COLUMBA CHRISTUM-FERENS—WHAT'S IN A NAME?
New Orleans Morning Star and Catholic Messenger, August 13, 1892.
The poet says that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but there is no doubt that certain names are invested with a peculiar significance. It would appear also that this significance is not always a mere chance coincidence, but is intended, sometimes, to carry the evidence of an overruling prevision. Christopher Columbus was not so named after his achievements, like Scipio Africanus. The name was his from infancy, though human ingenuity could not have conceived one more wonderfully suggestive of his after career.
Columba means a dove. Was there anything dove-like about Columbus? Perhaps not, originally, but his many years of disappointment and humiliation, of poverty and contempt, of failure and hopelessness, were the best school in which to learn patience and sweetness under the guiding hand of such teachers as faith and piety. Was anything wanting to perfect him in the unresisting gentleness of the dove? If so, his guardian angel saw to it when he sent him back in chains from the scenes of his triumph. He then and there, by his meekness, established his indefeasible right to the name Columbus—the right of conquest.
THE WEST INDIES.
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And Christopher—Christum-ferens—the Christ-bearer? A saint of old was so called because one day he carried the child Christ on his shoulders across a dangerous ford. People called him Christo-pher. But what shall we say of the man who carried Christ across the stormy terrors of the unknown sea? Wherever the modern Christopher landed, there he planted the cross; his first act was always one of devout worship. And now that cross and that worship are triumphant from end to end, and from border to border, of that New World. The very fairest flower of untrammeled freedom in the diadem of the Christian church is to-day blooming within the mighty domain which this instrument of Providence wrested from the malign sway of error. Shall not that New World greet him as the Christ-bearer? Indeed, there must have been more than an accidental coincidence when, half a century in advance of events, the priest, in pouring the sacred waters of baptism, proclaimed the presence of one who was to be truly a Christopher—one who should carry Christ on the wings of a dove.