the relic of his beloved Saint, St. 
Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, which he always wore, and he was asked if 
he accepted her advice, " Not to die but rather to suffer ! " " Yes," 
was his reply. Then, a few moments later, he whispered, " Jesus, all 
for love of Thee ! " They were his last words. 

He was 64 years of age, in the 43rd year of his monastic profession, 
and in the 42nd of his priesthood. He had been Abbot-Primate of 
the Benedictine Order for more than 20 years. 



DOM HILDEBRAND DE HEMPTINNE 377 

On the Feast of the Assumption, two days later, crowds of pilgrims 
came to venerate his body. Among them was a Protestant who on 
seeing it, exclaimed, " Truly this spectacle would be sufficient to 
convert an unbeliever to faith in the future life, 33 

He was buried in the Abbey Church of Beuron. The Abbot-Primate, 
Dom Fidelis von Stotzingen, presided at the ceremony, which was 
attended by bishops and abbots from all parts of Europe. He was 
laid to rest at the foot of the ancient altar of Our Lady of Sorrows, 
close to the tombs of the Beuron Arch-Abbots, Dom Maurus and 
Dom Placid Wolter. A beautiful monument was erected to his 
memory at St. Anselmo : it is surmounted with his bust, and decorated 
with the coats-of-arms of the 15 Benedictine Congregations. But his 
best memorial is the Abbey of St. Anselmo itself. There everything 
speaks of him, the monk, the artist, the Abbot-Primate. 

Those who knew him can never forget him, and long after their 
departure, his name will go down to history as the great and glorious 
Abbot, who was so dear to God and to man. Requiescat in pace. 



MAUD MONAHAN 



MOTHER JANET STUART 



A.D. 1857-1914 

WHEN IN 1914 Mother Stuart died at the age of 57, her loss seemed 
to many an irreparable one. " I looked forward to great 
things which I expected her to do/ 5 wrote a priest, and another saw in 
her death " a public calamity ... a disaster to the cause of religious 
education and the Catholic Church." 

But on the evening of her death, October 2ist, Fr. Roche, S.J., 
speaking in the Chapel of Roehampton, assured his hearers that their 
petition to Our Lady to prolong the life of their mother had not been 
made in vain. " You asked a lesser thing, Our Lady will give a 
greater. Mother Stuart will come back to you to be a greater power 
in your lives than if she had stayed with you. . . . Her biography as 
a world-wide power began this morning." 

And when, about seven years later, her life was published, some of 
those who deeply grieved for her loss, not only as for a friend, but as 
for one who could have helped so many souls, prayed that through 
its pages and those of Mother Stuart's published writings, which 
followed her biography, she might continue the work she had begun 
on earth, and teach and guide and strengthen souls unceasingly. 

No one could have lived with Mother Stuart and failed to realize 
that she was unlike the great majority. There was about her a 
mystery of peace ; she seemed, as Pere Charles, S.J., said, when he 
first met her, " to have recaptured, with the help of grace, that state 
of blessed liberty which preceded the original fall." Had the conquest 
been won by pain, had the goal been attained after arduous struggle 
all trace of painful effort had disappeared. Her supernatural perfection 
seemed natural. 

Pere Charles met her in the last years of her life, but 35 years earlier 
Father Gallwey had declared she was " the most complete person he had 
ever met." Gifted in every way, mind and heart and will, yet over 
all her gifts she was the master, and able to use them as she willed. 
A rarer gift indeed than all the rest in our unbalanced race. She 
exemplified in her life what she urged on others : " Take yourself 

37* 



MOTHER JANET STUART 

as you are, whole, and do not try to live by one part alone and starve 
the other. Control, but do not kill." 

Many in presence of her almost incomprehensible manifestation of 
leisure and repose in a life, which seemed filled to the brim with 
unending work one item of which alone " the mere burden of 
correspondence " would, as it has been said, " have daunted any but 
the bravest " have tried to explain it by saying : times were quieter, 
she had fewer calls upon her than we have to-day. And they have 
not understood that the secret of her success lay then, as it would 
assuredly have done to-day, in her complete self-mastery. Under her 
strong rule there was harmony between soul and body. 

She made no noise, as it is generally understood, in the world. 
She neither founded a religious order, nor faced the labours of the 
mission fields, nor did she revolutionize our methods of educating the 
young. Her unbounded influence over people was established by 
the gentlest and most imperceptible outward action and means. And 
this was as it should be for a chosen instrument of God, who as 
Ruysbroek says dwells in a sublime stillness, and who came to His fiery 
prophet, not as Elias seemed to expect, " in a great and strong wind 
overthrowing mountains and breaking the rocks in pieces, nor in the 
earthquake that followed, nor even in the fire " ; these things went 
before the Lord, but He Himself came " in the whistling of a gentle 
air." " So too," wrote Mother Stuart, " after the long preparation 
for the Incarnation, It came in great silence and tranquillity, only 
a few words, and only one to hear them." 

And so perhaps is it most often in His direct action upon souls. 
Many zealous seekers after them have found it to be true that 

. . . While the tired waves, vainly breaking 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent flooding in the main. 

Of her thirty-three years in religious life, thirty were spent in the 
comparative obscurity of Roehampton, and the last three in journeys 
round the world. " Having made a beautiful thing," wrote Fr. 
Roche, " God took her as it were by the hand and led her through 
His world for all to see." But that which all saw, and which won their 
love and admiration was the outcome of her thirty years of hidden 
life. A life like that of many others in the religious state, filled with 
duties and interests common to all whose lives are consecrated to 
God. It was in these years and by these means that she had become 
" joined unto Our Lord in everlasting love." 

She had entered the Society of the Sacred Heart with the fixed 



380 GREAT CATHOLICS 

determination to lead a perfect life, and that determination never 
faltered. But unlike so many seekers after sanctity, she realized, as she 
wrote, that " surrender in daily life is the solution of the great problem : 
how is my soul to get to God." She never waited for the great occasion, 
for the magic word, the magic hour or thought which would change 
all things and land her in the embrace of God ! " We are so earthly 
minded," she wrote, " that we are a long time before we stop looking 
for something great ; yet see God's choice of means to His great ends 
the matter of the Sacraments ; the trivial apparent chances of word 
or act that make a hinge, and turn the direction of whqle lives." 

She gave all, as she said to another setting out on the same path, 
" and went in for death or life or whatever God might choose." And 
this, wrote Abbot Marmion, is the whole of sanctity. 

God's choice of the path by which each soul shall reach Him is His 
own secret. As in the Easter Apparitions, He comes in a different 
guise to every one. " We know so little of what each one's secret is," 
wrote Mother Stuart, " ours to ourselves is everything . . . Every 
friendship with God and every love between Him and a soul is the only 
one of its kind ... A unique relationship love, friendship, prayer, 
union, whatever you choose to call it, and in this unique relationship 
qms nos separabit" 

But though no one can fathom another's secret, and write the history 
of their spiritual life, we can see how three great virtues were 
conspicuous in that of Mother Stuart : Faith, Hope and Charity, 
and these as the Catechism tells us are those which unite us most 
completely to God. " Those elemental forces of our souls," wrote 
Mother Suart, " by which we hold on to God are according to the 
teaching of the Catechism Faith, Hope and Charity. Beyond all 
controversy, beyond all human understanding, all human will-power 
(without the help of grace) these fundamental acts of the soul attach 
us to God, and this attachment to Him is the one thing necessary . . . 
Faith is the light of our life. That which gives it what we all long 
for above everything certainty . . . Not a certainty that is exempt 
from difficulties, but one that glories in them. The act of Faith is 
the daring, willing venture of the soul out of sight of land ; an act 
of the will supreme over the restive mind." 

Boundless is the horizon of the soul that lives by faith. " It makes 
us treat with realities, when we only see the symbols." And describing 
the fruits of a strong Faith, she drew her own portrait. "... As 
faith strengthens and matures," she said, " the mind becomes singularly 
hopeful, tender, patient about human things. It finds no stumbling 
blocks in the frailties of fellow Christians, no astonishment in failure 
or scandals, but persists in seeing the good, the hopeful, the victorious, 
the eternal . . . and in finding Our Lord through every disguise," 



MOTHER JANET STUART 5 & 

Hope she called the victory of our life. It must be she said not only 
firm, but large and glorious and full of expectations of the knowledge 
and life we shall have when we see God face to face. When as she wrote 
to another " all crooked things will go right, and the word will come 
into the riddle and the key into the puzzle, and we shall be so delighted 
to think that it was right all along and that we trusted Him when 
things were darkest and most incomprehensible." 

Ten years after her death a very beautiful appreciation of Mother 
Stuart appeared in the Messenger of The Sacred Heart, in a series of 
papers by Fr. Mangin, S.J., entitled Studies in Saintship. The 
following passages which speak of her Hope and Charity have been 
taken from it. 

" Mother Stuart was a woman born to rule . . . Yet her danger 
was self-distrust. Fostered, this weakness might have wrecked all ; 
combated, it gave to her soul an unusual degree of confidence in God, 
and to her intercourse with others a simplicity and sympathy which 
won all hearts. * Human ' said someone, * was the word that best 
described her. 5 This note of humanity, a singular appreciation and 
love of every human creature, is the dominant note of her character. 
She was a great administrator, a great educator, with a mind at once 
daring, original and disciplined ; a tireless worker also ; but the 
manifestation of God through her, remains the manifestation of His 
Infinite Goodness. 

"The spirit of her letters too breathes every hope and courage and 
cheerful confidence in God. . . . c There must be pain and doubt and 
insoluble difficulties/' she wrote, but as the screws said to the rivets, 
when the ship was straining in a gale : In case of doubt, hold on ! 
Wait for God to explain Himself in Eternity. It would be childish to 
think that we could understand in time. But never let go of the 
belief that He is the All-Good. 5 Her hope and patience were indefatig- 
able. . . . But the greater the love, the more protracted and trustful the 
patience, so much deeper was the pain of disappointment at failure and 
ingratitude. . . . 

" Here it is, in the deepest difficulty of her practice of charity, that 
we strike the source from which it sprang. * The Charity of Christ 
presseth us. 5 He had given Himself so entirely to them, she wrote 
of Our Lord and His Disciples, * that their failure did not disturb 
His affection for them. He looked beyond it.' 

" And in a letter written some years earlier, her method of working 
is plainly shown : * As to loving many people, I think the point of the 
problem comes in the question : From loving many people shall I 
not rise to loving God ? And I think the answer is, no ; very few people 
can manage it that way . . . But from loving God alone I can get 
intuitions of Him in everyone and then love them, and have them in 



382 GREAT CATHOLICS 

rny heart and not only in my eclectic head, with a very high priced 
ticket of admission 3 . . . One facet only of her many-sided character, 
one virtue only of her strong and gifted soul has been presented here. 
But since God is love, and His new Commandment is that we should 
love one another as He has loved us, it is the most Christ-like, and 
therefore the most attractive of her virtues. And she bears for us this 
further comfort, that assuredly God cannot have abandoned the 
country from which even in our own time He has raised so faithful 
a servant and so rare an image of His all-embracing Goodness." 

When Mother Stuart died she had indeed a vast concourse of friends, 
the members of her own Society and many more with whom, from her 
position and her world-wide travels, she had come in contact. But 
since that time she has made her way to countless others who had never 
heard of her in life. Some of their testimonies to her influence are 
gathered here. 

Priests, religious of many Orders, men and women in different 
paths in life, and in places far apart, have united in declaring that 
she has been to them a channel of God's Grace. 

" As one reads her wise and witty sayings," wrote Canon Burton, 
" how the memory of St. Thomas More arises in the mind. Surely 
she was spiritually akin to him, as he is summed up by the Church in 
the collect for his festival : hilari fortique animo crucem tuam amplecti 
tribuisti. Gaiety, strength and always the Cross." 

A well-known Benedictine having been brought by a friend, a priest 
likewise, to visit Roehampton, wrote to him : " It was very good of 
you to spend time in showing me the home of Mother Digby and 
Mother Stuart. I have had a great reverence for both of them ever 
since I read their lives and especially for the latter. Of Mother 
Stuart, what you said, is, I am sure true, that she was one of the 
very greatest women of her time, even judged by a merely human 
standard." 

" The world might go a thousand years and not produce the equal 
to Mother Stuart, a wonderful personality and a singularly lovable 
woman," wrote a Jesuit, and another added : " Her life not only 
gives a perfect exposition of religious life, but is the most complete 
exposition of Catholic spirituality in England since the reformation." 
These words were re-echoed from America where more than one priest 
recommended her spirituality as being, said one, " the best to be found 
in the Church in the present day." 

" Mother Stuart helped me more that I can say in my retreat," 
wrote a priest in London, and his words were echoed from many other 
places. From India a missioner wrote asking for a copy of her life : 
" I shall soon be making my retreat. Last time I had the help of 
Mother Stuart, but in this poor mission we have got no such book." 



MOTHER JANET STUART 383 

" Mon est similis illi" wrote a Franciscan Father. " I won't make 
any other comment, but simply say with St. Francis of Sales : * I will 
do something, 3 " 

As might have been expected many of these new friends of Mother 
Stuart have been found among those whose lives, like her own were 
consecrated to God. 

" I have had a great treat during my illness : the Life of Mother 
Stuart ! " wrote the Abbess of a contemplative Order. " What can I 
say to give you to understand how I love her. No wonder that Our 
Lord 4 longed for her.' She was surely the most beautiful and perfect 
soul of her generation. While she lived I was never privileged to have 
a word from her. Now I do, and I think she knows how I love her . . . 
I have never felt so at home, and so one with anyone for ages." 

From a number of letters from Poor Clare Convents in many parts 
of the world, the following may be quoted : " I cannot tell you the 
benefit I have derived personally from the perusal of your late 
Mother General's biography, nor how it is urging me to live my own 
life as a Poor Clare Colettine with increased fervour and inwardness." 

From a lonely missioner in Calabar, who had asked that the writings 
of Mother Stuart might be sent to help her, as she was so far away, 
the following word of appreciation came : "I want to tell you all the 
consolation and profit that I got from Mother Stuarfs Life and Letters. 
I have a read it again and again and always with new joy. How good 
God was to give her to you and to us all" 

" When I was a young Mistress at X," wrote a member of an Order 
devoted to teaching, " a priest made me a present of Mother Stuart's 
Education of Catholic girls. The book made a great impression on me 
and I often wished I could have met its author, but this happiness 
never fell to my lot. I feel I have met her now, and the meeting, 
which has been an unmixed spiritual joy came to me in the reading 
of her life . . . When I read and re-read it I feel I shall not need 
another spiritual-reading book for years ! The spirituality is so strong 
and so true, so far reaching and so practical . . . When you are 
kneeling by dear Mother Stuart's grave . . . pray sometimes for one 
who will always love and revere her as a great religious and a friend 
of Heaven's choosing and giving." 

But it is not only, nor even chiefly among priests and religious that 
Mother Stuart has found new friends. Going through the highways 
and the byways of the world she has gathered many round her. Some 
say, they owe to her the grace of conversion to Catholicism, and many 
have found in her words, help and comfort to bear the daily wear and 
tear of life. 

A nurse, a convert to Catholicism writes : "For several years I was 
stationed at the West London Hospital, and I have spent hours on the 



384 GREAT CATHOLICS 

flat roof of the nurses' home that overlooks the Convent grounds. 
I used to watch the nuns, and in my ignorance, I pitied them for their 
enclosed life . . . The first Catholic book I ever read was the Life of 
Mother Stuart. I was thrilled by it. I read about her death over and 
over again, and I had a longing to go and pray at her tomb in 
Roehampton. I thought the nuns would not admit a Protestant, and 
anyhow I was down here at JB., so I used to say every day : Mother 
Stuart pray for me. I had no knowledge of the Catholic dogma of 
prayer, either to or for the dead, and I was not used to saying prayers 
at all worth the name, so I didn't know why I did it or what I wanted. 
But within 18 months I was under instruction." 

In an office in a factory in a foreign land another friend appeared. 
A convert to the Church, she wrote : " During the days of my con- 
version I had no troubles of any kind, they all came afterwards . . . 
One day when it was very dark all round me inside me just as well, 
I bought a book which does wonderful things for me, and always does, 
the more I read it ... It is the German translation of the book of 
your beloved Mother Janet Stuart ... I can never say what 
happiness it has brought me ... If I am unhappy, grumbling about 
my destiny, furious with the whole world ! I have just to read a few 
lines and I get another view. She must have been the most wonderful 
person, and I think we never can learn enough from her ... I 
would recommend the book to every person who has any religious 
troubles ... If you could perhaps give me the titles of the books 
she has written personally ... I would be so thankful to you . . . 
I know there are other good books, but I like, before all, her style." 
Then having spoken of some special anxieties of the moment, she 
added, " I need therefore distractions, and where could I get better 
ones than in the books of dear Mother Stuart ... If you have a 
photo of her would you send one to me please. She would always 
remind me that with good will . . . we can get holy." 

From the United States one among numbers of testimonies may be 
given, that of a person who described herself as " one of those tired 
mothers, who have no leisure, excepting at the end of a long day . . . 
Mother Stuart came into my life just when I needed her most . . . 
About four years ago I had the joy of reading her life . . . daily 
she is in my mind and in my heart always . . . Have you for dis- 
tribution a picture or leaflet, a prayer perhaps of hers that I may 
have . . . Spiritually I am very needy and perhaps your reply will 
be the closest I can ever be to your beloved Janet Stuart ... At 
present we, like thousands of others are going through a terrible 
ordeal, trying to live, trying to be hopeful in a very hopeless world . . . 
You can understand why Mother Stuart's Life appealed so strongly to 
me and helped me. She taught me to have a mighty faith. And in 



MOTHER JANET STUART 385 

face of the most discouraging circumstances, I wanted to be brave 
to the end. I wanted to think of Our Lord as the tender Shepherd as 
she did ... A few days ago I received, from Roehampton, a package 
of the loveliest books by Mother Stuart. It was a joy I never dreamed 
of, it has been a breath of heaven to me ... I can't help feeling that 
from her heavenly home Mother Stuart understands and is trying 
to help me ... I never needed strength and guidance in all these 
past hard years as I did the day the books arrived ... It was like a 
message from Mother Stuart herself.' 5 

From the other side of the world, the Editor of a paper in Manchuria 
wrote : " I was profoundly impressed by the greatness of Mother 
Stuart ... It has given me much satisfaction to impress on friends 
and acquaintances the * inspiration of the life, 5 in places as far apart 
as Denmark, Manchuria and India ... In my own case the book is 
a constant companion, very much worn, having accompanied me round 
the world. I am sure that Mother Stuart herself would enjoy knowing 
that not only is my faith renewed and strengthened under her guidance, 
but I get an enormous amount of downright fun out of her enjoyment 
of life, which she found so constantly refreshing . . ." And when 
business brought this friend to England for a short time, he caine 
to Roehampton to visit " the Chapel so intimately connected with 
Mother Stuart. 

The next witness is called from, as she said ; " out back in the 
Australian bush, far from church and spiritual counsel ... By a 
great chance I was enabled to get the loan, from a friend, of Mother 
Stuarfs Life. Before I returned it I read it three times . . . Will 
you pray for me and mine and ask her to take us under her special 
protection once for all." Then referring to some passages in Mother 
Stuart's letters she added : " if unfortunately I have not the pleasure 
to be a friend of either yours or hers, I would like to be. If you can 
spare me any of her booklets I would deem It a very great favour, 
for I am sure my spiritual life would gain by it ... please ask her 
to guide my mind so as to enable me to make the best of her advice." 

And yet another traveller on the upward path wrote to a friend, 
" What a beautiful soul was hers. Such intellectual gifts coupled 
with the most fragrant humility. It left me breathless with admiration 
and quite fired with a desire to start afresh by being good in little 
things, obedience, selflessness, charity." 

" One feels assured," wrote a Jesuit, " that there is not an unbeliever 
however bigoted who, if he made acquaintance with these letters 
of Mother Stuart, permeated with religion though they are, would 
not pay tribute to the spell they exercise." And it is a fact that 
Mother Stuart has won countless friends outside the Church. 

" Dear friend of many years ago," writes one of these, " I feel I 



386 GREAT CATHOLICS 

must write to you because I seem to have been so near to Roehampton 
for the last two weeks. You will wonder why, until I say that I have 
been reading the Life of Mother Stuart, and cannot remember any other 
book, except the Bible, which has given me such joy and inspiration 
and a wonderful vision of holy things. Will you forgive a * heretic ' 
for saying this ? As 1 read and re-read the book, I never felt an out- 
sider the Mother's great, loving heart seemed big enough to take 
in all the world, to overstep barriers and separation in the glorious 
sweep of her love for Christ." 

Another Anglo-Catholic writing to ask permission to visit Mother 
Stuart's grave added : " I am, like many others, one who has found 
enormous and continual help from her writings and her life, and 
feel that I should like so much to make a little pilgrimage to her old 
home and resting place. I am afraid you think me a heretic, but I 
assure you I am not a heretic about that great lady." 

And another sending a thanks offering for Mother Stuart's teaching 
said : < She has shown me how my life (not the one I would have 
chosen) can be lived to the glory of God." 

I lent the life to X, an Anglican, wrote one who had known Mother 
Stuart, and she wrote as follows to thank me : " My gratitude to you 
for lending me Mother Stuart's life is very real. I soaked myself 
in the book all through the last days of Holy Week and Easter, and 
I really think that was largely why it was the happiest Easter inside, 
that I can remember. . . . Though, of course, one is used to looking 
up to see the top of the ladder, from very low down on it, to see the 
Saints, she made me feel that, with all my straining, I was only 
looking up from the very bottom rung, and that the top was hidden 
in luminous clouds. Mother Stuart is so delightful too intellect, 
humour, and that wonderful freedom to be individual, that comes 
with perfect surrender and correspondence with grace. A tide of 
wonder and abasing admiration swept through and over me." And 
when this reader passed the book on to another member of her Church 
it was with the words : "I am afraid it will make you feel that those 
Romans have got something we have not." 

Another member of the Church of England, far away in Africa 
wrote : " having read the Life of Janet Stuart , I am most anxious to get 
her various published works." And when obliged to return to England 
for some weeks she wrote again : "I am not a Catholic, but I have 
found Mother Stuart's writings so very helpful in the spiritual life, 
that I would appreciate greatly this opportunity to pay a visit to 
Roehampton." And having returned to Africa, when Mother 
Stuart's anniversary came round in 1937, flowers came from London 
by order from South Africa :" "In memory of and in gratitude for 
Mother Stuart." 



MOTHER JANET STUART 387 

As in her earthly life, so also in her heavenly life, her interests have 
been universal These are but a few of the many testimonies received. 
They unite in declaring that she has been, as Cardinal Bourne foretold 
she would ever be to those who knew her " a strong and holy influence 
in their lives." 



JOHN GIBBONS 



THE VERY NOBLE THE VISCOUNT 
CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 

A.D. 18^8-1916 

?T~<HERE ARE WHOLE books upon this thing in different languages, 
JL big books, scholars' books. It is not a light task, then, for a man 
with my sins of carelessness and flippancy to try to compress within a 
few thousand words a Life which may possibly one day come in calendars 
as that of a Saint of the Catholic Church. If in a volume full of the 
names of famous writers I dare attempt this story at all, then it is 
because of a particular reason. For once I got a commission for a 
book on the French Foreign Legion, and I went to North Africa and 
even got ever such a little way into the desert itself. And there on 
four separate occasions amongst the legionaries, not usually accounted 
as men of any very startling piety, I heard the name of Pere de 
Foucauld and always with the greatest possible honour and almost 
reverence. I even got as far as Taghit, one of the little desert forts 
that was particularly famous in his story. 

It is one of the most marvellous stories in the world, and now 
I know a little about it. And let us begin with 15 September, 1858, 
and the birth of Charles Eugene de Foucauld. That was at Strasbourg, 
but the family really came from the south. Genealogists have worked 
the pedigree out back to the time of the Crusades. It was a noble 
family with generation after generation of fighting men, and his 
father was the Vicomte which young Charles became at the age of six. 
Actually the Republic, of course, grants no titles ; but it does recognize 
the patents of the old nobility as being part of their surnames, and 
it is still something to be a Vicomte of France. Charles was a wealthy 
one at that, and, of course, he had to follow the family tradition 
and go into the army. He was a young officer of hussars, and a very 
dashing young officer. St.-Cyr military college means nothing 
particular to me, because I have never been there ; but I was interested 
when I read that he had passed through Saumur, where I have been. 
It is the cavalry riding-school of the French army, and one has to 
be "rather a picked man to be sent there ; it's the place that turns 



THE VERY NOBLE THE VISCOUNT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 389 

out the sort of teams which we see at international horse-shows, those 
men who apparently ride up the side of a house. When one has been 
at Saumur, in fact, one does not hold on by one's horse's ears ! 

Then Lieutenant Charles was not a very virtuous young officer, 
and perhaps he had come into too much money too young. Would 
he in the '70$ be an " exquisite " or a " dandy " ? He had to have 
his own brand of cigars especially imported for him, and it was the 
same with everything else. There was too much card-playing, too 
many (shall we say ?) lady-friends. Even in the hussars one can be 
over-dashing, and his military superiors were not pleased with him ; 
in fact the famous Pere de Foucauld of the future was quite often under 
officers' arrest, and the champagne parties had to be held in his own 
quarters. There was worse, with a serious scandal when the young 
hussar was openly flaunting one special lady much too publicly for 
even the not particularly squeamish etiquette of the army ; and 
would he kindly get rid of the lady, or would he in short be " broke " ? 
And the grave seniors of his family with centuries of soldiers 3 honours 
behind them shook their heads ; wild oats should have a limit, and 
the wise and prudent French Law was appealed to for the appoint- 
ment of a guardian. "It is true that you have so many thousands 
a year," they said, " but it had better pass through the account of 
the family solicitor ; he will know how to check these bills for diamond 
bracelets and the like." And so life became a little more serious, 

Next there was Africa, and the young gentleman's particular hussars 
had now somehow turned into the famous Chasseurs d'Afrique, those 
people with the wonderful horses and with the muslque with the pride 
and glory of the kettle-drums. But now there was no more extravagance 
and folly ; this was soldiering, and soon there was the desert. This 
North Africa must have been to the France of the earliest i88o's 
something like the Cecil Rhodes Africa to our England of the '90*3, 
and here was a whole new world of Empire to be reached out for by 
the strong of heart. And now the ex-dandy of the scandals of the 
garrison- towns is leading real men in an expedition down in the then 
uncharted Sud. This was what an army was for, and here were the 
burning sands of the wilderness and nights of a gigantic silence that 
terrified and appealed at the same time. This Africa which he was 
seeing now, with its solitudes and its unbelievable hardships, was 
something which was to colour the whole future life of the young 
officer. It is queer, but in one of his letters he refers to the men 
whom he was leading, rough troopers who would go anywhere and 
put up with anything ; and they might, he says, in their discipline 
and self-sacrifice have been monks. 

Very soon, however, he was an ex-officer. The expedition was 
successfully over, and it was inconceivable to think of a return to 



3 g GREAT CATHOLICS 

garrison life. What about going through Morocco, the unknown parts 
where nobody had ever been before, and making a survey of it ? 
What about, say, a year's officers' leave, and he would pay his own 
expenses ? But France said " No " ; and probably his early record 
wasn't much recommendation. In that case if there was no more 
fighting for the moment, he would throw in his commission and be a 
civilian and still serve France. And Charles de Foucauld started 
off on one of the very great journeys of modern exploration-history. 
What he actually did and exactly where he went comes in all the 
learned books on North Africa, and this and that Geographical 
Society voted their highest honours and their gold medals for the 
business. Take it here that he went through the unexplored part of 
Morocco when it was still the Forbidden Empire of the i88o's and 
when a European Christian if caught would have been tortured to 
death. In his planning of the journey he was helped by an extra- 
ordinary old Irishman called Oscar MacCarthy whom he found in 
Algiers. MacCarthy had spent nearly all his life in North Africa, 
he knew more than any other white man about the Moors, he had 
himself been to extraordinary places, and this particular journey 
through still more extraordinary places had been a dream of his for 
years. But he had never done it ; he had not had the money or the 
strength. Now here was a young man with both ; let him share 
the old man's knowledge. The two settled down together to plot 
out the details of that incredible journey. In the end, De Foucauld 
went through as a Jew. He had to have his skin dyed and to be 
instructed in all sorts of customs of eating and drinking and everything 
else ; he had to be dressed in filthy rags of the proper colour prescribed 
for a Jew to wear, he had to take his shoes off to walk through a Moslem 
village, he had to be prepared to be spat on by any Moor who met 
him and he had to learn to cringe convincingly. Perhaps worst of all, 
he had to live with his Jews. Now I have had Jewish friends, of course, 
just as probably many of my Catholic readers have also had Jewish 
friends ; but they have not been Moroccan Jews ! Those people 
are something like human rats. And then with it all, De Foucauld 
did exactly as he planned and went precisely where he had intended 
to go. Eleven months and three days that journey took, with one 
man's courage and endurance and resource matched against a 
barbarous and bitterly hostile nation ; and for every single minute 
of all that time he was in danger of mutilation and death. He did 
it rather on the lines of the man in our Kipling's Kim, making his 
secret survey-notes at night for the better guidance and glory of his 
France, and his Reconnaissance au Maroc stands out as one of the 
geographical land-marks of his age. Even the Moors, the very 
people whose country he had penetrated, had their word about him 



THE VERY NOBLE THE VISCOUNT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 391 

as at least a man in a million for bravery. Years later and when 
the explorer had changed into something like the Saint, there came a 
Moor's letter to the Algiers garrison with an address mis-spelt to 
" L'Officier Foukou." There were those, it seemed, who had not 
forgotten that trip. 

But is not this volume titled Great Catholics, and when is 
there any Catholic part ? So far there had not been much ! That 
boy had been brought up by a good Catholic mother, and in fact in 
earliest childhood had shown signs of a more than usual piety. But 
the signs had vanished, and with youth and young manhood there 
had succeeded a blank nothingness. It was not that he just neglected 
ever, to go to church ; it was that he believed in nothing. There was 
Glory, perhaps, and of course France ; but for the rest De Foucauld 
was a professed infidel. And then something happened. Perhaps 
it was due to that mother's prayers ; perhaps the seeds of Catholic 
childhood were not quite withered after all. Or was it an effect 
of that awful trip through Morocco, and De Foucauld mentions 
it himself. He had been so " alone," he puts it. The Mohammedans 
had their religion, and the humble Hebrews were spat at for having 
theirs and then still kept it ; and he who was liable to torture and 
death as a Christian had nothing at all. In this sort of short summary 
it is probably impossible to go too deeply into spiritual motives. 
Better put it, perhaps, that Something Happened. Put it that Charles 
de Foucauld returned to the Practice of the Faith which he had so 
long and so grievously neglected. Say simply, if you like, that he 
" Got Religion." 

He got it very thoroughly ! Here is an old French priest, and 
here is a man in his confessional but not kneeling down ; he has 
not come to confess, he says, but to be told how To Believe. " Kneel 
Down," the priest says, and the man protests ; that is not what he 
had come for, and can he not be first instructed ? " Kneel," says 
the priest ; and he wins. Then we find a Jesuit Father as Director, 
and at another period there is Solesmes Abbey and a effort to test a 
Benedictine Vocation. He tried three great Orders, and it is^ signifi- 
cant that the silence of the Trappists came nearest to his soul's ideal. 
Hard to please, wasn't he, the gay young man turned suddenly pious 
and wanting to pick and chose his own way of salvation ! But it 
wasn't really so at all. His great biographer gives up scores of pages 
and many chapters to reports and letters written about him by this 
great Abbot or that famous Superior, and they all say much about 
the same thing. Here is a man of exceptional grace and of positively 
heroic humility and obedience. He himself is only too painfully 
anxious to be told what to do, and it is his Superiors who are in doubt. 
This man is plainly marked out by God Almighty for some great duty, 



39 2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

he Is clearly set apart for some special path. Only what path ? And 
could It be the Holy Land? De Foucauld had visited it between 
his explorations of Morocco and of Religion, and had found a con- 
solation in it ; for it had the solitudes and silences of his beloved 
Africa, and it was, besides, a land which was Holy. And now as 
Brother Marie-Alberic of the Trappist Obedience, monk but not 
priest, professed but not yet under permanent vows, he is begging 
for permission to be sent out there again. There is a Trappist House 
in Syria, and can he be transferred ? He is transferred. 

Now he is leaving the Trappists altogether, and how do I get it 
on paper without giving all the wrong impression ? This is not the 
discontented would-be Religious, trying Rule after Rule and satisfied 
by none. This is a rare soul, almost a soul apart, and recognized 
as such by Trappists, Jesuits, Franciscans, and everybody else he 
comes in contact with. Everyone is anxious to help. Here Is a 
wonderful instrument for God in the forging. If only his humility 
can be overcome. They are discussing him in Rome itself, and 
there is a report of a Trappist Superior. Fifty years professed, he 
has never yet " met with a soul so entirely given to God." Now 
before the irrevocable life-vows are taken, the man leaves the Trappists 
and he is back in Palestine again as a layman. There is a silence 
and a sanctity in the Holy Land ; this man wants to be quiet and 
to think. He wants to be alone, but he is never going to be lonely 
as he once had been ; for he wants to be alone with God and learn 
His Will. He has ideas of his own ; can he use his private fortune, 
untouched for so long, to purchase from the Turkish Government 
the Mount of Beatitudes and erect an oratory on it ? It would be a 
kind of lighthouse of salvation ; perhaps he himself might be a hermit- 
priest to serve the altar. Always the idea of the Hermit ! Always 
the Solitude and the Hidden Life 1 But, of course, his ideas must be 
guided by God ; that plan was impossible, and so God had meant 
" No." Now he is living as servant to the Poor Clares at Nazareth, 
an odd-job man mending walls, feeding chickens, running errands. 
There is an old shed for him at the bottom of the field, and M. le 
Vicomte is beginning to be happy ; Nazareth is a very holy place, 
and he has the freedom of the nuns' chapel and time to think. 

Now the great decision is made. He is a priest at last, and has 
permission, extra-special exceptional permission from Rome, to be a 
very extra-special sort of priest, a Solitary in the Sahara. Here is an 
extract from one of the many high-ecclesiastical letters about him, 
and in a way it sums up the old life and points to the glories of the 
new. " Monsieur le Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, long a lieutenant 
in the African Army, then an intrepid and skilful traveller in Morocco, 
then a novice with the Trappist Fathers in Syria, afterwards devoted 



THE VERY NOBLE THE VISCOUNT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 

to the service of the Poor Clares of Nazareth, lastly received Holy 
Orders and the priesthood. You will find in him heroic self-sacrifice, 
unlimited self-endurance, a vocation to influence the Mussulman world. 
Never have I seen such prodigies of penance, humility, poverty, 
and of the Love of God." 

Now he is back in his Africa at last. I have used half my space, 
and the story is just going to begin. 



May we for a moment consider the Grand Sahara, three thousand 
miles from east to west and, say, a thousand miles from north to 
south. There are oases, of course, where the roots of almost shadeless 
palm-trees can tap the moisture of some underground stream ; but 
for the most part it is desert, an infinity of either sand or of sand with 
patches of black rock. It is an uncannily queer country, with sand- 
dunes that are often hundreds of feet high standing up against the 
intolerable blue of the African sky ; and with the wind those miniature 
mountains can move. The moistureless and over-heated air gives 
a clarity of view in which it is possible to see for many miles, though 
with odd distortions ; but for many miles there is nothing to see, 
neither road nor tree nor anything at all to break that terrifying mono- 
tone of sheer space. Somewhere in the furthest distance of that arid 
awfulness might seem to be some stream or pond ; but really it is 
only the sun reflecting unevenly from burnished and almost red-hot 
rock. There is no water. The traveller caught unprepared would 
just die. The sun would be dangerous to a European by perhaps 
ten o'clock in the morning, and by high noon it would mean death ; 
to get anywhere at all he must start his journey by possibly five in 
the morning. There are, however, no European travellers in the 
"ordinary way ; one cannot enter the Sahara except by permission 
of the French military authorities, and permission will not be readily 
given. It is too expensive ; the traveller will probably break down, 
and aeioplanes or cavalry will have to be sent to his rescue. Let the 
traveller deposit so many thousands of francs in advance to make 
an insurance that will help pay for the rescue party. He may quite 
likely need a military escort, too, and the garrison headquarters will 
radio so many scores of native irregular horsemen to stand ready to 
protect his route. Against whom? Against Arabs. One is never 
sure with that desert ; it looks so empty, but there may be fifty men 
hidden behind those rocks. Every Aj-ab will have a rifle. The 
soldiers may not be able to find the rifles ; they may perhaps be 
buried in the dry sand. But they are there somewhere, and the 
Arabs will know where to find them. 

But, of course, I have only seen the fringe of the circumference of 



394 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the desert, and perhaps it was only a hundred kilometres or say sixty 
miles that I was taken by very special permission and under very 
careful escort. The Pere de Foucauld country was five hundred miles 
deeper into the Sahara ! And he had no escort. Indeed there was no 
communication at all when he first went there, though France later 
on set up a monthly courier ; the ultimate boast was that official 
telegrams could be delivered within twenty-two days. Tamanrasset 
is where Fr. Charles went, and it is fairly remote ! It is in the Tuareg 
country. The Tuaregs are the " Veiled Men " of the romances, and 
there are all kinds of legends about them. Probably, however, nobody 
really quite knows who they are. They are not Arabs or Moors ; 
they are possibly the descendants of the pre-Arab aboriginals of 
North Africa driven down here to their last strong-point. They are 
nominal Mohammedans, but with their distinctive customs. They 
are a slave-owning people, of course, but with their own system of 
slave-tribes ; which means anybody whom they are able to conquer. 
Their slavery is probably the most horrible in the world, and even 
amongst the Arabs, themselves not a particularly humanitarian people, 
the Tuaregs are known as " The Merciless," and their treatment of 
the boys and young women of the conquered tribes cannot possibly 
be set down in English print. There are comparatively few travel- 
books with any genuine account of a race so remote and so dangerous, 
but Mr. W;B. Seabrook, the American travel-author, says that the most 
dreadful and unspeakable , thing in the whole modern world is the 
slave trade which works some salt mines somewhere down in the 
Sahara. Those are, of course, Tuareg slaves. In a short summary 
it seems impossible and unnecessary to say more about them, except 
perhaps that another native name for them is the " Abandoned of 
God." And except that these were the people amongst whom Pere 
de Foucauld chose to make his home. 

Now this part of the story is hardest to write, and probably nobody 
but a religious could properly explain it at all. P&re de Foucauld 
had no idea of being a missionary in the ordinary way ; there were 
the Peres Blancs for that, the White Fathers of Africa doing their own 
wonderful work. Father Charles was different ; he was not to teach or 
preach in the ordinary sense of those words. He was less to do some- 
thing than to be something, a Solitary leading a certain life which would 
open the door to an Inner Life with God ; and God would do the 
rest. His " parish," he said, had 100,000 souls ; and actually with the 
oases there are far more people in the Sahara than the old maps 
showed. Prayer was something that literally worked, every Mass 
was a spiritual dynamo. Come, let us light up the dark places ! 
Who served the Mass, then ? Inconceivable as it sounds, there nearly 
always was somebody. He was learning the Tuareg language, and 



THE VERY NOBLE THE VISCOUNT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 395 

was beginning to make converts without asking for them. There 
were soldiers, odd men in odd outposts. That is not the Foreign Legion 
of the films, and really there are plenty of decent men in it. There 
are practising Catholics even in the Legion, and there are more 
men who are nominal Catholics. Could not one try to remember the 
Responses to Mass which one learned as a boy and before life went 
wrong? This ex-officer, ex-nobleman, living on starvation diet and 
putting up with worse than any legionary for the sake of his God, 
mightn't one make an effort to oblige him and serve his Mass ? It 
was a miracle, but almost always even in the desert there was somebody. 

If ever there was proof of the force of example, Pere de Foucauld 
lived that proof. Seven francs a month he allowed himself to live on ; 
at pre-war rate, say five-and-threepence. What need of more than 
bread and water and a few dates ? His Lord of the Blessed Sacrament 
of the Altar (for which he had special authority for Reservation), had 
He lived sumptuously? And when the Legion officers so to speak 
sent the hat round that an ex-comrade might at least have enough to 
eat, he smilingly acknowledged the money and would be grateful 
for more. It came in beautifully for buying slaves from the Tuaregs ; 
perhaps they turned into catechumens, or at worst the poor creatures 
were a little happier. Wasn't life wonderful ? His personal fortune, 
however, he wouldn't touch, and really he disposed of most of it to 
relations. Our Lady of Nazareth, had she any private income to 
draw on ? Only once in all those years did Father Charles touch 
his own money. That was years later when he visited France and took 
with him the son of a Tuareg chief. Then the man who had lived on 
fifteen pence a week must travel first-class and with all that money 
could buy ; it must be de luxe, and he must stop at the chateau of this 
and that old friend. For here is a soul which will be able to influence 
other souls ; this African must be impressed by the glories of the 
country of the Christians. 

Meantime here was Pere de Foucauld in his desert, gorgeously 
happy at last. He was living a kind of strict monastic Rule, only all 
by himself, sleeping on the earth and starting his prayers in the middle 
of the night. And it was working ! The Tuaregs were coining in ! 
Yes, one knows the usual scoff ; that the slightly insane, the " Afflicted 
of God," are treated with respect. But it wasn't so. They were 
calling him the Christian Marabout, the " Good Man " ; they came 
to his tiny home-made church to see what kind of a God could fashion 
a man like that. By and by that church even boasts a real bell. Back 
on Oran quay over a thousand miles away is a huge barrel consigned 
to Pere de Foucauld down in the desert, and of course it must be 
altar-wine. What a pity ! With the heat of the interminable journey 
it will all go sour. And from rail-head for hundreds of desert miles 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

the Legion outposts, the Devil -May-Cares of Hollywood Heroics, 
are sparing a little of their precious water to damp that cask and keep 
it cool. Then it isn't wine, but a bell sent by some admirer in France. 
Father Charles is getting famous. 

Even in Tuareg social circles he was becoming a notable ! He 
knew more than any other white man of the language and customs. 
He was translating the Holy Scriptures ; for light recreation he was 
compiling a Tuareg dictionary. Those people had their princes of 
a sort, and he knew them and himself ranked as a kind of chief and 
adviser. He even found and translated such Tuareg poetry as there 
was ; but it must never be published in Paris under his name. Had 
Our Lord written books for publicity ? Very well, then ! And when 
the troops advanced so many more leagues and built a new poste and 
meant to call it " Fort de Foucauld," Father Charles with his terrible 
and uncompromising Latin logic forbade that too. 

France recognised him, of course, and the great people were his 
friends. There was Marshal Lyautey as his staunch admirer ; he 
could have a cavalry escort any time from this place to that. But no ! 
That one needs no escort ; he can walk alone where a regiment could 
never go. There was Colonel Laperrine, one of the tremendous 
figures of the Sud, and as a cadet he had been at the Academy with 
Father Charles ; he never followed him into religion, but he was his 
life-long friend. That was the man who tried the first aeroplane 
flight across the desert ; the thing crashed and drove his ribs through 
his pulped body. They were trying to bring him back, carrying him 
by day and camping every night. The army of Africa has a discipline, 
and each night the colonel punctiliously drew his ration of water ; 
but when it was dark he put it back into the common supply, for he 
knew himself a dying man. That was the man who was the great 
friend of Father Charles. There was a camel he once sent him, and 
the priest was most grateful ; it was the very thing wanted to carry 
some altar furniture to a new oratory in the still remoter desert. 
What a fine chance, too, for a little joyous penance for sins of a life- 
time back. Some of those camels can go quite fast, and of course a 
man can always run behind the beast. 

Did Pere de Foucauld ever stop belonging to the African army in 
his spirit ? And one suspects that at the back of the human part of 
his mind he always remained a soldier. Here in his " parish " were 
those hundred-thousand souls to be recruited for the standard of 
Christ the Captain ; the Sahara was Satan's citadel, something to be 
stormed with many Masses, besieged with infinite prayer. Certainly 
he was a soldiers' priest, almost a soldiers' idol. There was his famous 
ride to Taghit, and down in Africa the story has passed almost into 
legend. That place is a poste, the first fort in the real desert. Over 



THE VERY NOBLE THE VISCOUNT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD 307 

the gateway Is a stone, and it says that Here the Undermentioned, 
so many men of such-and-such a company under Captain So-and-So, 
such-and-such another company and so forth, they held out for four 
days against six thousand armed Moors. There were four hundred 
and seventy of that garrison. At the start. Then when the news 
reached Beni-Abbes, nothing would serve Pere de Foucauld but that 
he must borrow a horse and go to Taghit at once. It is seventy-five 
miles ; but desert miles. And he was off on the instant without an 
escort. It took twenty-three hours, and he was in time to find 
forty-nine wounded still alive. He remained twenty-five days in that 
fort and was given an officer's room and never once slept in it. The 
place of the chaplain of the Sahara was with his wounded. 

That, by the way, was in 1903 ; and in 1935 I was visited in 
London by an old man carrying a brown-paper parcel. As a young 
man he had served in the Legion, he said, and he had tried to write 
out some of his memories ; could I look at the manuscript and advise 
him how to get it printed ? He had seen things. Yes, he had even 
seen Pere de Foucauld. He had been one of the wounded in Taghit 
Fort when that one came riding in from his twenty-three hours* ride. 
That was at nine o'clock in the morning, and he did not take one 
single minute for rest or food or even drink. It was straight off his 
horse and in with the wounded. The old man was proud he had 
seen Pere de Foucauld ; it was something to remember. Certainly 
Father Charles was a soldiers' priest ! 

Certainly, too, he never stopped being a Frenchman. Indeed we 
are not sure that he did not die for being a Frenchman, for when his 
earthly story came to an end in 1916 he was murdered by unknown 
natives at his chapel in the Sahara. Now why? He had next to 
nothing to steal ; he had no local enemies. But it was war-time ; 
this man had more influence over the tribes than any other white 
man, and his influence was French. And one suggestion is that he 
was assassinated by hired agents of an enemy power. We do not know. 
An odd thing, however, is that while his two native catechumens were 
found later as skeletons, the body of Father Charles was said to be 
mummified. (In Quest of Lost Worlds, Count de Prorok.) "In- 
corrupt " is a word which we must not at present use of that body, 
but other people are wondering the same thing ! The Saint of the 
Sahara, and will he one day be canonized ? 

There is one thing more to say. All those years in the desert, he had 
prayed for helpers ; can we possibly say that he wanted a " Com- 
munity " of Solitaries, men vowed to God ? He had his Rule drawn 
up and approved, but there was nobody to share it. One man came 
out as a sort of disciple, an ex-zouave of the African army ; zouaves 
are strong men, but that one failed to stand the severity of the life 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

and had to go back and find another vocation. Father Charles was still 
alone. He had even prayed for Sisters, and outlined the marvellous 
work they might do under God. But of course it was impossible. 
No woman could go out there. It was all a glorious dream, and had 
Pere de Foucauld failed ? He had done his life-work, and a mar- 
vellous work it had been. Was it now to die with him ? 

And years later those prayers are answered. The miracle has come. 
There is an Order of " Brothers of the Solitude " and they are in the 
desert and living the Rule. There are even the Sisters, too, of the many 
prayers, not at present in the desert but praying and planning for the 
desert from a " Solitude '* in France. Pere de Foucauld's work is 
not dead but alive ; the Legion of the Lord is arming for the conquest 
of the Sahara. 

Mine is the merest summary of the story, and is mostly taken from 
Rene Bazin's monumental biography. My information on the 
" Brothers of the Solitude " came first from an article by Miss Constance 
Davidson in the Catholic Fireside. Miracles still happen. I saw 
that article by accident, and when I wrote to the lady I found perhaps 
the only woman in Great Britain in touch with the French headquarters 
of those who are following up Pere de Foucauld's work. 

There are those who will read my story who will know far more 
about it than I do myself; of them I would ask pardon for my 
omissions, and perhaps too for inconsequences and flamboyances 
which may have grieved them. But other readers will know as little 
of Pere de Foucauld as I once did, and of them I would beg that they 
would go and find out more. Mine is only the outline. Go now, 
please, and read the real books. 

If I apologize for even my outline, it is not in ,the least to make 
any " literary " finish, but because I know how sadly imperfect is my 
very summary of the story. It glosses over the important part, the 
spiritual part ; there is one place where into a paragraph or so I have 
condensed eight or nine years of life and a whole aeon of spiritual 
voyage. To tell the truth, I am half sorry now that I ever undertook 
this story at all. The writing of it has frightened me. Really I am 
not sure that it may not be a kind of blasphemy for any common sinner 
to undertake the life of Pere Charles de Foucauld, the Marabout of 
Christ- 



REV. CLAUDE WILLIAMSON, O.S.C., F.R.G.S., F.R.Hist.S. 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 



A.D. 18^9-1907 

AWE LOOK back at the works of the great figures of the past it will 
sometimes give us a strange, and most painful shock if we realize 
how very few of them can be still said to live. A variety of interests 
may lead us to inquire into the circumstances relating to the person 
whose doings we wish to understand. But it is not often that this 
enquiry is facilitated by an equal amount of biographical incidents, 
or rewarded by a number of suggestive details. 

Difficult as it is to appreciate at its true value contemporary 
endeavour distance alone enables one to view things in the right 
perspective very few of those for whom Francis Thompson possesses 
an appeal, will deny to him the title of genius or the adjective " great." 
The phrase " those for whom the poet possesses an appeal " is used 
advisedly, for there is no middle course with Thompson as there is 
none with Meredith. One must either possess the talisman that admits 
to his magnificence or stay outside. For many his magnificence is 
overpowering, his artistry, his involution, his inversion, his conceits, 
all act rather as irritants than attractions. But those who can follow 
him up to the heights, he rewards with wonderful gifts of sheer beauty 
and grandeur. 

When Francis Thompson was living and writing, an understanding 
few valued and treasured the pure gems of poetry with which he was 
so lavish, but of the fact that a great force was working quietly in their 
midst the general reading public was unaware. Then came the 
merciful death, the finale of a life crowned rather with the thorn 
than with the laurel, and lo ! came the discovery that a poet in the 
direct line of English poetry had passed away. The sudden vogue 
of Francis Thompson is one of the curiosities of literature. Singing 
for some ten years to an audience few and fit, he then fell almost 
silent, and for another ten years produced nothing but occasional 
criticism, not always of much value. He wound up with his Life of 
SL Ignatius Loyola, a characteristic work of Pegasus in harness. Then 
the inexplicable thing happened. The English people discovered 
that there had been a prophet among them, a Popish prophet and 

400 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 401 

therefore suspect, but a prophet, who had written there was no 
telling when one of the imperishable masterpieces of prophetic song. 
All the world was clamouring for a copy of the " Hound of Heaven/' 
and no self-respecting preacher could go for a month without quoting 
from it. 

G. K. Chesterton in his brilliant study of Victorian literature said 
that the spirit of it might well be described by saying that Francis 
Thompson stood outside it. Knowledge and appreciation of Thompson 
have widened during the last few years, but the present age is still 
unspiritual and antagonistic to the supernatural. Thompson's genius 
shed a new glory on Catholicism, and it should therefore be a duty 
as well as a delight for Catholics in particular to try to increase the fame 
and influence of the poet who sang : 

" the songs of Sion 
By the streams of Babylon." 

There is no middle way of love with him, even as there is no middle 
way of love with Blake whose Songs of Innocence were found in his pocket, 
together with ^Eschylus, when a timely hand was stretched to him 
adrift in the whirlpools of a cruel great city. And, indeed, the heart 
of the difference is deeper still. 

One can imagine what would have been Francis Thompson's scornful 
amusement of sudden popularity had this happened before his death. 
Now well, perhaps he is not too wise for scorn. While still capable 
of it, this avowed disciple of De Quincey not in one thing only was 
entirely without De Quincey's itch for notoriety. The little Opium- 
Eater was also scornful, but he demanded the very attention that he 
scorned. What Francis Thompson cared for was the attention of his 
friends. That he had ; and when they lost his presence, they suddenly 
found themselves called upon to share the memory of him with an 
army of discoverers. And one has not read Thompson rightly unless 
the memory of what he wrote comes with a strong and tender 
impulsion to fill the whole of life, its thoughts, its efforts, and its 
desires, with the lilies of whiteness and of wisdom. 

The setting of the sun, which moved him more deeply than any 
other sight of nature, is the true symbol of Thompson's life and poetry. 
The solemnity of evening invests all his utterance, but it is the 
solemnity of the sunset sky. His art in words is to be matched with 
Turner's. The poet, too, is a painter of skies, a sublime colourist. 
And as the sunset gathers up in a final pageant the day's light and 
glory, so Thompson reveals in his verse the infinite beauties of poetic 
utterance in the past. His sensitive ear has caught the floating 
harmonies of every age of song. He is most often compared with 
Crashaw, Herbert and others of their group. But if he is of the old 



4 02 GREAT CATHOLICS 

school of Donne he is also of the school of Shakespeare, he is the 
disciple of Milton, the familiar of Pope and Dryden, in sympathy with 
the Lake poets, and a companion spirit with Shelley and Keats. The 
poet nearest to his own time with whom he has affinity is Coventry 
Patmore, and the direct inspiration which, we are told, he owed to 
the verse of Mrs. Meynell, is clearly discernible. Nor are his 
derivatives all of one civilization for Greek and Latin poets live in his 
diction. Withal, Thompson has the original authentic note of the 
great singer. In their poignancy his poems are the expression of his 
own life. Phoenix-like, they sprang from the ashes of his youth. To 
him more than to most poets the too-familiar lines may be applied : 

" Most wretched men 
Are cradled into poetry by wrong. 
They learn in suffering what they teach in song." 

It is easy to liken Francis Thompson's poetry to a cathedral. His 
frequent employment of dogmatical and liturgical figures makes such 
a reference unavoidable. Yet at the heart of it there is a similarity 
that is not quite so obvious, that has part of the same paradox even. 
For the zeal which built the cathedral at Milan was yet the same 
zeal as drove St Francis to the ways of discipline. The two not only 
co-existed, they were part and lot of the same inspiration. So it was 
with Thompson. If he was content, nay, glad, that pain should 
prune his spirit, it did not follow that the towering wildness of his 
verse should be pruned in the same process. If he could bring the 
light of earth to a narrow focus in his own disciplined soul, it could 
then widen as broadly as it would on the further side in the spiritual 
realm. 

Some are so dazzled and deafened and thrilled by the thronging 
pictures, the organ-blasts, the flute-notes, that they do not perceive 
the sadness and terror and glory of what is sung. Perhaps if our 
hearing and seeing were sharpened to notice one or two particulars 
of lesser importance, we might be less likely to content ourselves with 
a vague and profitless wonder at the magnificence of his imagination 
and language ; the wonder has its place, and will be increased when 
we perceive how that magnificence enhances or conflicts with a 
tremendous or austere burden. All through his few volumes appears 
the poet's own perception that his days are consumed and gone up 
in the smoke of sacrifice. But by some alchemy of the spirit his loss 
and misery were converted into the ethereal substance of art, and out 
of his poverty he enriched humanity. It is a fact of life and poetry 
that may give Eugenists pause. 

For the many, for that large audience which has neither the 
scholarship nor the taste to hear the music of " a poet's poet/* 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 403 

Thompson will live chiefly as a voice religious. He has, indeed, 
wrapped most of his utterance in diction which sets it apart from the 
narrower range of appreciation. The language of Milton is not 
further removed than Thompson's from the common speech of this 
day. In all but a few ballads and lyrics of almost Wordsworthian 
simplicity, Thompson adheres to his chosen vocabulary, the vocabulary 
of a man whose muse was nursed by a bygone literature. He uses 
words archaic, words obsolete, words coined from classical mints, 
and phrase-words of a rich invention a vocabulary of which poets 
have the heritage and privilege, but such as passes slowly into the 
wider currency. And yet, in his highest expression of emotion, in the 
perfection of his form, this wealth of borrowed ornament is no veil 
between his thought and common understanding. His jewelled 
verse is like some old poem in stone, a Gothic temple, the secret of 
whose material loveliness is lost, but whose enshrined appeal to the 
springs of human feelings is instant and unchanging. 

To use a metaphor, Francis Thompson's life resembles a telescope ; 
his life interest was focussed to a very small compass, but his vision 
was prolonged to an almost incredible extent. It is written : " Blessed 
is the people that knows its prophets before they die," yet mutatis 
mutandis the poet had a deep gratitude for the past, a love for the 
present, and faith in the future. Thompson was not left without 
the praise of those from whom it was worth having. On his coffin 
lay roses from Meredith's garden, with the testimony of the aged Titan, 
" A true poet, one of the small band." Previously Coventry Patmore 
heaped praise upon his work in the Fortnightly^ H. D. Traill in the 
Nineteenth Century ; while Arthur Symons followed suit in the Saturday 
Review with the much quoted critique : " Other poets have deeper 
things to say, and a more flawless beauty ; others have put more heart 
into their song ; but no one has been a torch waved with so fitful a 
splendour over the gulfs of our darkness." A torch ! But let it be 
remembered that if a man has written one fine poem it is best to 
forget that he has written five hundred failures. There is a sense in 
which complete editions are the unkindest service that can be rendered 
to poets. 

In the less eclectic space of a collected edition it is now possible to 
see the truth of this more clearly in Thompson's own work. If in the 
" Ode to the Setting Sun " his diction is somewhat feverish, as though 
the writer were not sure of expressing adequately the thing that he saw, 
or sought rather than affirmed it, the poem is yet saturated with his 
vision, and so, however one ranks it, it is stamped with his idiom ; 
whereas in " Of Nature : Laud and Plaint " the vision is gone ; the 
poet feels his way through the poem along the lines of cogitation and 
loses his title to poet thereby. That the cogitation itself should be 



404 GREAT CATHOLICS 

none too satisfactory Is only a small part of the trouble. The 
cogitation would have come right or would not have mattered if, as 
was his wont, the poet had been content to see steadily. His simplicity 
allied to exquisite art finds hardly more delicately beautiful expression 
than in the poem " To a Snowflake," which poem is s however, run 
very closely by the beautiful " Field Flower." 

The Catholic has already been presented with one of the keys of 
his work, for his was essentially Catholic vision, and much of the 
high mystical beauty of his work is due to the Catholic basis on which 
it rests and to the analogies within it, drawn from Catholic faith and 
ceremonial. Others many others outside the faith have happily 
been enabled to climb with him, and have testified to the greatness 
of the man who was their guide. 

In the highest sense all poets are religious in the precise degree of 
their poetry ; and in that affirmation Francis Thompson enrolled 
himself of their number. The fact that he sang his songs from the 
cave that so generously and nobly found him shelter when he was like 
to be destroyed in the storms without has not altogether served him 
well. Some have disparaged him as the poet of a circle ; others have 
thought of him as a " religious poet," meaning something between a 
poet proper and a hymn-writer. Whereas he was altogether of the 
wider company, having his place in the highway of the poets, with a 
fame that will increase when many more notable names have 
diminished in glory. 

So, from those who share in this belief, a knowledge of Thompson 
comes weighted with moral and spiritual obligation beyond the duty 
which gratitude should hasten to fulfil of heightening his fame and of 
doing everything possible to ensure for posterity the mighty heritage 
of his work. Catholic lovers of Thompson should show the sincerity 
of their appreciation by reflecting in their lives the starry splendour of 
his message. In the "Motto and Invocation" to the prose volume, 
after a request for saints' assistance, comes this perfect little prayer : 

" Last and first, O Queen Mary, 
Of thy white Immaculacy, 
If my work may profit aught 
Fill with lilies every thought ! 
I surmise 
What is white will then be wise ! " 

And what can be said of the " Hound of Heaven " that could add any- 
thing to the tributes that acclaimed it upon its first publication ? Critics 
and poets Coventry Patmore one of the latter artists, Burne-Jones 
among others hailed it with surprising unanimity, as the greatest 
religious poem in the language. 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 405 

The main region of Thompson's poetry is the inexhaustible 
mine of Catholic philosophy, and never was a more splendid tribute 
paid to the theologians than is furnished by this shrinking, modest, 
diffident, and most eloquent disciple of the Muses. No one who has read, 
however cursorily, the " Hound of Heaven " has ever had a moment's 
doubt that the author is veritably a poet as well as a philosopher 
and a religious thinker. That he is also a mystic and a symbolist 
does not alter the estimate. Nor yet does his exhaustless vocabulary 
of abstract terms destroy his pretensions to be a thinker. In the one 
case, as in the other, the elemental bigness of the man overpowers 
all minor considerations or differences. We yield ourselves captive to 
his charm, and, as in the "Hound of Heaven," recognize with a certain 
awe that we are in the presence of a genius. The theme of the " Hound 
of Heaven " is the Divine pursuit of the sinner, the long struggle before 
the resisting soul acknowledges its final defeat. The everlasting arms 
are round the fugitive from the start to the finish ; but the human 
instinct to resist and preserve an obstinate independence has kept the 
sinner in his attitude of reluctance and refusal of God's mercies. The 
Hound who pursues is the abounding love which at the last overcomes 
all obstacles and welcomes the hunted soul to eternal peace. 

Agonies of mortification are endured and even sought out by the 
spiritual athlete, not for their own sake, but because pain is known 
to be a condition of sanctity, as of all supreme attainment. To this 
ma dolorosa succeeds the state of illumination, when mysterious gates 
are opened and a world of hidden things is made visible to a soul over 
which appearances have lost their power, thanks to the cleansing 
discipline that has prepared it for this revelation of the ultimate 
Reality. The true artist's resignation of prosperity and of happiness 
as common minds understand happiness is, like that of the saint, 
complete and irrevocable. 

For mysticism usually appeals only to the very simple or to the 
very learned. You may become a mystic by communion with nature, 
and by cultivating a certain childishness of character. Thompson 
himself said " Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.'* But it is 
also natural for the mystic to be extremely learned, and, indeed, to 
those who are not mystics the studies of the mystic seem to be the 
most recondite possible. To have read the Early Fathers is fantastic 
erudition. And learning has been lately the mystic's chief approach 
to the truths which he is bent on discovering, as the example of Yeats 
will show or of Lionel Johnson. Moreover, the proper understanding 
of a mystical poet is often an end to be reached in much the same 
way as the mystic reaches his truths, by elaborate historical researches 
which enable the student of a mystical poet to get within the minds of 
many past mystics and to put himself in their age 5 in an age when 



40 6 GREAT CATHOLICS 

mysticism, so it would seem, was a natural and easy thing. If we wish 
to understand a satirical poet it is not necessary to read Juvenal in 
order to appreciate the strange mind of a satirist, any more than it is 
necessary to read Darwin in order to understand the kind of mind 
which can believe in evolution. 

The magnificence of the " Hound of Heaven " diction, the daring of its 
conception, its almost bewildering intricacy of ornament sometimes, 
it must be confessed, perilously near to pulling down the structure 
must place it on a plane by itself. In its poetic value the " Hound of 
Heaven " must be ranked as one of the treasures of English literature, 
and its human value seems greater now the full story of Thompson's 
life is known. The " Hound of Heaven " and " New Year's Chimes " 
are as sure of their life as anything that has been written since Shelley 
sang are not only great things in themselves, but are full of that 
incommensurable quality that marks the highest. 

Thompson also wrote a Life of St. Ignatius, and a series of essays of 
which the greatest is on Shelley. In its exquisite imagery it comes 
as near to poetry as ever prose can. Health and Holiness is an article 
not solely of spiritual intention but of practical good sense. The 
sensitiveness of Thompson's literary ear is curiously illustrated in 
A Renegade Poet on a Poet To read a few lines is to be instantly 
reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson, and presently it is discovered 
that the essay was prompted by one of Stevenson's. Indeed, says 
Thompson of that haunting stylist, " I cannot get him out of my 
head." Thompson's essays are precious as criticisms of life and 
literature, and they must be read with the poems for a full interpretation 
of the author. They exhibit the sanity of his genius, his equability, 
and own, though rarely, as might be expected, traces of the 
Stevensonian humour. 

Few of his writings were written so much con amore as the essay on 
Shelley ; it is an Apologiefor Poesie, an apology for Shelley, an apologia 
pro vita sua. Shelley's sins, which were many, are to be extenuated 
because he was always a child. Something of romance clings about 
this essay. Written in the first days of Thompson's rescue from the 
" nightmare time," it was sent to the Dublin Review, to fc be declined as 
scarcely suited to so definitely ecclesiastical a magazine ; found among 
his papers after the writer's death years later, it was submitted again 
to the same Dublin Review, and, being printed, it sent that staid 
quarterly for the first time to a second edition. The late George 
Wyndham hailed the essay as " the most important contribution to 
pure Letters written in English during the last twenty years." 

Little need now be said about this essay, with its powerful plea for 
poetry in general and its tender justification of Shelley in particular 
as " a straying spirit of light." It revealed to Christian readers a 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 407 

non-Christian poet in a new and more gracious setting ; no less did 
it reveal Thompson's own close poetic kinship with the author of 
The Cloud. 

" Remember me, poor Thief of Song ! " So Francis Thompson 
prayed to his beloved Queen of Heaven, and the echoes of that 
heart-cry, so poignant in its dear simplicity, should fall as a personal 
message on the ears of all who call themselves Catholics and children 
of their Mother-Queen. " Remember me ! " The remembrance 
which should spring in response to that plea should mean more than 
prayer or more than mere joy in the magnificence of the song which 
the poet stole from the Muses to offer unto God. Thompson essayed 
to bring the modern unbelieving world back to Faith and spirituality ; 
he made all things of earthly knowledge and sight flash back even to 
blinded eyes a revelation of Divine governance and Divine love. 

An artist more than any man needs faith ; and his faith has been 
given him ; the faith that his urge for self-expression is worth trans- 
muting into writing, painting, or sculpture. The world does not 
find that necessary. The artist proceeds from the beginning against 
not exactly hostility but utter apathy on the part of the world. The 
world will eventually acclaim 'him and crown him if he pursues his 
undeviating way and so enhances his original gift as finally to produce 
work of indubitable power and scope. But he may expect no real 
assistance from it in the meanwhile. The rigour of this condition 
kills off the small artists, drives them into megalomanias and persecu- 
tion manias, fills them with phobias, introduces into their lives elements 
that sap and undermine their original gift, but the major talents proceed 
and attain. It has always been so and it will always be so. It may 
be a cruel rule of creation, but it is a salutary one. 

A quality peculiar to Dr. Johnson's criticism is that it seldom fits 
very exactly the writer of whom he is speaking, but it often fits a writer 
of whom he never spoke or who came after his time. Thus he said 
that Dryden " delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning " and 
again, when speaking of the poetic diction before Dryden's time, he 
says that " words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they 
occur draw that attention on themselves which they should transmit 
to things." These criticisms would be exact and just if they were 
made about Francis Thompson or about his diction, 

A century is an inadequate test of the eternities of literary fame, 
and it is still too early to be certain that his poetry is really destined 
" to un-edge the scythe of time, and last with stateliest rhyme/' But 
the striking change which has taken place in literary fashions since the 
close of the Victorian era makes it at least worth while inquiring 
whether he has succeeded in crossing that first barrier of oblivion 
which bounds the memory of many poets whose feet to their contem- 



408 GREAT CATHOLICS 

poraries seemed set securely upon the road to fame. For of all the 
changes in aesthetic valuations which are constantly occurring few have 
been more violent than those which have taken place since the 
beginning of the present century. How many of the favourite poets 
of the 'eighties and the 'nineties are still read to-day by any but the 
dwindling remnant of their contemporaries ? Robert Bridges, whose 
greatest masterpiece, " The Testament of Beauty," was only published 
after the War, bestrides the two centuries like a Colossus ; but besides 
him who except Francis Thompson has retained his hold upon the 
imagination of the younger generation? Pauci quos aequus amavit 
Jupiter. This fact is the more remarkable because in many respects 
his poetic ideals are the very antithesis of modern fashion. His 
defects and they are palpable enough are precisely those which 
might be expected to jar most painfully upon the susceptibilities of 
an age intolerant of any mannerisms but its own. The wealth of 
classical allusion, the exotic neologisms, the deliberate richness of 
poetic diction do not these " date " painfully for a generation which 
has taken " The Waste Land " as a model ? 

Prophecy, said George Eliot, is the most gratuitous form of human 
error. And the first praisers of Francis Thompson, when they went 
on from their own high appreciations to prophesy that he never could 
or would be read by the many, were, it would now seem, astray in their 
then plausible, divinings. 

As a Christian and religious poet Thompson has few rivals, while 
as an artist he stands high on the role of fame. Dimly though we 
realize what manner of man this was, we gather enough to become 
aware that there was a tragedy in his career which left its mark on all 
he wrote and all he thought. Opium in a mild form shortened his 
days and left him a wreck, just as it exercised a baneful power over 
kindred sufferers de Quincey and Coleridge. Perhaps the fact that 
all three were subject to the same tyranny brought them into some sort 
of sympathy with one another. At all events, we know that de Quincey 
was a prime favourite with Thompson and the Confessions of an Opium 
Eater never very far from his pocket. The laudanum habit began 
from a serious illness in 1879. He recovered to some extent and then 
relapsed, recovered and relapsed ; and thus with intervals alternated 
elation with despair. 

Beyond question many of his earlier poems suffer from fantastic 
and meretricious ornamentation. A coldly critical judgment, ignorant 
of the setting in which these poems took shape, would justly condemn 
this ornamentation. Yet who can censure it if he remembers the 
circumstances of the writer ! It would be a harsh judgment which 
censured a dweller in a dismal slum because he tried to brighten his 
tenement with tinsel and tawdry pictures ; yet the kind of solace they 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 409 

would bring was the kind that overwrought and glittering phrases 
brought to this outcast of the streets. Dazed with words and bemused 
with opium, he reverenced God and reeled In the gutter. 

Thompson had to draw attention to single words in order that the 
attention might be transmitted from the single word to many things, 
or to one very great thing. He had a great deal to say, and, being a 
poet 5 he had to say it as succinctly as possible. The object of his 
best metaphors was to express a large idea. If possible, in one word 
enfolding his meaning ; and his metaphors are successful only when 
this Is his aim and when he succeeds in it. When he tried, like 
Sir Thomas Browne, to embellish a simple statement with many 
metaphors and images, which are Intended to open innumerable 
paths down which the reader's mind may wander, then he rarely 
achieved anything but a vague poetic enthusiasm. The paths down 
which such words as " argent " and " beamy-textured " lead us are 
usually blind alleys. 

A great deal is packed into Thompson's best poetry. Since the 
poet spent so much time in packing it, the critic's task of unpacking 
it may seem ungrateful and unnecessary. But our appreciation of 
the poetry very much depends upon observing the dexterity with which 
the packing is done. God was even in the opium dreams of a divine 
drunkard. Francis Thompson was not only drunk with opium, but 
drunk with God. One was the servant of the Other. He led a more 
or less outcast life after leaving his northern home as a medical 
student even after he had been rescued and housed and warmed 
and praised and loved, breaking away from all these and escaping to 
the outcast life till he was again saved ; but never, never did he feed 
on the husks of swine. The poor poet was singularly innocent. He 
was quite fit for the company of children, of whom and for whom he 
wrote. He died with the child in him. One cannot associate him 
with any kind of grossness. 

His verse cannot always be spoken aloud with pleasure ; it pays 
that single toll to the age wherein it saw the light, an age in which 
poetry has become a pen-craft, appealing to the eye from printed 
pages rather than to the ear with faintly-murmured accompaniment 
of lute and harp. So it comes to pass that, although he utters many 
a line of perfect music, such as : 

Caved magically under magic seas ; 

And in her veins is quick thy milky fire : 

Dusk . . . like a windy arras waved with dreams ; 

All its birds in middle air hung a-dream, their music thralled 

he also violates the harmony with inadmissible discords like " cluck'dst " 



po GREAT CATHOLICS 

" cast'st," " foist'st," " siev'dst," and with an immediate juxtaposition 
of words that cannot with loss of euphony support so close a contact, 
as in " verge shrivelled," " vaporpous shroudage," " lineage strange." 
A lesser poet might have escaped these pitfalls, but would certainly 
have missed " the exultation, the all-compensating wonder " of realities 
that lurk inviolably secure in those rough lairs. 

Certain truths about Thompson's poetry must be taken into account 
whenever an estimate is framed, and they are not less worth setting 
down because nowadays they seem obvious. One is that, though the 
whole body of the poetical works is small, the gulf separating the best 
from the worst is in itself quite immense. Another is that the verbal 
tricks, the hideous neologisms, which his idolaters applauded, must 
be set among the faults and not the merits of the work. Our greatest 
poets have not needed to disfigure the English tongue in order to 
express their thought. Indeed, Thompson's simplest lyrics are also 
his best. " To a Snowflake " is vastly superior to some of the laboured 
and turgid Odes. It is a common experience that, especially with 
prentice hands, the endeavour to weave prose patterns of gleaming 
colour and exotic splendour tends to produce rhetoric and false 
rhythms. The keenest absorption in past mannerisms and repro- 
ductions of old diction are not in themselves sufficient to prevent a 
sentence ringing false. 

Youth exults in displaying this cleverness. But the more mature 
writer of poetry grows to appreciate simplification. Of course, there 
are all manner of things that can be done with words and rhythms, 
and are still to be done. " If I cannot carry mountains on my back 
neither can you crack a nut." Yet the great accent, the truly great 
accent, seems strangely to inhere in the simpler forms. Diverse 
experimentation in form is an excellent thing. Sometimes it leads 
to fresh achievement. Oftener it is merely a practising of scales. 
What matters in poetry is the transference of a definite temperament, 
in all its many colours and eventually in its complete human values, 
to the printed page. When a poet writes a poem if he is not merely 
practising he is not counting syllables on his fingers or thinking in 
terms of caesuras. He is saying something that is in his heart and on 
his mind, and suddenly finding that it takes unto itself a certain rhythm 
of utterance. If he achieves an onomatopoetic effect in its proper 
place or a triumph of deft alliteration, he is not thinking, " Gome, 
now for an onomatopoetic effect now for alliteration, now for 
synecdochy." Such pedantry and poetic creation are at opposite 
poles. The writer is simply seized of a vision and haunted by 
rhythms that express it. Afterward, the dissection of what he has 
done, the separating out of his effects, may prove a fascinating study ; 
but the taking of too much thought for technique at the inception of 



FRANCIS THOMPSON ^// 

his poems would have ruined the poem ; it would have reduced it to 
a clever exercise. 

Verdicts that have so slight a pretension to authority can arouse no 
indignation when it is remembered that a great poet belonging to the 
little band of " unacknowledged legislators " will ever be, in Shelley's 
words, " a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own 
solitude with sweet sounds/ 5 and that upon this unseen musician no 
power can sit in final judgment save the jury that must be " empanelled 
by time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." 

Without rebellion, and with scarcely a lament, Thompson suffered 
his outward life to become the merest shuttlecock of destiny. It was 
as if the ordinary power of conscious choice had been denied him, so 
that while other men could walk deliberately, treading each the path 
of his own wisdom or folly, he must remain selfless and passive as blown 
thistledown. In this dependence upon some outward force more 
mighty than his own will lay the secret of his entire mysterious 
existence, and, perceiving it, he spoke always as if poetry were no 
abstraction, but a merciless queen exacting from even the greatest 
of her vassals a tribute of lifelong service. Under that most imperious 
of sovereigns he drifted upon every breath of circumstance, helpless 
to the last and, perhaps, more than any other master-singer, defenceless 
against his own power of song. 

Trained as a young man for the priesthood, and, when that height 
seemed inaccessible, for medicine, he was not upheld, so far as can be 
discovered, by any sure knowledge of his real vocation. No one, 
himself least of all, had skill to unfold that riddle. So, in the battle 
with sickness and poverty he tried many a painful walk of life, 
descending always lower in the worldly scale until for the unprofitable 
outcast, bereft of resource and given over, in despair at so much way- 
wardness, by even the kindest friends, nothing remained but days and 
nights of hunger and dereliction in the streets of London. 

But for all the difficulty of comprehending the mystic's attitude to 
life, it is not Francis Thompson's mysticism which is most likely to dis- 
please but rather his diction. We usually accept without fully 
understanding a poetry like this : 

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) 

Cry : and upon thy so sore loss 
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder 

Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross. 

We know that the mystic can feel heaven near to Charing Cross ; 
we may not understand why or how, but the imaginative idea is 
magnificent and we are content to leave it at that. But we cannot 
so readily accept such a phrase as coerule empery. It is not possible 



412 GREAT CATHOLICS 

to defend it by saying that only by such strange words could Thompson 
have expressed a strange and far-reaching idea, since all synonym 
for the phrase is easy to find. The sole purpose of such diction is to 
put the reader in a poetic frame of mind. If such strange words did., 
in fact, after putting the reader in a poetic frame of mind, lead his 
imagination down strange paths, in the same way as Browne takes 
the reader's mind to the Antipodes merely by saying in a particular 
way that it is time to cease writing and go to bed, they would, of course, 
be justifiable. But the word coerule seems as if it would lead the 
reader a long way, and yet when he is prepared for this journey, he can 
go no further in fact than to where the word " blue " would lead him. 
Thompson, we are told, when at the age of seven he read poetry, used 
to take his Shakespeare or his Coleridge and sit on the stairs " away 
from the constraint of tables and chairs and the unemotional flatness 
of the floor." No doubt coerule empery comes from the dislike of 
unemotional flatness which was characteristic of Thompson throughout 
his life. But it is never safe to condemn carelessly any strange word 
of Thompson's, and the practise of his worst faults often led to great 
beauties which could not have come perhaps any other way. 

Across the margent of the world I fled 

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars, 
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars. 

Here, by the one coined word " clanged " he has expressed in the 
noise of their meeting that the gates were shut to him, and also the 
vehemence of that inhospitality. 

He has a vast capacity for this emotion, feeling it for those who 
suffer and for those by whom their suffering is caused, for the stupid 
whom the world hurts and who cannot appreciate the cause of their 
hurt, and for the clever, constrained by that composite stupidity 
to the limitation of the energy within them. His pity is sometimes 
misplaced, but that is because of his view of the world, which is 
essentially anarchical, rebellious and sentimental. 

His prose verges from leanness and rigid explicitness to an abundance 
of sensuous images. His essays seem at times like a procession of 
metaphysical paintings. 

When his death was announced it seemed natural to say that the 
flame had died out because all the fuel was consumed in that intense 
burning of the senses and the mind ; but it is clear from these lively 
and firmly written essays at least the longer, more careful ones 
that the extinction of the flame was sudden. There is no evidence 
of flicker and wane. 

It has been affirmed that Francis Thompson was a great literary 
artist rather than a really great poet. The really great poet has 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 413 

noble tilings to say and trains himself to express them nobly. The 
literary artist may have few things of his own to say, but he loves the 
music of words, the cadence of sentences, the exquisite charm of a 
thing said perfectly. He steeps himself in the work of the great 
writers whose work most appeals to him, and when he practises the art 
of expression for himself an art the practice of which gives him 
intense joy the influence of those predecessors is almost always 
visible. All this is true of Francis Thompson. And with what great 
poets taught him he blended his own individual genius. Divest 
his longer poems of their sonority and imagery, and you may find very 
little in what Thompson has to say. Yet this does not diminish the 
frequent splendour of the way in which he says it. A poet, though 
decidedly not of the first order, but a superb craftsman, a lover of 
languages, a really great literary artist that, or something like it, we 
venture to predict, will be the final verdict on the poetry of Francis 
Thompson. 

We never think of Thompson in relation to human passion he 
was more concerned with spiritual love but his biographer tells us 
that he fell in love at least three times. A beautiful and distinguished 
woman-poet, a sparkling and deep-natured young lady whose eventual 
marriage was a keen disappointment to Thompson, and a young 
village girl all three were objects of the poet's affection, though we 
can hardly believe that they left deep traces in his memory. But he 
never forgot an earlier episode in the London streets, and to the last 
cherished a hope that he might meet again a girl who had been kind 
to him when he was destitute and penniless. She had saved him from 
starvation and made him share her poor resources of food and shelter. 
When she learnt that friends were busying themselves about his 
welfare she disappeared, feeling that her work was done. 

Nearly one-half of his poems are the songs of gratitude which were 
all that Thompson could bring to repay his friends. Noble and 
beautiful many of them are judged by any standard. Yet who, 
remembering the service of love which inspired them, can read them 
with a coldly critical detachment ! 

Such then, are the memories which may lead us to rate Thompson's 
poetry above its intrinsic worth. Yet there are other memories also, 
memories that incline the modern reader to unfair depreciation. The 
human service wrought for Thompson by his friends was splendid 
indeed. But the literary support they added was not always wise. 
Thanks to their efforts, he was " taken up " to quote the impartial 
record of the Cambridge History of Literature, " by a powerful coterie." 
Instead of helping him to purge his work of its faults, of forced and 
violent effects, of verbal tricks and grotesque diction, these people 
acclaimed his faults as his most sovereign virtues, and deliberately 



4*4 GREAT CATHOLICS 

encouraged him to accentuate them. They shouted extravagant 
praises not merely of his best work, but of everything he wrote. 

The tragic tone which pervades much of the world's greatest poetry 
is deepened by the " hierarchical vision " which, if it nerves the seer 
to his daily battle, exposes him also to the invasion of an unreckonable 
discontent. Woods and ponds and starlight can give less than 
customary joy to eyes that have caught even a fleeting glimpse of woods 
that never lose their green and waters that reflect in their untroubled 
mirror the image of eternally unfading stars. This is the lot of an 
inspired singer, who views from afar the towers of a more splendid 
city. Having drawn breath in remotest ether, he can find little 
savour in common life, and being haunted by secret memories keeps 
evermore a lonely habitation. 

The poet knows, however, that the rhythms that often fill his head 
are just as clearly music to him as if the words he is fitting to them 
were sung by the most beautiful voice in the world. The wordless 
rhythms moving his mind, in fact, will often entrance him as actual 
music does the auditor. And when he reads other poetry on the 
printed page, the basic rhythms of any poem set up vibrations that 
cause him literally to hear the poem singing itself at the same time 
that he sees it lettered out before him. Indeed, we have sometimes 
thought, though we have known poets who were both poets and 
musicians, that a large proportion of writers of poetry were but 
musicians manques. Denied the fullest expression of actual song, where 
sound alone creates forms and dissolving and merging pictorial effects, 
and rouses all the various emotions they turn to the medium that 
most nearly resembles actual song. 

Of course to-day this musical aspect of poetry is regarded in another 
way by the more modern. They attempt to give that intricacy to 
their rhythms which will more nearly parallel the intricacy of musical 
improvisations and compositions. Curiously enough, the more they 
do this, the less actual music passes into the mind from a perusal of 
the poem, the more it becomes an intellectual exercise, a mathematical 
diagram. At least, so it appears to us. We may admire the agility 
of the presentation of images, the emotion inherent, the subtlety of 
statement and then, for something to sing in our brain, we turn back 
to the Elizabethans. We are not saying, of course, that the musical 
element in poetry is the most important element. We are simply 
saying that we regard it as one necessary element, together with 
others, 

Francis Thompson, like Wordsworth, wrote much about poetry 
as well as in poetry and much worth remembering. One of his 
great sentences was " that with many the religion of beauty must always 
be a passion and a power, that it is only evil when divorced from the 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 413 

primal beauty." In Catholic poetry it "can never be so divorced. It 
is welded as in the liturgy of the Church or in the souls of the saints. 

The great mystic poets have one intensity in common, their ability 
to feel and convey a sense of unity. But they differ in the ways in which 
they arrive at this sense of unity, and, in the image or symbol or idea 
which they name unity. The Catholic mystics find their conception 
of the ultimate in the Catholic idea of God. Many of them reach the 
moment of utter conviction through the logic of the church. This 
was not true, or certainly not entirely true, of Francis Thompson. 

He swept, sometimes in the one poem, through each of his masters, 
giving us, after all, the effect of a man who ransacks the treasuries of 
the world to pour their contents into the laps of those whom he loved 
on earth or before the altar. It is pillage, and the result is gleaming 
confusion ; but at any rate, these are treasures and the motive is 
not ostentation. 

Francis Thompson was actually a great romantic poet. Although 
his faith demanded that he forsake the physical world and search for 
spiritual values, his strongest emotions sprang from the very flesh 
which he must renounce. He was sensuous, passionately emotional, 
acutely sensitive to every sound, taste and colour in the world about 
him. His imagery is as rich as Keats's, though sometimes lacking 
in the restraint which Keats finally learned, and his sense of light, 
of the disembodiment of all natural objects is not unlike Shelley's. 
He even tried the rhythms of Swinburne. He was not a thinker, 
but a man of such keen sensibilities, such vehement feelings, that he 
must arrive at any ultimate rather through his reactions to the physical 
world than through any intellectual conviction. This was the struggle 
that went on within him ; he was a devout Catholic, and he was a 
romantic poet. His mysticism springs from the resultant struggle. 

Francis Thompson has little or nothing of the " terrifying simplicity " 
of Blake. He has nothing of the austere directness typical of the poetry 
of Mrs. Meynell herself. In order to see God he must see every light 
and shade of the physical universe and must penetrate through these 
to the security of deity. The famous " Hound of Heaven }J is a record 
of just how, step by step, this penetration takes place. " The Dread 
of the Height," perhaps his most characteristic poem, is the acknow- 
ledgement of Thompson's awareness that once the height, or unity, 
was touched, the poet must fall to the depth of despondency in the 
immediate loss of that height. God, for this poet, could be known 
only in the highest, the most intense moments. For the rest there was 
the abundant beauty of nature, the exquisiteness of childhood, the 
desire for human love. None of these were satisfying and yet they 
caught his heart. 

The struggle between the poet's romantic temperament and his 



416 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Catholic faith Is everywhere apparent In his poetry. Searching 
always to see more than the outer garment of life, Thompson was 
profoundly aware of the beauties of the outer garment. His poems 
are a curious mingling of the sensuous and the spiritual. The greatest 
of his poems, however, attain a certain simplicity, a classical form which 
almost frees them from the emotionalism and elaboration more 
characteristic of the romantic poems. In those of Thompson's poems 
which express the highest, most perfect vision of God and of God's work 
the language is simpler, the lines more balanced, the Imagery clearer. 

Here all is resolved, and the poet is speaking from the heart of his 
most intense conviction. Intensity at its best tends always to order, 
is against over-elaboration. The mystical experience, being one of 
greatest intensity, has, therefore, the power of order. In the complete 
collection of Francis Thompson's poems the reader will note how 
certain poems, always the mystical, mount into complete clarity, how 
certain others, the romantic, give vent to the poet's love of delirious 
colour and natural beauty ; how many poems are a confusion of these 
two tendencies, the romantic and the Catholic mystic. 

The most magical that Thompson ever wrote, " The Mistress of 
Vision, 55 is interpreted according to Catholic doctrine, which is most 
certainly the only doctrine that could illuminate its mystery. This 
doctrine is an immediate key to the cipher, even in the matter of Cathay 
and the unenlightened Buddhists unenlightened in the view of the 
Catholic Church. There is no doubt that Thompson's mind was so 
deeply impregnated with Catholic doctrine that this is the true 
interpretation of his " Mistress of Vision," although his development 
of the symbolism has a magical quality in this poem which actually, 
and marvellously, bears comparison with the rnaglc of Coleridge's 
" Kubla Khan." To many it is the only poem in the English language 
that can bear such a comparison, save possibly Keats's " La Belle 
Dame Sans Merci." 

Naturally the exigencies of rhyme, for he wrote always in rhyme, 
frequently caused him to resort to poetic license in syntax. " Trope 
that itself not scans," when what is meant is " Trope that cannot, 
itself, scan," is certainly not grammatical. Yet so swift is Thompson's 
attack that even his occasional crudities of this kind can be forgiven. 
Doctrinaire in religion he was yet one of the most daring wielders of 
words in imagery that English poetry has ever seen. And his imagery 
was never vague or indefinite. It summed up vividly a particular 
picture. He could even borrow Kipling's " the dawn comes up like 
thunder " from " Mandalay," probably unconsciously, and transmute 
it into line of organ-music, " the great earth-quaking sunrise rolling 
up beyond Cathay." 
Despite the great debt Thompson owes to the many beauties and 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 417 

splendours found in the elucidation of the Catholic point of view 
through its masters of phrase, the fact remains that he is a great poet 
because he draws not only on these sources but on the great poetic 
writing of all time. 

His debt to Crashaw, to Patmore and even to lesser poets, is clearly 
distinguishable. His attitude toward human love is by no means 
satisfactory, absorbed as he was in the idea of the soul's utter abandon- 
ment to God. For Thompson, as is the case with all true genius, had 
in himself the seeds, if not at times, the fine flower, of absolute 
fanaticism. One of the most interesting things he ever wrote, though 
it has been often passed over in the face of his more splendid lyrical 
achievements, is the sequence called " A Narrow Vessel," which he 
speaks of in his sub-title as being upon " the aspect of primitive girl- 
nature towards a love beyond its capacities." 

Thompson was fortunate in utterly believing in all the ramifications 
of Christian doctrine as expounded by the most astute and subtle 
Catholic minds, and that in the ritual of the Catholic Church with its 
tremendous accretions of symbolism, he found infinite riches of imagery. 
His definite faith supplied his poetry always with a strong underlying 
framework and the oscillating needle of his sensitive reasoning always 
returned to what for him was true North. Added to this was his 
mystical recognition of the validity of the poetic imagination which 
did not disdain the imaginatively scientific. 

Somehow Francis Thompson has managed to survive, while most 
of his contemporaries, dead or alive, are almost forgotten, because 
his work embodies the essential qualities which everywhere and in all 
ages are known as the mark of true poetry. He was indeed " one 
smitten from his birth, with curse of destinate verse," and though 
his appeal is not so wide as that of the greatest names in English poetry, 
chiefly because he was pre-occupied so intensely with the more Roman 
aspects of the Catholic religion, he will continue to be read even by those 
who have little sympathy with his particular creed. For richness 
of imagination, for metrical skill and sublimity of thought, he is 
surpassed only by the great master poets of our language, and even where 
his greatest fault the exaggerated luxuriance of his diction is most 
apparent, his " cloth of gold," as he himself has said of Shelley, " bursts 
at the flexures and shows the naked poetry." Few poets in any 
language have known as he did " to teach how the Crucifix may be, 
carven from the laurel tree." He is the victim of no optimistic 
delusions. He has studied Nature and human life too closely not to 
admit their " mean ugly brutish obscene clumsy irrelevances " ; but 
man, the highest product of Nature, is endowed with consciousness 
and judgment, and of what good is judgment if it does not choose 
the best? 



4x8 GREAT CATHOLICS 

There were, besides, little personal episodes that perhaps even 
more instantly affixed the laurels. Barbellion, in a passage held over 
from the Diary of a Disappointed Man, and appropriately included in 
Enjoying life, said that, despite all his sufferings, he was glad to have 
lived to see men fly through the air like birds and to have read the 
poems of Francis Thompson. And Burne-Jones, saying that no words 
since Gabriel's " Blessed Damozel " had so moved him as this new- 
comer's " Hound of Heaven," went on to confess that he undressed, 
and dressed and undressed again, not knowing what he did in 
those minutes of verbal intoxication. 

Thompson was a true Catholic who lived in the shadow of the 
Cross, and so much of the haunting poetry of the book of Job lingers 
in his lines that one may divine him to have been a regular reader of 
the Office for the Dead. Fr. McNabb was present in the Hospital 
of Ss. John and Elizabeth in St. John's Wood when Francis Thompson 
died, and he passionately pleads from first-hand evidence that it is a 
travesty to portray the poet as a helpless drug addict. For Fr. 
Vincent was present when two surgeons discussed the dead poet and 
one of them stressed to the other that the amount of drugs Thompson 
ever took or could have taken was indeed very small. 

Thompson's poetry sprang from his love and contemplation of the 
Cross and Passion, from the Blessed Sacrament, from the Bride of 
Christ (and Christ was for him the True Orient), from the Lady Poverty 
of St. Francis (he espoused her in London streets), and not the Coleridge 
inspirations of intoxicants or drugs. 

Fantastically absurd was the claim once made by some 
Theosophist writers twisting mystic passages to fit the Reincarnation 
invention that Thompson was a perfect Theosophist poet. And an 
article in the London Mercury contained much nonsense about the 
religious side of the poet's work. It was suggested that he belonged 
to no church, to any church. Now all this is to " miss the many 
splendoured thing " of Thompson's burning Catholicism. 

We find some Catholic critics who have objected to Thompson 
because they think his work savours of the pagan spirit ! Even though 
from the outset the poet pleaded ; " I began my career with an 
elaborate indictment of the ruin which the re-introduction of the pagan 
spirit must bring upon poetry." Or " I would far prefer to be the poet 
of the return to God than of the return to Nature." For Thompson 
denounced paganism old and new ; the old paganism which he saw 
concerned with the expected Christ, the new paganism which he saw 
brooding over the rejected Christ. He demanded that St. Thomas 
and Dante should walk hand in hand as defenders of the Church's 
Sacred Literature. " I find I cannot do without Eternal Poetry," 
he wrote. Then there are his lovely lines of prayer " To Chastity." 



FRANCIS THOMPSON 419 

But thou, sweet Lady Chastity, 

Thou, and thy brother Love, with thee 

Out of the terror of the tomb, 

And unclean shapes that haunt sleep's gloom 

Yet, yet I call on thee, 

" Abandon thou not me." 

As a poet, he went in robes all his life. In that he was not alone 
in his generation, for Lionel Johnson did the same. But Johnson, 
with far less imagination and ardour, and far severer scholarship, 
got his poetry out of the robes. It was truly necessary for him to 
appear in the garb of the scholar or the vestments of the priest : we 
cannot conceive of him as a poet, though we know he had other and 
lamentable aspects as a man, in any but ceremonial and learnedly 
correct dress. His ceremony was his way of inducing order into the 
disorder of his life, of achieving decorum , and though the remark 
may sound absurd for readers with imagination there is pathos in the 
unusual, scholarly punctuation of that poem, "The Dark Angel," into 
which he put the tragedy of his always losing, never quite lost, battle 
with drink. 

Thompson's quick-change splendour of costumes, for all that he was 
so much the more considerable poet, has nothing like as much justifica- 
tion. He has got at the wardrobe ; and, without a scholar's purist 
concern about anachronisms and incongruities, though he has his 
own sort of scholarship, he can resist nothing that is brilliant. Only 
one thing saves him. There is no cold posing. He really is enraptured 
and he really conveys that to us. But what incompatibilities ! 

Thompson has taken hold upon the imagination of the younger 
generation. And this although some of the distinctive features of his 
verse his wealth of classical allusion, his exotic neologisms, the 
deliberate richness of his diction might be expected to jar painfully 
upon the susceptibilities of an age intolerant of any mannerisms but 
its own. He has managed to survive because his work embodies the 
essential qualities which everywhere and in all ages are known as the 
mark of true poetry. For richness of imagination, for metrical skill 
and for sublimity of thought he is surpassed only by the great master 
poets of our language. 



REV. J. KEATING, S.J. 



CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, SJ. 



A.D. 187^-1921 

y N LONDON THERE is a " Plater Dining Club," which meets periodically 
JL to discuss the questions of social betterment to which Fr. Plater 
devoted nearly the whole of his Jesuit life. In Oxford there is a 
Catholic Labour College, established as a permanent memorial of that 
wonderfully beneficent career. All over Great Britain, the continued 
and growing activities of what was largely his creation, the Catholic 
Social Guild, testify to the spiritual vitality of the ideas with which 
he inspired it from the first. These phenomena are indications of an 
exceptionally vigorous personality which made a definite and lasting 
impression on its age, and entitles its owner to rank permanently 
amongst Catholic leaders. Even now a " Catholic social sense 3S a 
realization that modern industrial conditions are in many ways at 
variance with the principles and ideals of our Faith is by no means 
general amongst us, but we can truly say that, only for Fr. Plater and 
the band of fellow-workers who drew their inspiration from his wisdom 
and zeal, that sense of what our Catholic profession demands of us 
would be even less keen and less wide-spread. Accordingly, it is well 
to keep alive amongst us the memory of what he accomplished and 
of what he projected, since the need for the extension of his work is 
ever growing more pressing. 

It is interesting to note that Fr. Plater's remote paternal ancestors 
came to England from the Catholic country of Poland, although 
somehow they had managed to lose their Catholic heritage by the 
change. Thus his great-grandfather and grandfather were beneficed 
Anglican clergymen, as was one of his uncles. His father was converted 
in 1851 at the age of 17, and married in 1865 a Miss Margaret Harting, 
a member of an old Catholic family, eminent in the practice of the 
law. Charles Plater was born of this union on September 2nd, 1875, 
the youngest of a family of four, three sons and one daughter. 
Apparently from his earliest years he was of a delicate constitution, 
and so was educated at home under the care of his talented and deeply 
cherished mother until he was twelve years old. Even then, although 
he was entered at the famous College of Stonyhurst in the Ribble 

4 2 



CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, S.J. 431 

Valley, he spent his first year at the Preparatory School, Hodder, on 
the banks of the picturesque river of that name. In 1888 he joined the 
College proper where he at once became distinguished both for 
intellectual ability and a capacity for leadership. 

Association with a school like Stony hurst, steeped in ancient 
Catholic tradition, a school founded abroad during the Elizabethan 
persecution and driven from one Continental refuge after another 
St. Omer, Bruges, Liege during the French Revolution, until, " exiled 
from exile " it settled in 1794 in the old Lancashire mansion of the 
Shireburns, must have been an education in itself to a highly-gifted 
and impressionable boy like Charles Plater. Its history, illustrating 
the fortunes both of Church and State in England during several 
centuries, its many relics of the past preserved in its very structure, 
and in museums and libraries, the old traditional customs concerning 
both work and play, the constant process of its material growth, the 
remarkable men numbered amongst its pupils and its staff, the 
allusions to it embodied in English literature all this creates an 
atmosphere productive of love and pride and loyalty even in the 
average schoolboy, and is well-calculated to fire the imagination and 
broaden the intelligence of the more receptive. Charles Plater, so to 
speak, absorbed " Stony hurst " with every pore, and became a 
complete embodiment of its spirit and outlook, so much so that his 
portrait might fitly be added to those of the worthies which adorn the 
great banqueting-hall, a roll of men who have deserved eminently 
well of their Alma Mater. At the same time, it may reasonably be 
urged by the athletic that the name of the boy Plater never figures in 
the College teams of football or cricket, nor shines forth in sports records. 
That is true but, after all, it only goes to show and to that extent he 
falls short of schoolboy perfection that he had not that combination 
of inclination and capacity which makes for full physical development. 
He did not shirk games, and probably played as much as was good 
for him. 

He was fortunate in that his six years at the College fell within the 
headmastership of Fr. John Gerard, a brilliant scholar of many-sided 
interests, who had the gift of exciting enthusiasm in the most diverse 
subjects in all who came within reach of his influences. He it was who 
founded the present Debating Society and the College periodical, 
called The Stonyhurst Magazine, thus providing ambitious boys with 
the means of acquiring fluency of speech and writing. His strongest 
bent was for natural science, but he was as well a competent classical 
scholar and a student of history. His influence on boys like Plater, 
thus brought into contact with so capacious and energetic a mind, 
was very marked. Charles laid the foundation of genuine classical 
culture, became a ready debater and developed a faculty for excellent 



422 GREAT CATHOLICS 

prose-writing, which secured him the chief Essay Prize for five years 
running and, in the last two years of his school-life, the post of 
sub-editor of the Magazine. In 1894, when the Centenary of the 
College on English soil was celebrated, it was Plater who was selected 
to deliver the school address at the commemorative banquet. 

It is certain too, that the desire for the priesthood which, in common 
with many boys in pious homes, Charles Plater evinced at a very early 
age, easily blossomed into a vocation, both because of the Catholic 
traditions of the College and neighbourhoods and from his admiration 
of Fr. Gerard and others of his religious masters. They were con- 
spicuous illustrations of the truth that devotion to God's service may 
make a man more, rather than less, capable of helping and serving 
his fellows. Anyhow, two years before the end of his school course, 
he applied for admission into the Society, and duly entered the 
noviceship at Roehampton in September, 1894, in his nineteenth year. 
He might be described at this stage as a youth of remarkable promise 
whose solid and sensible piety had prevented his popularity with his 
companions and academic successes from spoiling his essentially simple 
and loveable character, but who had not yet guessed in what particular 
direction his life-work would lie. Nevertheless, even in his school-days, 
he showed, in the ready way in which he forgathered with the rustic 
worthies wjiom he met, when in search of copy for his periodical, 
evidence of what was a salient feature of his later life. 

The traditional training of the young Jesuit follows the well-tested 
lines laid down in the Institute of the Society, and at first it is almost 
entirely spiritual. During the two years of his novitiate, the aspirant 
makes three retreats, one of which lasts for thirty days, wherein he 
studies and puts into practice that matchless method of properly 
orienting human life, the " Exercises " of St. Ignatius. Of these, what 
is called the " First Principle " sets forth the foundation of all human 
perfection and ultimate salvation the praise, reverence and service 
of God. This is followed by the famous meditations the " Kingdom 
of Christ," the " Two Standards," " Three Classes," etc. all designed 
to put before the postulant the very highest ideals and to provide 
means and motives for their accomplishment. These are further 
elaborated by a detailed study of our Lord's life and a sustained 
endeavour to emulate that Divine Model-" to put on Christ," as 
St. Paul advises. On this basis, the Jesuit's spiritual edifice is erected : 
on these themes he continually ponders, not only on the formal 
occasions of his annual retreat, but practically every day of his life. 
No clearer indication need be given of the spiritual background of 
Charles Plater's future career. A mind so keen must have readily 
grasped and held the all-importance of the life to come, in spite of the 
inevitable lag between ideal and practice : a will so strong and 



CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, SJ. 423 

unselfish must have kept steadily to that course in spite of recurrent 
human weaknesses. It is practically impossible for teaching' so clear 
and so constantly repeated to be forgotten or in practice ignored. 
At the end of the two years' novitiate are taken the three vows of 
poverty, chastity, and obedience, which constitute the religious state, 
and then, normally, two years more are spent in the novitiate, engaged 
in the study of science, of the humanities, or of whatever branch of 
learning that the subject may need the most. After this, the Jesuit 
scholastic is sent to the seminary to apply himself to a three years' 
course of philosophy. Accordingly, in 1898, Charles Plater found 
himself back at Stonyhurst, not now at the College but at the neigh- 
bouring philosophate, St. Mary's Hall. He was not, however, destined 
to complete his course there, for in September, 1900, he was sent with 
others to fill the vacancies in the Jesuit Hall at Oxford, lately bereft 
of its first master by the death of Fr. Richard Clarke, and then 
restarting under Fr. J. O'Fallon Pope. 

As is well known, it took a long time before, in the mind of Catholic 
authorities, the intellectual advantages of study at the famous University 
were held to outweigh the moral dangers of contact with a culture 
which had for generations ceased to be distinctively Christian. It 
was not until 1870, that the abolition of the Test Act made it possible 
for Catholics to attend Oxford, and not until 1895 tnat tne Holy See 
allowed them to take advantage of that possibility. The next year 
the Jesuits established a private Hall there for their own scholastics, 
now known as Campion Hall and available for others besides members 
of the Society. 

The four years which Charles Plater spent at Oxford could not but 
have been, for a mind so receptive and a zeal so all-embracing, a period 
of immense development, not merely or even mainly, in the academic 
sense. He had, of course, the great advantage, denied to all but the 
inheritors of the Catholic tradition, of a fixed yet rational standard 
of belief and a clear-cut consistent philosophy, whereby to assay all 
new forms of learning. His knowledge of the classics widened and 
deepened through contact with the experts who tutored him, and he 
even acquired a passion for Mycenaean archaeology, but he never took 
a specialist's interest in languages or aspired to scholarship as such. 
For that reason and because already the needs of the day were 
competing for his attention with the records of the past, he did not, 
to the great disappointment of his friends, secure more than a Second 
in the Honours Lists of classical " Mods " and (( Greats." Moreover, 
he was handicapped always by precarious health and a tendency to 
overwork. But it was during the vacations, which University customs 
so lavishly provide, that Plater's zeal got that definite orientation 
towards social work which it thenceforward never lost. He spent the 



424 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Easter vacation of 1903 at the French Jesuit House of Studies at 
Canterbury, where he came into contact with a number of Fathers 
conversant with every aspect of Catholic activity in France, and felt 
stirred to emulation. The " long " of the same year he spent in 
Holland studying German, and also the highly organized Catholic 
life of that country, and in Belgium where he met for the first time 
what seemed to him the remedy for manifold social evils the provision 
of Retreats for workers. His immediate reaction finds expression in 
the following lines addressed to a friend in England" I am quite 
mad on the subject of the Belgian retreats for working-men. It is 
really unspeakable the cure for all our troubles, Tm sure : results 
reaEy miraculous." 1 In the summer of 1904, when he finally went 
down, he had a similar experience in France where he visited the 
House of Retreats at Epinay and studied methods of organization. 
From this time may be dated what may be called his Apostolate of 
the Pen, whereby in articles or letters to the Press, he did all that he 
could to rouse Catholic public opinions to the need and the methods 
of social reform. He was a born organizer. When advocating a 
cause, he was careful first to learn all about its history, and particularly 
how far it had been projected or attempted by others. He neglected 
no source of enlightenment, experimental or theoretical and he excelled 
eliciting the co-operation of all who could help. Later, as we shall 
notice, he employed the platform as well as the Press. Without being 
an orator or a stylist, he made very effective use of both voice and pen 
a pleasing clear articulation, a vivid phraseology, spiced with anecdote 
and humour helped to convey his message easily to all varieties of 
hearers or readers. What is remarkable is that he began his fruitful 
apostolate whilst he was yet himself in training, as if he foresaw that 
his years of work would be few. A greater measure of repose, a fuller 
cultivation of leisure, might have won him a longer span of life, but the 
projects before him would not brook delay. Although he never 
neglected his relative duties, the charity of Christ urged him to make 
time and opportunity so as to set on foot matters of greater moment. 
His " man of Macedonia," saying " Come over and help us " was 
the long-neglected working-class, robbed not only of their natural 
rights but also of that compensatory Christian faith which makes 
earth's trials endurable or even turns them to gain. 

He was only 29 when he left Oxford and still only an " approved 
scholastic." Normally, he would now have been sent to teach boys 
in some college for several years, to serve in this highly practical fashion, 

1 He set forth his impressions more at length in an article in The Month for November 
of that year (1903) the first of a long series on that and kindred subjects ; one of 
which, now thirty years old (Feb. 1908), bears the significant title "A Plea for 
Catholic Social Action." 



CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, SJ. 425 

the Society which had educated him. As a matter of fact this 
experience, for which he was so well equipped, was denied him, for he 
had still to complete his course of philosophy at Stonyhurst, as well 
to embark on the formidable four years of theology, preparatory 
to ordination and to what may be called his professional career. 

To St. Mary's Hall, accordingly, he returned in 1904 to study 
ethics and to revise his previous philosophical course : to this was 
added the task of " coaching " in Classics the scholastics who were 
destined for an Oxford career. Thus he was not wholly a student 
or altogether a professor : however, his ambiguous status helped rather 
than hindered his exercising his qualities of leadership. His own 
class were taught, but hardly in the spirit of Mr. Squeers, not only 
to study primitive archaeology but also to excavate the Roman remains 
in the neighbouring hamlet of Ribchester a work the results of which 
attracted the attention of the Athm&um. And he encouraged others 
of his charges and fellow-students to exercise the apostolate of the 
pen i and in this way historical accounts of various Catholic societies 
and enterprises were put before the public, 1 always with an eye to the 
future and greater development which he contemplated. At the 
Catholic Truth Conference at Brighton in September, 1906, a paper 
of his on " Retreats for Working-Men " was read, which may be 
regarded as the formal opening shot in a campaign which has resulted, 
so far, in the establishment both in Scotland and England of various 
Houses for that specific purpose, and the prospect of still more. This 
cultivation of the press had gratifying, if sporadic, results ; the Catholic 
conscience began to be less drowsy ; little social enterprises sprang up 
here and there, which had their centre in him, but now the time had 
come for the temporary retirement of their zealous inspirer. He 
started his theological course at St. Beuno's College, North Wales, in 
September, 1907. 

Some may wonder why this zealous young man, bent on doing 
everything possible to remedy the ravages of industrialism amongst 
the British working-classes, should have hit upon and stressed the 
specifically Catholic practice of " going into retreat." It seems rather 
a remote and indirect means of attacking economic injustice and the 
distressing phenomena of destitution. But, in essence, it is a sound 
means and indeed the only sound means : the means taught by 
Infallible Truth when he said " Seek ye fast the Kingdom of God 
and His justness, and all these things shall be added to you." Catholics 
know that the existing chaos of human affairs, national and inter- 
national, results from men and nations ignoring the Kingdom of God 
altogether, and that the only remedy is to restore to human relations 
the observance of Christian principles. . Now, in a retreat a man faces 
1 Notably a series called " Our Social Forces " which appeared in The Universe. 



426 GREAT CATHOLICS 

the realities of time and eternity, God's purpose in creating, the 
creature's responsibilities, the comparative unimportance of this 
world except as a training-ground for the next. It is only in the 
light of eternity that the things of time can be seen in their proper 
perspective and proportion. And man is further taught that God 
is best served by his own service of his fellow-man for God's sake. 
A retreat puts charity, the love of God and man, in its proper place in 
life. And it is love, not mere justice, that will save the world. 
Moreover, let us remember that, although Charles Plater laboured 
to bring the means of making retreats within the reach of those who 
are normally too busy or too poor to secure the privilege, he would 
have all classes, employers and employed, women as well as men, rich 
and poor, employ from time to time this hallowed way to set their 
lives in order, to realize both their duties and their privileges and to 
combine for effective action. In a retreat, the great basic doctrines 
of God's fatherhood and the brotherhood of men are especially 
emphasized, and the way paved for that Christian unity in good works 
which is meant to enlighten and preserve the world. 1 

During his iheologate, although his intercourse with the outer 
world was necessarily much restricted, Plater's superiors wisely 
allowed him to relieve the strain of study by writing and correspondence 
on his various social interests and even by occasional excursions in 
pursuance of them. News came to him in 1908 that the first Retreat 
House had been opened Compstall Hall near Romily and he was, 
to his great delight, allowed to visit it. In the course of the next 
year came the -first idea of a " Catholic Sociological Society," for 
which the ground had been prepared by discussion and correspondence 
with various friends. The Silver Jubilee Conference of the Catholic 
Truth Society in September, 1909, at Manchester brought together a 
number of these, at a luncheon presided over by Mgr. Parkinson, of 
Oscott. The new organization was discussed and approved, to be 
formerly constituted under the title of " The Catholic Social Guild," 
about a month later at Oscott. The name of Charles Plater whilst 
he was at St. Beuno's and for several years afterwards does not appear 
amongst the officers or even on the committee of the Guild, although 
every one felt that he was its principal originator and the mainspring 
of its early activities. At the first (Leeds) Catholic Congress of 1910, 
the Catholic Social Guild took a prominent place amongst Catholic 
societies, and was welcomed generally by the hierarchy and thence- 
forward, up to a point, grew rapidly in numbers and influence. In 
that year was published by the Catholic Truth Society the first Catholic 
Social Tear Book compiled at St. Beuno's by the busy theologian largely 

1 All that can be said in commendation of this means of personal and social 
regeneration may be found in Fr. Plater's own Retreats for tfie People, published in 191 1 . 



CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, S.J. 427 

out of previous writings, and containing an account of another recently 
founded Catholic society, the Catholic Women's League, which also 
owed much to his counsel and inspiration. 1 He continued to edit, 
and to contribute copiously to successive Tear Books> which served 
admirably both to chronicle and to direct Catholic social effort, till 
a twelve-month before his death. We may mention especially that 
issued in 1918 towards the close of the Great War, called " A Christian 
Social Crusade," which was later issued as a separate publication and 
ran into a third edition. It was based upon a " statement of principles 
and proposals" put forward in 1917 by the Inter-denominational 
Conference of Social Service Unions, a body on which the Catholic 
Social Guild was represented almost from its foundation in 1911. 

In the September of the previous year, 1910, the culminating event 
of his career, his ordination to the priesthood, took place at Roe- 
hampton. Thenceforward as a member of the Ecclesia Docens his 
status as a leader was to be more assured, but he was not yet freed 
from the long training of the Society. Another year of theological 
study, diversified by a certain amount of pastoral work, preceded his 
final successful examinations and then, he departed for St. Stanislaus 
College, Tullamore, Ireland, for his " Third Year of Probation," a 
sort of second noviceship which every Jesuit has to undergo before 
admission to his last permanent vows. He returned in time for the 
Third Catholic Congress, in August, 1912, which marked some further 
progress of the Catholic Social Guild and then put in some strenuous 
parish work in the slums of Glasgow, an experience calculated to fire 
still further his already fervent zeal for the victims of modern 
industrialism. His appointment as Professor of Psychology at St. 
Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst, in September, 1912, was explicitly provisional: 
he had not been professedly trained for the part, yet it enabled him as 
usual, to inoculate his charges with enthusiasm for social work, whilst 
it gave him many opportunities of evangelising the industrial North 
and spreading the work of the Catholic Social Guild by lectures, 
retreats and the founding of study-clubs. He was relieved of his 
Psychological Professorship after July, 1914, and spent the vacation 
giving retreats in the Midlands, until the outbreak of War occurred to 
change the lives and destinies of millions. In the first year of the 
War, Charles Plater was still employed at Stonyhurst, teaching 
philosophy and classics and beginning to add to his social apostolate 
that care for refugees and wounded soldiers that grew daily more 
clamant and absorbing. Then the scene of his work was changed, 
but not its volume, by his appointment in September, 1915, to teach 

1 As showing the extent of his activities he had also a large share in the foundation 
of the Catholic Medical Guild which came into being in July 1910, and has since 
proved of immense service to Catholic doctors all over the country. 



428 GREAT CATHOLICS 

a class at Wimbledon College. This post brought him within reach 
of the large camps around the metropolis and he entered with zest 
upon that purely spiritual crusade for souls, which found in the 
realities of war unparalleled opportunities of preaching the truths 
and administering the consolations of religion. 

Fr. Plater as we have implied had always been a " good mixer " ; 
now in the widely-varied composition of the huge civilian armies he 
could indulge his capacity to the full, and his geniality and manifest 
affection brought hundreds back to the practice of religion. And, 
of course,, he speedily instituted retreats for soldiers. 

Then quite unexpectedly in January, 1916, he was appointed to a 
rectorship, which involved his becoming Master of the Jesuit Hall 
at Oxford. 

One feels that, in normal circumstances, this position at one of the 
main centres of the intellectual life of the country would have given 
Fr, Plater the very widest scope for the exercise of his exceptional 
powers of leadership and inspiration. But though the upheaval 
caused by the War did prepare the public mind for radical changes 
in industrial and social life as witness the extensive movements for 
" national reconstruction " set on foot by every Christian organization, 
by various political parties and even by associations of business men 
yet the immediate necessity continued to be the welfare of the actual 
victims of the War, who, in growing numbers began to fill the hospitals 
of England. Those in Oxford and the neighbourhood soon became 
familiar to the Master of Campion Hall and to others of its staff, 
notably Fr. C. C. Martindale, and when once week-end retreats were 
started the Catholic public contributed generously to the support of 
this novel but very real form of charity. 1 Innumerable were the 
friendships formed in those few crowded years, when the University, 
depleted of its usual inhabitants, was filled by an even more transient 
clientele cadets in training for the great adventure overseas and 
those' who returned from it, alive yet broken in body and often in 
mind. Many were Colonials, and in time large encampments of 
German prisoners gave further scope for the devotion of Fr. Plater 
and his colleagues, during what Fr. Martindale calls " those tragic, 
laughable, bewildering, exhausting, exhilarating, but always happy 
and always holy years." (Charles Dominic Plater, p. 228.) Direct 
literary fruits of this time were A Primer of Peace and War, a compilation 
in which others took a share, and of value as giving the Church's 
teaching on the many moral problems connected with the practice of 
warfare ; How to Help Catholic Soldiers, Letters to Catholic Soldiers, four 

1 Fr. Plater never lost the chance of embodying his experiences or his projects in 
permanent form, and his Retreats for Catholic Soldiers gives an inspiring account of 
this enterprise. 



CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, S.J. 429 

in number which met the needs of the moment and, towards the end 
of the War, another compilation, Catholic Soldiers, by Sixty Chaplains 
and Many Others an attempt, necessarily incomplete, to show how 
the profession of Catholicity served the fighting forces who possessed 
the faith. 

But work for soldiers, hale or wounded, was not allowed wholly to 
interrupt his strenuous advocacy of the ideals of the Catholic Social 
Guild. Every University vacation was for him a time for a vigorous 
crusade through the great industrial districts of the North, carrying 
the social message of the Gospel, in spite of his frail and uncertain 
health, to the multitudinous manual workers, that class so oppressed 
by iniquitous social conditions and so exposed to perversion by the 
false principles of Communism. His " Tyneside tours " became 
traditional and his enthusiasm was such that everywhere he became 
a colporteur of the Guild's increasing literature. 1 His audiences were 
often socialistic yet, once it was explained to them, very appreciative 
of Catholic economic teaching. He continued these exhausting but 
most useful expeditions up to a year before his death, made innumerable 
friends among the clergy and established a solid tradition of social 
study amongst Catholic industrial workers. 

It was not often that he had the opportunity of addressing that other 
factor in industry, whose need of evangelization is certainly not less 
than that of labour the capitalist employers. But as late as December, 
1919, before the brief glimpse of better things revealed by the explosion 
of the War had become clouded again by the mists of human selfishness, 
he was called upon, as representing Cardinal Bourne, to address a 
Mansion House meeting of the controllers of industry on the resolution 
" that whole-hearted co-operation among all classes to secure 
prosperity in industry and satisfactory conditions of life for workers 
is essential in the national interest." It is perhaps characteristic of , 
the business world, then and now, that the workers 5 welfare is put 
in this resolution second to industrial success ; anyhow, there was 
nothing in the proposal to suggest that radical reform in the ideals of 
industry which the crisis called for. Fr. Plater spoke plainly and 
bluntly, like another St. John Baptist, on the need to Christianise 
industrial relations. " Christianity," he said, " is something very- 
revolutionary and something very strong, I venture to say that if 
you were to introduce a little real Christianity into directors' meetings 
or on to the Stock Exchange or into a Trade Union Congress, or into 
the House of Commons, you might get some surprising results." The 

1 Amongst the most successful pamphlets issued about this time by the Catholic 
Social Guild was Cardinal Bourne's famous Lenten Pastoral of 1918 The Nation's 
Crisis, regarding the form and contents of which it is generally believed that His 
Eminence consulted Fr. Plater. It states in clear and convincing language the only 
sound lines on which national reconstruction can proceed. 



430 GREAT CATHOLICS 

audience cheered, but he immediately asked them if they really 
meant it ; were they ready to pay for the introduction of charity and 
justice into business by sacrifice, " by carrying a cross." " There is 
no power that can lift up this conflict between employers and employed 
above the level of mere brute force except Christianity." 

Fr. Plater's eloquence and sincerity in which was practically his 
last public speech in England, might win applause but more was 
needed to uproot the evil traditions of centuries. The only official 
organization of employers since the War is the Federation of British 
Industries and this has formally declared, regarding the Living Wage, 
" that the real ultimate test (of its justice) must always be what industry 
will bear." Instead, therefore, of the " Two Nations " managing to 
combine in their common interests, the lists are now being set for their 
final conflict which only the principles so assiduously preached by 
Fr. Plater and his Guild can avert. 

I have said above that the Catholic Social Guild rapidly made its 
way to a point where it stuck. Had Fr. Plater lived, it might at last 
have won support from the Catholic business world, whereas that world 
on the whole has from the first boycotted it. In spite of all the Popes 
have written and since Fr. Plater's death Quadragesima Anno (1931) 
has come to endorse and extend the teaching of Rerum Novarum in 
spite of all the efforts of the English hierarchy down to the latest 
pastoral of the Cardinal Archbishop, " Brotherhood in Christ," there 
is little sign yet of that combination of Catholic employers and pro- 
fessional men with Catholic workers, through which alone the social 
message of Christianity can be made articulate and effective. In his 
Mansion House speech Fr. Plater laid his finger on the reason. The 
workers on their side gladly embrace Catholic teaching because it 
upholds their rights, proclaims their dignity and saves them from 
servitude, whereas for the employers the Christianising of iiidustry 
would involve, to start with, a certain amount of sacrifice. And, as 
the Pope Pius freely admits in Dwini Redemptoris (ftie great Encyclical 
against Communism) the employers are saddled with " the heavy 
heritage of an unjust economic regime whose ruinous influence has 
been felt through many generations." Accordingly, there is need 
of association between themselves and dissociation from those whose 
principles are unchristian ; a process likely to be troublesome ; a 
process calling for the help of grace as well as of reason and therefore 
linked, as all Fr. Plater's apostolate was, with the practice of " seeking 
God " in retreats. Apart from this failure to enlist the support of the 
Catholic employing class as a whole many individuals were more 
enlightened and generous in help in the Christian Social Crusade, 
one must, for completeness, note that, especially at the beginning, 
the Catholic Social Guild roused opposition even amongst good and 



CHARLES DOMINIC PLATER, SJ. 431 

zealous people. It was the same hostility, born of righteous but 
mistaken zeal, that Cardinal Manning encountered in his time : the 
word " social " frightened all that were afraid of Socialism. Opposi- 
tion grew so strong that it was thought opportune that Mgr. Parkinson, 
the President of the Guild, should, at the Cardiff National Congress 
of 1914, fully declare its attitude towards all social theories and 
programmes which were not specifically Catholic. This vindication 
effectively cleared the air and henceforward, no educated Catholic 
has doubted that the Guild is fully trusted both in England and at 
Rome, although from time to time both " Right " and " Left " have 
found fault with its central position. 

In The Nation's Crisis Cardinal Bourne used these significant words : 
" We should co-operate cordially with the efforts which are being made 
by various religious bodies to remedy our unchristian social conditions. 
Without any sacrifice of religious principles we may welcome the 
support of all men of good will in this great and patriotic task." 
From the first Fr. Plater put this counsel into practice and he became 
one of the best known and most helpful members of the Annual 
Summer School at Swanwick, held since 1912 by the Interdenomina- 
tional Conference of Social Service Unions. Fr. Martindale records 
that, in the opinion of some non-Catholic .members, although Catholics 
stood uncompromisingly aloof in worship, they and especially Fr. 
Plater diffused a really unifying spirit. (Charles Dominic Plater, p. 203). 

The last nine months of this devoted life were spent in what some one 
called " strenuous rest-cures." He had long known that both heart 
and arteries were out of gear, and he extracted from his doctors the 
admission that a rest, even two years, would give him no guarantee 
of future fitness, so he quite evidently determined to wear out rather 
than rust out. But obedience and indeed prudence obliged him to 
slacken off to some extent, and he was sent in March, 1920, to 
recuperate for a month in the West of Ireland. He resumed his life 
at Oxford for a while and gave all his time to the first Catholic Social 
Guild Summer School in June of that year : whereat the idea of a 
Catholic Workers 5 College began to take shape. The Summer School 
has survived even the blow of his death and has been held without 
a break ever since. He was well enough to attend the resumed 
National Congress in Liverpool at the end of July, 1920, but grew 
steadily worse during the autumn. At last, it was suggested that, as 
his doctor as well as himself needed a rest, they should go together to 
Malta. He was there about a month, lecturing, preaching and 
helping in the formation of a Maltese Social Guild, before the end came, 
as he would have wished : a sudden cerebral haemorrhage following 
on a charitable visit to the sick. In that brief period of apostolic work, 
he had so endeared himself to that Catholic people, high and low, 



432 GREAT CATHOLICS 

had so impressed them by his whole-hearted devotion to their interests, 
that both Archbishop and Governor were only answering a popular 
demand by giving him a splendid public funeral. 

The final words of this brief sketch of a great Catholic social pioneer 
are actually being penned on the seventeenth anniversary of his holy 
death. So comparatively short was the span of life in which he 
" fulfilled many days," that many of his colleagues and intimates 
are still alive, not to mourn him but rather to try to carry on his work. 
What, indeed, would we not give to have amidst us still that lovable 
personality, that fountain of contagious energy, that mind of clear 
vision and that God-inspired will, now that all the problems we faced 
under his leadership are growing more instant and more complex 
before our eyes. But his inspiration is with us yet to give us courage 
and hope and perchance he can now help us even more effectively 
than when alive, to fulfil his splendid ideals. 



ISABEL C. CLARKE 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 



1872-1898 

A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF attention has of late been bestowed, 
and not unworthily, upon the little group of men and women 
who won fame in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was a 
time of passionate literary and artistic revival, being indeed one of 
those periods of collective genius which occur from time to time to 
startle and even dismay a world unprepared for and even suspicious of 
novelty. It owed its inception to the ambition, initiative and rebellion 
of a handful of young people, inspired by an energetic impulse that 
could not be disregarded. And to us it must now seem that the Victorian 
age, so prolific in literature, was to go down in a blaze of glory, 
ephemeral, fugitive, yet nevertheless imbued with the germ of 
immortality. That narrowly defined epoch was destined, despite 
its errors and exaggerations, to influence succeeding generations. It 
constituted a break with tradition of a very definite character. While 
fin-de-siecle was the adjective frequently and contemptuously applied 
to that group by those reared in an earlier and more robust tradition, 
its votaries did undoubtedly possess those flaming attributes of 
brilliancy and genius which, however wayward, must leave an 
indelible mark upon their period. The Wilde scandal and the South 
African War combined to end it, while the death of the aged Queen, 
the inauguration of a new epoch, produced an entirely different type 
of poet and writer actuated by widely divergent ideals men who 
were preparing, albeit unconsciously, for that grim ordeal which 
was destined to earn for them the name of the sacrificed generation. 
Many of the survivors of the 'nineties were absorbed into that newer 
tradition, and in many cases lived to obtain recognition in a very 
different field. 

The interest evoked by those artists and writers is in no way based 
upon any necessity to rescue their names from oblivion. For despite 
their youth, and in many cases their premature and tragic deaths, 
the work they accomplished was such that no student of Victorian 
art and literature can afford to ignore. And among those who 

434 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 455 

perished early, three names stand out with a certain hectic and feverish 
brilliancy those of Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel 
Johnson. The Church claims them all as her children. And in his 
book The 'Beardsley Period the late Mr. Osbert Burdett affirmed 
unhesitatingly that if one of the men who formed that group was 
lacking and " whose art the decade would feel its greatest loss, that 
personality is undoubtedly Aubrey Beardsley." 

When in 1 894 John Lane planned the publication of the Tellow Book 
he could not possibly have foreseen the immediate fame, even the 
immense notoriety it was destined to achieve. It was primarily 
instituted for the encouragement of those young writers and artists 
whose work he had already in many cases begun to publish. Looking 
back upon the list of contributors we can discern little that was 
in the slightest degree abnormal in the majority of those whom he 
thus assembled to assist him in his new venture. Such names as 
Edmund Gosse, Henry James, William Watson, Kenneth Grahame, 
Arnold Bennett, Maurice Baring and Henry Harland suggest nothing 
to us now of those peculiar qualities with which the periodical was then 
considered to be imbued. Many of them were indeed destined to 
survive honourably in English literature long after that ephemeral 
quarterly had perished. Lord Leighton and Walter Sickert were 
among the illustrators, but the post of art-editor was given to a young 
man of twenty-two, Aubrey Beardsley. 

Since the appearance of the Germ in the early fifties nothing in the 
least resembling it had been seen. The Germ perished .even more 
rapidly than did the Tellow Book) yet it gave two deathless lyrics to the 
world Christina Rossetti's When I am dead my Dearest and Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti's Blessed DamoseL Nothing in the letterpress of 
the Tellow Book achieved a like fame, although the names of many of 
its contributors can never be forgotten, but the drawings of Aubrey 
Beardsley, disquietingly original, are of perdurable value in the 
history of British Art. 

It is still almost universally believed that he owed his fame to that 
brief and abruptly ended connection with the Yellow Book. But 
his genius had already been recognized and encouraged. At the age 
of twenty-one he had been commissioned by Dent to illustrate the 
Morte d" Arthur for an important edition de luxe which was intended to 
rival the productions of the Kelmscott Press. Beardsley made over 
five hundred drawings for this book alone. Decorative, delicate and 
beautiful they were stylized to a degree that revealed the young artist's 
preoccupation with the Primitives. The exquisitely wrought designs 
for the headings and tail-pieces are full of a certain medieval charm. 
But he was then as always the despair of his publishers. " The most 
sacred engagements, the loudest imprecations," wrote one of his 



436 GREAT CATHOLICS 

biographers, " failed to move him if they conflicted with his humour 
of the moment. 53 

Even earlier his drawings published in the Pall Mall Magazine and 
the Pall Mall Budget had attracted the attention of connoisseurs by 
their singular force and originality. To such an one the association 
with the Yellow Book could bring only notoriety rather than fame. 

Born at Brighton in 1872 Aubrey Beardsley died at Mentone in 
March, 1898 in his twenty-sixth year. He was educated at Brighton 
College where, however, he seems to have left but little mark, since 
the public school system, so admirable in many ways, has almost 
invariably failed to discover, recognize or foster genius. Nor can it 
be said that his ill-written and ill-spelt letters were a credit to his 
instructors. From childhood he was very delicate, with the Damocles 
sword of inherited disease hanging perpetually and menacingly above 
his head. His mother, left a widow with two young children, Aubrey 
and Mabel, could not afford to keep him at school after he was sixteen, 
at which age he found employment for a time in an architect's office, 
an experience that was not without its formative influence upon 
his future work. But his health broke down, and his next effort to 
earn his bread was as a clerk in the Guardian Assurance Company. 
While his days were spent at a desk in the City his evenings were 
devoted to attending the art-classes held by Professor Brown for 
students at Westminster. The long hours must considerably have 
taxed his fragile physique, and in his twentieth year he abandoned 
office life for ever and embarked upon the hazardous career of an 
artist. Nor was his chance long in coming, since as we have seen he 
was but twenty-one when Dent gave him his first remunerative 
commission. 

During those last five years of his life Beardsley produced with 
ferocious energy and industry an incredible amount of work which was 
perfectly mature, definitely original, and certainly during its early 
and final phases of rare and unique beauty. Had he lived he would 
undoubtedly have gained many of those qualities which men and women 
of artistic impulse must acquire with fresh experience of life and by 
contact with those shaping influences which inevitably enlarge the 
mind and expand the soul. Indeed that the process of an immense 
change was at work within him during that last year of his life is 
amply evidenced by one of his latest and most perfect drawings, 
Mademoiselle de Maupin, which in delicacy of pattern and execution 
surpassed all his former work, as well as in one his final letters to 
Smithers in which he wrote: "I. have definitely left behind me all 
my former methods." The Beardsley who had boasted that he was 
" nothing if he was not grotesque " was gone. The spiritual change 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 437 

that came to him during the last eighteen months of his life had already 
begun to affect his art, transmuting it to nobler purposes. But it would 
be idle to speculate upon the particular form which that progress and 
development would have taken. As well ask what Keats, Shelley, 
Emily Bronte, and that genius of our own day, Katherine Mansfield 
would have achieved had they survived to middle age. The man or 
woman who dies young has often completed his task, and offered 
his little gesture. . . . 

In appearance Aubrey Beardsley was at any rate towards the end of 
his life extraordinarily pallid and emaciated. Someone wittily described 
him as a " silver hatchet with green hair." The large nose was 
strongly formed ; the great haggard sunken eyes were shadowed by the 
heavy lids so frequently to be observed in the victims of phthisis. 
From a narrow forehead the rather long hair was parted and brushed 
back from the brows. But it is always a boy's face that looks out 
from his photographs an eager wistful face as of one aware of his 
approaching, untimely end. 

The few survivors of the Pre-Raphaelite period encouraged the 
young man whose passage to fame was of such dramatic swiftness. 
Burne-Jones was perhaps less enthusiastic than the others, but Lord 
Leighton was warm in his praises, despite an amusing reservation 
with which few people could now be found to agree. On examining 
his drawings he exclaimed : " What wonderful line ! What a great 
artist ! If he could only draw ! " But draw he could with an unsurpassed 
accuracy and precision, although it was not in the manner of Leighton, 
educated in an earlier and very different tradition. Of younger 
men Mr. Pennell was one of the first to recognize Beardsley's talent and 
contributed an article about him to the Studio which was then making 
its first appearance. 

As art editor of the Tellow Book Beardsley was associated with Henry 
Harland, the literary editor, whose stories at that time had considerable 
vogue. To the first few numbers of that famous periodical, Beardsley 
contributed much of that work which amused, dismayed and even 
repelled the public of his day. But he bore criticism well, even the 
rather deplorable " Daubray Wierdsley " of Punch> and only twice 
replied to it through the medium of the press rather after the witty 
and satirical manner of Whistler. And it must be said he had a 
good deal to bear. " To that other thing/' wrote one of his critics, 
" to which the name of Mrs. Patrick Campbell has somehow become 
attached, we do not know that anything would meet the case except a 
short Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal ! " But the 
" thing " in question afterwards obtained a position of honour in the 
Berlin National Gallery. 

In a moment of panic during the following year 1895 John Lane, 



438 GREAT CATHOLICS 

aware that the odium incurred by the Tellow Book was practically 
concentrated upon Beardsley, dismissed him, an action which left 
the young artist with impaired reputation and in a condition that 
save for the generosity of a few friends would have spelt destitution. 
It is only fair to say that no evidence has been adduced which could 
justify his being thrown to the wolves in such summary fashion. 



At this juncture there appeared upon the scene the man who more 
than any other must be regarded as the evil genius of Aubrey Beardsley. 
Leonard Smithers was a Yorkshireman, some ten years his senior, 
who had abandoned the law to become a publisher and bookseller. 
A drug addict, he was also a surreptitious dealer in books of doubtful 
quality, and owing to the risks of this unpleasant trade he was able 
to command large sums for his wares. 

He resolved to start a rival to the Tellow Book to be entitled the 
Savoy, and invited Beardsley's help in this new venture, offering him 
the munificent sum of 25 weekly for all rights in his future drawings 
of which he was also to retain the originals. 

To the Savoy, which did not prove a success and was even more 
short-lived than its rival, Beardsley contributed at least one memorable 
drawing The Rape of the Lock, which, executed at the instigation of 
Edmund Gosse, evinced his preoccupation with the elaborate 
artificiality of the eighteenth century. He also published the fragment 
of a novel in its pages, and several poems of which his translation of 
the Ave Atque Vale of Catullus is worth quoting as an example of his 
facile mastery of verse. 

By ways remote and distant waters sped, 
Brother, to thy sad graveside am I come, 
That I may give the last gifts to the dead 
And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb ; 
Since she who now bestows and now denies 
Hath ta'en thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes. 

But lo ! these gifts, the heirlooms of past years, 
Are made sad things to grace thy coffin-shell, 
Take them, all drenched with a brother's tears, 
And, brother, for all time, Hail and Farewell ! 

Almost penniless Beardsley was dependent upon the bounty of 
Smithers, and it was for him he executed the illustrations for the English 
translation of Wilde's Salome. Those nightmare negroid faces with 
their hideous suggestion of evil magic were among the most repulsive 
he ever drew. The theme seemed to evoke all that was morbid and 
sinister in his imaginative processes. One turns with relief from 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 439 

them to the drawings of his first and last periods. Of the early ones 
the Procession of Jeanne d'Arc, done when he was only twenty and which 
was always a favourite of his, is one of the most beautiful. It owed 
something of its decorative quality to the influence of Burne-Jones, 
although revealing that sensitiveness of vision, that appealing rhythm 
of line and superb balance so characteristic of his own art. Another 
of his early masterpieces, Les Revenants de Musique, is also conceived in 
this happier vein ; the man's wistful, dreaming face turned towards 
those indeterminate phantom forms evoked by the music is full of a 
delicate and imaginative charm. To the later period, the work of his 
last year, belong the exquisite Mademoiselle de Maupin and Chopin Ballade, 
both " aquatintesques," executed in line and faint wash and reproduced 
by the auto-chromatic process then recently invented. These were 
among his few adventures into colour and for that reason are profoundly 
significant of the change he contemplated in his methods. But by 
that time the influence of Smithers was on the wane, and another and 
more spiritual one was usurping its place. Smithers was further 
proving a broken reed in the matter of payments, and indeed a few 
months before his death when hard-pressed for money, Beardsley 
confessed to his sister that he never knew when he sat down to a 
drawing whether it would ever be paid for, or if published, whether 
it would be adequately produced, an even worse fate from the artist's 
point of view. 

Fortunately for him he had another benefactor in the late Mr. 
Andre Raffalovich whose influence over him was of a very different 
character. A writer of some repute he was a devout Catholic, and it 
was undoubtedly largely due to him that Beardsley was received into 
the Catholic Church the year prior to his death. It was to this friend 
the Last Letters 1 were addressed, although for a long time it was 
believed they were actually written to Fr. John Gray who edited them. 
The priest had at one time formed part of that little group of writers 
and artists, and was the author of two books of verse, Silverpoints and 
Spiritual Poems, the latter being among Beardsley's most cherished 
possessions since he clung to it when compelled to sell his other books. 
Fr. Gray renounced the career of an author and became a priest, 
working in Edinburgh for many years where he was well known and 
greatly beloved. Both he and his friend Raffalovich died in 1934 
within a few months of each other. 

And as his malady increased Beardsley turned more and more 
towards those things which Fr. Gray and Raffalovich represented. 
Indeed in the Last Letters he made generous acknowledgment of the 
debt that he owed to the solicitude and prayers of the latter. 

1 Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley with an introductory note by the Rev. John Gray 
(Longmans, Green & Go. 1904). 



440 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Beardsley was influenced by many things in the world of art, 
assimilating and bending them to his own genius. The Greek vases 
from which he learned so much (one wonders that he never illustrated 
Keats's famous Ode), the prints of old Japan, the Italian Primitives 
whom he admired so whole-heartedly, all produced their effect upon 
his art. Absorbed in the alembic of his fertile and energetic imagina- 
tion and stimulating its processes, they contributed to his intellectual 
equipment without touching his essential originality. His idiom 
remained his own. The forcefulness of those clean firm lines, the 
boldness of the blotted masses of shadow, the large pure white spaces 
which were so intensely significant, the economy and rhythm of his 
composition which in the artist would seem to be the result of a 
special process of subjective visualization combined to imbue his 
work with a quality that has never been successfully imitated. But 
that he had a profound influence upon subsequent decorative art cannot 
be denied. Indeed it has* been suggested that the Bakst decor for the 
Russian Ballet could hardly have come into existence without the 
strange yet beautiful work of Aubrey Beardsley. 

Few people ever saw him at work. If interrupted he would thrust 
the paper out of sight. Yet a story exists of his being one day surprised 
by a friend when he was in the act of drawing an overturned chair. 
Sheet after sheet was cast aside and destroyed, he drew it no less than 
; fifty times before he could satisfy his own exacting ideal. He left 
nothing to chance ; all his work was supremely careful. cc I may 
claim," he once wrote, " to have some command of line. I try to get 
as much as possible out of a single curve or straight line." 

During the day it was his habit to darken the room and draw by 
artificial light in order to produce the desired effects, but for the most 
part his work was actually accomplished at night. His industry was 
prodigious, giving one the impression that he was as the French say 
un averti, aware that the time allotted to him must prove of brief 
duration. 

He had, wrote Mr. Arthur Symons, the fatal speed of those who are 
to die young, that disquieting completeness and knowledge, that 
absorption of a lifetime in an hour, which we find in those who 
hasten to have their work done before noon, knowing that they will 
not see the evening. 1 

Where the flame of genius burns very fiercely it is apt to consume 
its frail human habitation. And in Aubrey Beardsley the flame of 
creative energy resembled a destroying force, a fiery impulse urging 
him ever to more and more work until at last his enfeebled hands could 

1 Aubrey Beardsley by Arthur Symons. 1905. 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 441 

no longer hold the implements of his craft. " I am always burning/' 
he told a friend who remonstrated with him outside Govent Garden 
Opera House one bitter winter's night because he was wearing no 
overcoat. 

It seems to have been in June, 1896, that he first became definitely 
alarmed about his health though it had already aroused considerable 
anxiety among his friends. In a letter to Raffalovich he wrote : 

I know you will be sorry to hear that Dr. Symes Thompson has 
pronounced very unfavourably on my condition to-day. He enjoins 
absolute quiet and if possible immediate change. I am beginning to 
be really depressed and frightened about myself. 

And a little later from Epsom to the same friend : 

My only trouble now is my entire inability to walk or exert myself 
in the least. The attacks of haemorrhage have been a dreadful 
nuisance. Last week I had a severe one and I have been an invalid 
ever since. 

In July he went to Bournemouth, his mother accompanying him, 
and this journey was to have a profound effect upon his life. For it 
was there that he fell almost immediately under the spell of the 
Catholic Church. 

There is down here a beautiful little church served by the Fathers 
of the Society of Jesus. I hope, when I am able to go out, to assist 
at their services. 

And a few days later : 

I should indeed be grateful for an introduction to any of the 
Jesuit fathers here. 

But his health grew worse and a few days later he was again 
seriously ill. 

I can't tell you how ill I am to-day. I am quite paralysed with 
fear. I have told no one. It's dreadful to be so weak as I am 
becoming , . . work is out of the question. 

Presently he was able to enjoy Fanny Burney's novels Evelina and 
Cecilia. They inspired several drawings, although he said in one 
of his letters that no book was ever well illustrated when it had 
become a classic. " Contemporary illustrations are the only ones of 
any value or interest." 



442 GREAT CATHOLICS 

In December he had a terrible attack of haemorrhage when ascending 
the Chine, and believed that he was going to die, out there and alone. 
Somehow or other he managed to struggle home, but his fears were 
now definitely aroused and the plans he made for future work were 
more formidable than ever. He wrote thus to his friend : 

My agony of mind is great at even the slightest appearance of 
blood, for one never knows if the first few streaks are going to lead to 
something serious or not. It is nearly six weeks now since I have 
left my room. I am very busy with drawing, and should like to be 
writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state. 

He was engaged then on the illustrations for what he called Dowson's 
"foolish playlet," The Pierrot of the Minute. Very charming in all 
these delicate, fanciful drawings are the garden backgrounds with 
their heavy foliage, sharply pointed cypresses, the stylized lilies and 
roses. There is something surely fatidical in the hour-glass that appears 
in two of them, but all are invested with an unbearable pathos when 
one remembers beneath what stress of mortal weakness they were 
accomplished. The subject, however, pleased Beardsley. In his 
boyish moods he had always been fond of drawing Pierrots, and it is 
interesting in this regard to learn that the witnessing of a performance 
of UEnfant Prodigue in the early 'nineties had made a profound 
impression upon him. And " like Pierrot/' as Mr. Marillier observed 
in his sympathetic account of him, " he wore a brave mask, and faced 
his tragedy with a show of laughter." 

During the autumn of 1896 one of the Jesuit fathers probably 
at the instigation of Fr. Gray paid him a visit and proved " most 
charming and sympathetic." He lent him books from the library 
and gave him a Manual of Catholic Belief. " I feel much drawn towards 
him," Beardsley wrote to Raffalovich, " and I believe he will be a 
good friend to me." 

And indeed the priest proved to be that good friend. He saw that 
he had to deal with a dying man who was looking pitifully to him for 
spiritual help. He was present on one occasion when Beardsley had 
an exceptionally severe attack, and " was all kindness and sympathy." 

The intimacy which thus deepened was viewed with considerable 
alarm not only by Smithers but by a certain section of Aubrey's friends. 
He received long communications from " certain pillars of the Anglican 
faith," remonstrating with him on account of his increasing friendship 
with the Jesuit fathers. " I hope you are not haunted too cruelly 
with visions of designing Jesuits," he wrote to Smithers shortly before 
he was received into the Church. 

His letters to Raffalovich show that he was preoccupied with those 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 443 

spiritual things that must necessarily absorb the thoughts of a man 
who knows that any day may prove to be his last. The prayers of his 
friend were about to be answered in full measure. 

On the 1 6th of February, 1897, Fr. John Gray paid him a visit at 
Bournemouth, and the meeting between the two men could not have 
been otherwise than profoundly significant. A few days later he was 
followed by Raffalovich. Probably both believed that Aubrey was 
then dying. . . . 

His letters to Smithers at that time were laconic. Although 
regretting the latter's inability to visit him he acknowledged that 
he should have found anything in the way of talk too tiring. He also 
telegraphed to Mr, John Pollitt to put off a proposed visit. Mr. 
Pollitt possessed the originals of the eight drawings for Lysis trata concern- 
ing the destruction of which Beardsley wrote to Smithers " in his death 
agony." It is easy to read between the lines and see that his thoughts 
were now definitely turned away from his former associates and patrons, 
and were concentrated upon the spiritual change so surely approaching. 

During the early months of 1897 Beardsley read the lives of St. 
Aloysius and St. John Berchmans with profound interest. Until the 
end of March he was comparatively well, and had even visited the 
Jesuit fathers at the Church of the Sacred Heart. But another and 
more severe attack followed upon this temporary improvement, and on 
March 31, Fr. B. (as he is called throughout the letters) received him 
into the Church. Je mis catholique, was his laconic announcement in 
a letter to Smithers, but he wrote as follows to Raffalovich to whose 
prayers he owed so much : 

This morning I was received by dear Fr. B. into the Church, 
making my first confession with which he helped me so kindly. 
My First Cotnmunion will be made on Friday. I was not well 
enough to go up to the Church, and on Friday the Blessed Sacrament 
will be brought to me here. This is a very dry account of what has 
been the most important step in my life, but you will understand 
fully what these simple statements mean. With the deepest gratitude 
for all your prayers. . . . 

And on the following day : 

Fr. B. came to see me this afternoon, and brought me such a 
dear little rosary that had been blessed by the Holy Father. He 
explained to me the use of it. I feel now like someone who has been 
standing waiting on the doorstep of a house upon a cold day and who 
cannot make up his mind to knock for a long while. At last the door 
is thrown open, and all the warmth of kind hospitality makes glad 
the frozen traveller ... It is such a rest to be folded after all my 
wandering. . . . 



444 GREAT CATHOLICS 

The frozen traveller. The warmth of kind hospitality. The rest 
after wandering. . . . In those poignant words Beardsley epitomized the 
progress of the convert who has waited long between the first decisive 
call and the ultimate submission, and who has been amazed at the 
sense of warmth and welcome after long hesitation upon a chilly 
doorstep. Heart and soul he was fully prepared. His next letter 
reveals a note of even deeper and more rapturous faith : 

The Blessed Sacrament was brought to me here this morning. It 
was a moment of profound joy, of gratitude and emotion. I gave 
myself up entirely to feelings of happiness, and even the knowledge 
of my own unworthiness only seemed to add fuel to the flame that 
warmed and illuminated my heart. Oh, how earnestly I have 
prayed that that flame may never die out ! . . . 

His First Communion was made on the first Friday of April, 1897, 
when he had rather less than a year to live. But from that time it is 
clear that all fear of death had left him. His letters were no longer 
" a study in fear," as Mr. Arthur Symons has described them. He 
was fortified, and the flame, by God's mercy, never died out. 

I understand now so much that you have written to me that seemed 
difficult before. Through all eternity I shall be unspeakably grateful 
for your brotherly concern for my spiritual advancement. This 
afternoon I have felt a little sad at the thought of my compulsory 
exile from Church just now, and that the divine privilege of praying 
before the Blessed Sacrament is not permitted me. You can guess 
how I long to assist at Mass, and you will pray, I know, that I may 
soon be strong enough to do so. ... 

No one can read the series of letters addressed to his two principal 
correspondents without being struck by the extraordinary diversity 
they display in the thoughts of the young dying man. Those to 
Smithers are full of his work, of schemes for future work, with references 
to money and to the various persons with whom the publisher was 
associated* But those to Andre Raflfalovich are written with the eager 
simplicity of a child, and indeed form a kind of spiritual diary of the 
last months of his life. They are entirely without pose or self-pity, 
even when he refers to the progress of his malady. He did not, like 
Keats, bewail his cc posthumous life," and yet in this pathetic record 
of a young life, ebbing inexorably to its premature close, we have a 
human document for which we must look for a parallel to the last 
letters of that poet. 

Here 3 wrote Mr. Arthur Symons, Beardsley is as he is iri his 
drawings, close, absorbed, limited, unflinching. . . . 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 445 

In his appreciative introduction to the Last Letters which Fr. Gray 
published some six years after Beardsley's death he writes : 

Aubrey Beardsley, had he lived, might have risen, whether through 
his art or otherwise, spiritually to a height from which he could 
command the horizon he was created to scan. As it was the long 
anguish, the increasing bodily helplessness, the extreme necessity 
in which someone else raises one's hand, turns one's head, showed 
the slowly-dying man things he had not seen before. He came face 
to face with the old riddle of life and death ; the accustomed 
supports and resources of his being were removed ; his soul, thus 
denuded, discovered needs that unstable desires had hitherto 
obscured ; he submitted, like Watteau, his master, to the Catholic 
Church. 

For a time his health improved wonderfully, and in May, 1897, he 
was able to go to Paris where S. Sulpice was his favourite church. 

I was at S. Sulpice on Sunday. The church was crowded. 
Cardinal Vaughan was the celebrant. He looked magnificent, and 
was admired greatly by everybody. 

The doctor whom he consulted in Paris gave him hope of at least 
a partial recovery although not attempting to conceal the gravity of 
his malady. He remained in Paris until July when he went to Dieppe, 
a place already well known to him. But he was recommended to winter 
in the South and plans were made for this, his last, journey. He left 
Paris at the end of November and went to Mentone. He was greatly 
worried at the time about money, for it was then that his first suspicions 
of the inability of Srnithers to pay were disclosed to his sister, Mabel, 
Mrs. Bealby Wright. Before leaving Paris he finished what was 
perhaps his most exquisite drawing, Mademoiselle de Maupin> which 
was intended as one of a series of twelve that he hoped to complete. 
The drawing is very slightly tinted, the face is tender and wistful ; 
the lace of the garments is most delicately indicated, and the shadowed, 
wooded, Corot-like background is full 'of a haunting mystery. It is 
said that this print is very rare and is only to be found in complete 
collections of Beardsley's work. It certainly surpassed all that he had 
hitherto accomplished, and held abundant promise for the future 
which was, alas, never to be fulfilled. 

His last published letter to Raffalovich was written towards the close 
of February, 1898, from the Hotel Cosmopolitain, Mentone, when 
the end of the journey was in sight. 

I am in better spirits and indeed very happy at times I have 
been reading a good deal of St. Alphonsus Liguori, no one dispels 



GREAT CATHOLICS 

depression more effectually than he. Reading his loving 
exclamations so lovingly reiterated it is impossible to remain dull 
and sullen, I believe it is often mere physical exhaustion more than 
hardness of heart that leaves me so apathetic and uninterested. 

Symons affirmed that only once did Beardsley say anything to him 
which could help him to reconcile the young artist with the devout 
Catholic and author of that handful of letters. He told him that as a 
child he had had a " singular dream or vision." He awoke one night 
in the moonlight and saw a great Crucifix with a bleeding Christ falling 
off the wall where no Crucifix had ever been. But when asked if he 
was in the habit of seeing visions he answered evasively : " I do not 
allow myself to see them except on paper." 

Until almost the end of February he was at work on the initials of 
Ben Jonson's Volpone which he proposed to illustrate. But during the 
first week in March a definite change for the worse set in, and on the 
yth of the month he wrote the well known, tragic letter to Smithers. 



Jesus is our Lord and Judge. 

Dear Friend, 

I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings. 
Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do the same. By all that is 
holy all obscene drawings. 

Aubrey Beardsley. 
In my death agony. 

But that poignant death-bed appeal fell upon deafened ears. Aware 
of their monetary value Smithers did not destroy the drawings. It 
is therefore scarcely surprising to learn that after the death of her 
son Mrs. Beardsley wrote refusing to see him although demanding 
the return of Aubrey's manuscripts. 

Beardsley died on the i6th of March, having received the Last 
Sacraments two days previously. He was lovingly tended in those 
final weeks by his devoted mother and sister. His end was saint-like, 
in its complete resignation to the Will of God. It might be said of 
him in the words of his gifted contemporary and fellow-convert, 
Ernest Dowson who, stricken by the same malady was so soon to 
follow him, that he had : 

. . . serene insight 
Of the illuminating dawn to be ... 

To that frail erring life the Church had held out strong, sustaining 
arms, bestowing upon him her unimaginable gifts of grace, absolution 



AUBREY BEARDSLEY 447 

and consolation, enfolding that soul securely after its brief, tortuous 
and tragic wandering. 

Mass was sung for him in the Cathedral Church of St. Michel at 
Mentone, and his sister wrote thus of the ceremony to Andre 
Raffalovich, 

I want you to know how beautiful everything was ; the dear 
heart himself would have loved it. The road from the Cathedral 
to the cemetery was so wonderfully beautiful, winding up a hill ; 
it seemed like the way of the Cross. It was long and steep and we 
walked . . .* 

There upon that sunny slope, set with the black flames of innumerable 
cypresses and within view of the wide blue expanse of the Mediterranean 
upon which /his dying eyes had so often gazed, Aubrey Beardsley 
was laid to rest in a grave hewn out of the rocky hillside, a rosary 
clasped in his wasted hands. . . . 

1 Letters from Aubrey Beardsley to Leonard Smithers. Edited by R. A. Walker. First 
Edition Club, 1937. 



THE RIGHT REV. MGR. FULTON J. SHEEN 



CARDINAL HAYES 



A.D. 1867-1938 

HAYES WAS born on September 4, 1938. In that one 
word " born " is wrapped the greatest tribu te which can be paid to 
any man. The world celebrates a birthday on which a man is born 
to physical life; for example, Lincoln's birthday is February isth. 
But the Church celebrates a birthday on which a man dies to the 
physical life and is born to eternal life ; that day the liturgy calls 
natalitia or birthday. If Cardinal Hayes were a worldly man we would 
have said he was born on November 20, 1867, but being preeminently 
spiritual and living only for eternal union with Divine Life, we set 
down the date on which he went to meet his God. 

On the earthly plane his close identification with New York City 
and his mission in it was forshadowed even in infancy. Nothing could 
be more metropolitan than City Hall Place where he first saw the light 
of day ; nothing could be more Irish than his baptismal name Patrick 
which his father gave him in protest to some anti-Irish sentiment 
prevalent at the time ; nothing could be more prophetic than the joyful 
outburst of his mother at his birth that he would one day be a bishop. 

His education was exclusively religious, which fact has more to do 
with making character than is generally believed. The basic difference 
between religious and non-religious education is that under the former 
knowledge grows by penetration, whereas under the latter it grows by 
substitution. Religion gives one supreme purpose to which all other 
purposes, social, political, and economic, are subordinated. Secular 
education gives not supreme purpose but multiple purposes. From the 
day Patrick Hayes entered the parochial school of the Transfiguration 
parish until he completed his university work there was never once an 
abandonment of a material philosophy for an idealistic one, nor the 
substitution of a Gestalt psychology for a Behavioristic one ; there was 
only a deepening and unfolding of eternal Truth as an acorn develops 
into the oak. This spiritual background of his education echoed in all 
his public utterances within that field. "The tendency of modern 
education," he once told the graduates of the College of Mt. St. Vin- 
cent, "is to take the soul out of learning and to develop only the outward 

448 



CARDINAL HAYES 449 

form. Catholic education aims too, to give a thorough knowledge of all 
the facts, but it goes further and claims the need of a knowledge of 
God, the source of all things. . . . We follow all requirements of the 
Board of Regents, but the heart of all our schools is the heart of Christ ; 
and whenever this is true we may well understand the source of their 
power." On another occasion he said : "It is only right that the State 
should spend millions, as it does, on the educational system. But it is 
not right for the State to halt at the most important point of its work 
and to neglect the spiritual education of the child." 

It was this consecration to the supreme end of life which made him 
such a patriot, for as St. Thomas Aquinas long ago pointed out, Piety 
is the root and basis of patriotism. As early as 1887 when he was only 
twenty-one years of age he seemed to foresee the present danger to our 
American liberty. In a senior essay for Manhattan College he wrote : 
" Our constitution tolerates as much liberty as is conducive to the pros- 
perity of any people ; therefore all factions which wish to promote 
either anarchy, socialism or communism, deserve the brand of censure 
from the ruling power." For him patriotism and religion were in- 
separable as love of fellow man and love of God. For that reason he 
praised the Catholic Teacher's Association for "placing beside the 
flag the Cross of Christ. The flag is only human and may of itself, 
God forbid, go the way of all things human. It needs the Cross of 
Christ beside it. The Cross will be its teacher, protector and defense, 
particularly in times of crisis." 

His love of America was one of the great passions of his life. The 
Catholic Church already had a distinguished line of patriotic prelates, 
such as Carroll, Ryan, Kenrick, Spalding and Gibbons. To that list 
must be added him who, during the World War was the spiritual lord 
of all Catholic chaplains. After receiving the Red Hat he pleaded : 
" Let no one fear that the making of the Archbishop of New York has 
made him less an American. Democracy is not a leveler. Democracy 
as we understand it here in America is something that lifts men up and, 
in the process of lifting up, some are bound to go higher than others. 
As long as America pays tribute to every citizen according to merit in 
right and justice, America will endure, will fructify, and will receive 
more and more blessings from Almighty God. Then we need never 
fear the future. An American spirit will be created in this country and 
it will be of such kind that whenever anything that is vile, anything that 
is un-American shows its head, it will wither away in the presence of 
that spirit." 

Men are like sponges. A sponge can hold just so much water and 
a man can hold so much honor. There is always a point of saturation. 
Some reach it much more quickly than others. Those who take little 
honor too seriously prove they never should have had that honor. 



450 GREAT CATHOLICS 

Instead of their wearing a decoration, the decoration wears them. 
Cardinal Hayes never reached the point of saturation. He was one 
man who never changed either his voice or his love of the poor when 
he was honored. This was due to two things : his humility and his 
gradual ascent to eminence. Honors came slowly and rhythmically ; 
he hardly ever took two steps at a time on the stairs that led to Prince- 
dom. From curate at St. Gabriel's Church he became the secretary 
of Cardinal Farley ; the next step was to that of Chancellor and Presi- 
dent of Cathedral College in 1903 ; from that to Domestic Prelate in 
1907, and from that after seven sacramental years to the honor of 
Auxiliary Bishop of New York. Then in 1917 he became Bishop 
Ordinary of the Armed Forces of the United States and two years 
later Archbishop of New York, and finally, in 1 924 Cardinal. Such 
gradual ascendency stamped him with the mark of maturity. He 
was always ripe for each new duty. Never being thrown into office 
impetuously he never exercised it impulsively. It takes radicals who 
suddenly bombed into proletarian thrones a long time to cool off and 
therefore become fit for the administration of justice. Like a piece of 
steel tempered by being dipped into the waters of each new office, 
Cardinal Hayes was always prepared for governing. A fellow chaplain 
during the World War told me that on many occasions Bishop Hayes 
refused to take a Pullman sleeper, kindly offered him by a soldier or an 
officer or chaplain, on the grounds that they needed it more than he. 
The same humility manifested itself when he refused a high military 
rank from the United States Government, feeling that the spiritual 
nature of his work would be more effective among chaplains and sol- 
diers if he worked only as a prelate. 

At the close of the World War, when he had under his direction nine 
hundred chaplains, his foresight, along with that of three other Bishops 
in the United States, was instrumental in founding the present Na- 
tional Catholic Welfare Conference which was then called the National 
Catholic Welfare Council. " In view of the results obtained through 
the merging of our activities for the time and purpose of war, we de- 
termined to maintain, for the ends of peace, the spirit of unity and the 
coordination of our forces. 5 ' 

Catholic Charities was organized by Archbishop Hayes in 1920 to 
coordinate, supervise, develop and help more than 200 existing Catho- 
lic charitable agencies in the Archdiocese. Although incorporated in 
1920, Catholic Charities really had its beginning in plans formulated 
by % the Archbishop in 1917, when he was rector of St. Stephen's Church. 
At the annual diocesan retreat in June, 1919, three months after his 
installation, Archbishop Hayes stated that he did not know fully the 
field of charity in New York, did not completely understand its problems, 
its limits, its unoccupied areas ; but felt that it was his duty to know the 



CARDINAL HAYES 451 

immense field which God had committed to his care, and to know it 
thoroughly before attempting to organize it. On the following Sep- 
tember ist, he ordered that a diocesan study be made under the direc- 
tion of his Secretary for Charities, the present Executive Director of 
Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, the Eight Reverend 
Monsignor Robert F. Keegan. So that there might be no mistake as 
to the motives and methods to be pursued, as soon as the plans had 
been formulated the Archbishop called a meeting of some 400 persons 
in charge of Catholic works. He outlined the purpose, the scope and 
the spirit of the study and emphasized the fact that it was to be under- 
taken for constructive purposes rather than for criticism. 

The survey and study brought to light the vast number and great 
variety of Catholic charitable activities in the Archdiocese, but also 
revealed that despite the excellent work being done, there were three 
principal weaknesses lack of unification, lack of sufficient funds to 
improve existirig agencies, and need for the extension of Catholic 
charitable work in many sections of the Archdiocese, 

Archbishop Hayes lost no time in setting up machinery to follow 
out the recommendations developed by the study. He called to his aid 
a dependable body of some 25,000 lay people in the 300 parishes to 
be known as the Archbishop's Committee of the Laity. To overcome 
the lack of cooperation among Catholic agencies it was recommended 
that there be set up immediately a central organization with the 
Archbishop as its president, his Secretary for Charities as its secretary 
and, working under the latter, six divisions Children, Families, 
Health, Protective Care, Social Action and Finance each with a 
full-time director and assistants. 

The Archbishop also planned at once for an intensive campaign, the 
principal aim of which was to build up the Archbishop's Committee 
of the Laity of 25,000 members. It was the duty of the Committee, 
during the week of April 18 to 25, 1920, to accomplish the secondary 
object of the campaign, namely, to secure from at least 100,000 Catho- 
lics, pledges to contribute a total of $500,000 annually for the next 
three years. No attempt was made to obtain pledges from other than 
Catholics. The campaign was a remarkable success. Instead of 
$500,000, approximately $1,000,000 annually was pledged for the 
following three years. Pledges were made by a total of 223,000 in- 
dividuals. The enrollment campaign ended on April 25th, and on 
May i, 1920, the new central organization, known as " The Catholic 
Charities of the Archdiocese of New York " took up offices and began 
to function. The success that has attended its work since then is 
known throughout the country. 

In the light of the facts of his life, could Cardinal Hayes be called 
a really great man? Naturally, that depends entirely on what is 



4$2 GREAT CATHOLICS 

understood by greatness. Our modern world has peculiar ideas about 
greatness. It generally evaluates the characters which walk across its 
stage either by the abundance they possess or by the power they wield. 
By the first standard millionaires are successes ; by the second, dictators, 
party and organization leaders, are great. 

It need hardly be emphasized that neither of these constitutes great- 
ness, for by such standards man would be great, not because of what 
he is, but because of what he has ; character would then not be some- 
thing inside a man, but outside of him, like money or an army. Our 
Blessed Lord has warned against measuring men by such superficial 
standards. To those who judge worth by bank accounts He warned : 
" A man's life doth not consist in the abundance of things which he 
possesseth." 1 And to those who judged worth by power over others, 
He said : " You know that the princes of the Gentiles lord it over them : 
and they that are the greater, exercise power upon them. It shall not 
be so among you, but whosoever will be the greater among you, let him 
be your minister : And he that will be first among you, shall be your 
servant. Even as the Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, 
but to minister, and to give his life a redemption for many." 2 The con- 
clusion is obvious : Wealth without charity is snobbery ; authority 
without humility is tyranny. No man is great by wealth until he has 
learned to be detached like the Lord of the Universe in the role of a 
village carpenter, and no man is great by power until he has learned 
to be obedient, as the Power of Heaven and earth was subject to 
parents at Nazareth. 

Greatness is something in the soul of man and the extent and depth 
of his love for the profoundest of all realities : God and neighbor. 
" Thou shall love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole 
soul) and with thy whole mind . . . and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself "* 

Judged by these standards Cardinal Hayes was truly one of the great 
men of the present generation. Newspapers said he was the head of 
the richest diocese in America, but nothing so much missed the mark 
for he considered himself as the head of the poorest diocese in Amer- 
ica. His friends lauded him for his service as Head Chaplain of the 
Army and Navy during the World War, as the builder of schools, 
hospitals, convents, and charity organizations. But whence came this 
profound love of the poor and the children and country ? It came 
from only one source, and until we find a man who loved that one 
source more than Cardinal Hayes, we shall never see again such pa- 
triotism and such generosity. And that one fountain whence poured 
all other loves as streams was his deep and profound love of God. 

We would have wounded Cardinal Hayes deeply if we spoke of this 
during his life, but now that we need an inspiration and encourage- 

1 Luke 12 : 15. 2 Matt. 20 : 25-28. 3 Matt. 22 : 37, 39. 



CARDINAL HAYES 453 

ment for these troubled days, we would leave our wounds unhealed did 
we not speak of his inner and unknown life. Thousands saw him dur- 
ing life clothed in the richest red which the Church could bestow, 
sometimes seated on a throne in a great Cathedral, or at other times 
administering agencies involving millions of souls. But how many 
know how little he gloried in that red or that throne or that power ? 
What was he like without these accidents of color or pomp ? 

Look at this picture of the man : Early each morning of his life you 
would have overheard him amidst the trickling waters of a shower 
saying aloud the beautiful prayer of St. Augustine : " Noverim te, 
noverim me " "Lord, that I may know Thee, that I may know 
myself." Then as he shaved there followed the morning prayers he 
learned as a child, and prayers in preparation for Mass beginning with 
the words : " O Lord, remember not my faults " which he followed 
by the psalm : " How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts ! 
my soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord." This min- 
gling of action and prayer which began his waking life was followed by 
prayer without action. The next two and one half hours were, given 
over purely to meditation and prayer and, until a few years ago when 
physicians ordered otherwise, it was all done on a hard floor without 
the benefit of a prie-dieu. It was no wonder that the Holy Sacrifice 
of the Mass which followed was always Offered with such unction and 
devotion. So reluctant was he to leave Calvary, which the Mass re- 
news, that he would linger in its shadows in thanksgiving for never 
less than half an hour. 

Nor let it be thought that it was his Mass which mattered, it was the 
Mass. For that reason he would serve another Mass which was read 
in his house, and when confined to his bed during serious illness would 
answer the responses to be more intimately a part of that which was 
the center of his priestly life. 

When a priest, fortified by over three hours of spiritual and sacra- 
mental communion with God, sits down before his desk, you could 
walk before it and feel you were in the presence of Christ. No wonder 
he was never known to have lost his temper, nor to have been angry, 
nor to have hated anyone, nor to have rebuked with bitterness ! No 
wonder, when hearing of any scandal among those committed to his 
care, that he. would weep for the wounded Christ ! No wonder that, 
when extremely delicate matters of administration needed a decision, 
he would retire to the chapel and in the presence of Our Lord in the 
Blessed Sacrament, pray for light and guidance ! 

When the day was over and what a busy day it must have been 
ministering to a diocese with 456 churches, 1,650 priests, 182,298 chil- 
dren under Catholic care, and one million faithful he would retire 
to his study and very often raise his arms as if to push someone out, 



$ 54 GREAT CATHOLICS 

saying : " Trouble and worry . . . keep out !*" He would then de- 
liberately lock the door in the face of both and go again to the feet of 
His Master in the tabernacle to spend another hour in prayer. There 
is absolutely no doubt that Cardinal Hayes spent more time in utter 
an5 abject prostration before his Lord than he permitted himself to 
be enthroned among men. To the eyes of his flock he was on a throne, 
but he was more often before one : the throne of his Eucharistic 
Saviour. 

Next to his love of the Eucharist and the Mass was his love of the 
Blessed Mother of Our Divine Lord. One particularly touching cus- 
tom he had betrays the utter simplicity of his heart ; it was to take 
from the table after each meal a flower, carry it upstairs, and with his 
own hands place it at the feet of the statue of Our Lady, He lost his 
own earthly mother at five, but Cardinal Hayes was never an orphan. 
His Mother who is the Mother of us all, survives him still. The 
greatest events of his life took place on her feasts. He was baptized on 
the feast of Our Lady's Presentation ; he was ordained on the feast of 
her Nativity ; he was named a Cardinal on the feast of her Annunci- 
ation ; his titular Church in Rome was Santa Maria in Via ; and he 
was buried within a day of the same feast on which he was ordained 
the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady. This is more than a coinci- 
dence. One cannot help but feel that he who carried flowers to her 
daily must himself have been carried by the angels, as a glorious 
unfading flower of the Catholic priesthood, to that Heavenly Mother, 
as the last and most precious of gifts. 

One other special devotion of the Cardinal was to St. Raphael the 
Archangel/ whose story, as revealed in the book of Tobias, he knew so 
well, and on which he often preached as a young priest. Later on in 
life a painting of St. Raphael which hung in his bedroom kept alive 
that devotion until the Master called, and, we may guess, until Raphael 
guided him as another Tobias to the banks of the eternal Tigris. 
Shortly before his death His Eminence confided to his secretary and 
to his chancellor, Monsignor Casey and Monsignor Mclntyre, that, his 
memory having failed him in a few of his childhood prayers, he begged 
his guardian angel to recall them to his mind ; and his prayer was 
answered. 

All the doctors of the Church, whose names he knew by heart, he 
loved and studied. Probably no one, not even students of the subject, 
loved more to read their writings than he. To Saint Chrysostom he 
prayed often that he might, as he put it, " preach the truths of Christ 
and His Church in the language of the people.*' But among the doc- 
tors of the Church St. Augustine was his favorite. It is indeed remark- 
able that as a priest he once paid a visit to the tomb of that learned 
saint and there prayed that he might receive something of his priestly 



CARDINAL HAYES 455 

spirit. A very short timfe after that visit he was named auxiliary bishop 
of New York, and the See to which he was appointed was that which 
St. Augustine himself once ruled. Until his end he daily read the solilo- 
quies and prayers of St. Augustine, and editions of these works in 
Latin, French, and Italian which he used, were on his desk when he 
died. Those who know the style of St. Augustine will recall how often 
the Cardinal was like him in his preaching. The frequent use of the 
ejaculation " O " when speaking of the love of God, was typically 
Augustinian, or should we not rather say it was typical of those who 
love God so deeply that human words are inadequate ? 

The initial address over the Catholic Hour, which he inaugurated 
eight and one half years ago, was typical of his views concerning the 
purpose of preaching. " May it serve," he said, " to make better 
understood the [Catholic] faith as it really is a light revealing the 
pathway to Heaven . . . pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating 
our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only justice but 
gladness and peace to our searching and questioning hearts." 

Such a truly spiritual life manifested itself in his surroundings. The 
furniture of his house is the same that was in it during the days of his 
predecessor, Cardinal Farley, who died twenty years ago. The same 
simple desk with cloth covering that served his predecessors served him. 
His bedroom was only fourteen by sixteen without an attached bath, 
and with only an old bed and two old chairs other than the statues of 
Our Lady beside his bed, the crucifix over it, and a few pictures on the 
wall. His personal needs were reduced to an absolute minimum. He 
protested that he did not have money enough to have a new bath at- 
tached to his room, and the housekeeper from time to time would put 
a note in his old shoes saying : " Isn't it about time to buy another 
pair? " He never in his life rang a bell for a servant and was never 
known -to have asked for anything for himself. Severe and ascetic with 
himself, he was most generous to others. As "Cardinal of Charities' 3 
he is well known, but the many poor whom he personally supported 
and who are still living are too numerous to mention. This incident 
is rather typical of them all. A poor old woman on Third Avenue 
wrote a letter to the Cardinal telling him of her poverty. The Cardinal 
and his Auxiliary, Bishop Donahue, both paid a personal visit to the 
old hovel. It was winter, the room where she lived was cold, and only 
a dim gas light illumined her poverty. The Cardinal had her taken 
immediately to St. Vincent's hospital where he cared for her until she 
died. 

Each action of his day was mingled with prayer, but when the day 
was over prayer again drew the curtain on a busy life. His night prayers 
took an hour, and during them he would go through his entire diocese, 
and mention by name each institution, each work and particular 



456 GREAT CATHOLICS 

problem that needed God's spiritual help. True shepherd of his flock, 
he lived only for his sheep. If he told anyone he would pray for them, 
he did so by name. I shall never forget my own joy at hearing His 
Eminence say he read his Resurrection Mass for my intention that souls 
might come to God through preaching. 

In the last few years of his life his physicians would not permit him 
to say his night prayers on his knees. Accordingly, he said them in bed 
with his head propped by three pillows, one of which he would remove 
on retiring. Alongside his bed was a glass of water and a pill which he 
would take immediately after his night prayers just before falling to 
sleep. He turned out all the lights in his room as he prayed at night, 
but kept his hands folded across his breast holding a crucifix. As he 
lifted his soul to God, he would run his fingers over the cross and the 
image of the crucified Saviour one needed no light to know that 
Love was there. 

That was the way he went back to God saying his night prayers. 
The water had not been touched, nor the pill, nor the third pillow. 
Without any convulsions whatever he died as he prayed, and the 
next morning they found him as if asleep, with his hands folded across 
his breast and his eyes looking down upon his Crucified Saviour. Thus 
died America's greatest citizen and the Church's greatest priest. 

Into so many hands at death a crucifix is placed by friends to bear 
a tardy witness to their fellowship with the Cross. Not so with the 
Cardinal. He placed the Crucifix in his own hands for his own death. 
He whose fingers daily loved to touch the "Crucified Lord at the con- 
secration of the Mass, now dies with fingers entwined about His Cross. 
It was the most beautiful way a priest could die ! And that is what 
Cardinal Hayes was, above all things else a priest a member of 
all families yet belonging to none ; living in the world and yet not of 
it ; serving the poor not as one giving but as one receiving ; lifting man 
to God in the Consecration and bringing God to man in Communion ; 
going to work from prayer and to prayer from work ; being hard on 
oneself and easy on others ; hating sin but loving the sinner ; being 
intolerant about truth, but tolerant to persons ; being a priest to others 
and a victim to Christ. What a vocation ! That is the priesthood ! 
That is Cardinal Hayes ! 



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