Lines on the Ceremonial Sandal of his Holiness.
Preserved At Burton Manor, Staffordshire,
The Seat Of Francis Whitgreave, Esq.
"How beauteous on the hills the feet of him"
('Tis thus Isaias sings)
"Who preaches heavenly peace, and brings to man
Glad tidings of good things!"
Christ first, his vicar now, to us fulfils
This gracious work of God;
No land by seas or mountains so concealed
But Peter there hath trod.
Hail, dearly-prized memorial, in late days
By our loved Pius worn!
Hail, emblem of the foot that walked the waves
In our redemption's morn!
Before the little cross embroided here
Princes have bended low,
And owned the presence of a greater power
Than the proud world can show.
Here love hath left a kiss; here guilt hath been.
Nor dropped her tear in vain
At his dear feet who can absolve all sins,
Or, when he wills, retain!
Here learning to the truthful Roman See
Hath noble homage paid;
Here to religion's lovelier majesty
Beauty hath bowed her head.
Oh! by this sacred relic here I swear,
As all my life shall prove,
To him who sits in Peter's holy chair
True loyalty and love.
E. Caswall.
Oratory, Birmingham.
The Labor Question.
Translated From Le Correspondant.
Address Of Rev. Father Hyacinthe
Before The Catholic Congress Of Malines.
Your Eminence, My Lords, And Gentlemen:
I will not attempt to conceal from you the emotion which thrills me. I behold and am dismayed. I am abashed before this assembly, which will presently give me inspiration. I speak before a prince of the church, who is also a prince of wisdom and virtue; before this illustrious circle of bishops, my fathers in the faith; before these eminent statesmen, masters of science and of eloquence, and I find this tribunal still warm and palpitating from the hands which have touched it and the words which have made it tremulous. I speak before this grand assemblage, convened from the four quarters of the world to discuss, upon this little spot of free ground that we call Belgium, the religious interests of the Catholics of two worlds. Gentlemen, I was alarmed at first, but I will fear no longer. I feel that I am not a stranger here; I meet brothers. Your acclamations I accept, for they are not addressed to the individual, who is nothing, but to the cause, which is grand; I had almost said, which is every thing. This cause I can define in two words—the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.
On that day which no priest forgets—on that day when, lying upon the pavement of the temple, I took for my only and virginal spouse the Holy Church of Jesus Christ; my lips in the dust, my eyes in tears, my heart in ecstacy and in thrills of rapture—I vowed in silence to love her well, and, if I could, to serve her well, not only in her grand past, which is no more, and in her glorious future, which is not yet come, but in her present, so sorrowful and so grand also; in her present, which is the product of the past ages of her history, and, consequently, the work of God.
Those who undertake to serve the church in the nineteenth century have one especially profound and threatening question to encounter: I mean the Labor Question.
This question is one which transcends all fixed limits, but I will limit my treatment of it to one especial point of view—the education of the laboring classes. The hope of the harvest is in the seed, and Leibnitz was right in saying, "Give me the instruction of the youth during one century and I will change the face of the globe." This transformation cannot be accomplished until the working classes shall be educated under the conditions designed by the nature of man and the general harmony of the divine plan.
There are three degrees in this education—the primary education by the family, the professional education by the workshop, the religious education of the Sunday.
I.
Family Education.
I place the family in the first rank. It occupies it in the order of time; it ought to occupy it in the order of influences.
Among the many elevated minds occupied with the fate of the working classes, I am astonished that there are so few who comprehend their real wants. The remedy for the evils which they suffer, the means of the progress that they wish to realize, are vainly sought for in new inventions and combinations, in specious theories, or even in private or public charitable institutions. They are in the family; that institution which is as ancient and universal as the world, and which has its roots in the inmost depths of the strength and tenderness of humanity; that institution which came from the hands of God himself, a vestige of the primal order of Eden, which Christ has empurpled with his blood, and raised to the dignity of a sacrament, making it one of the seven pillars destined to uphold for ever the edifice of regenerated human society. (Applause.)
It is, then, the family that embodies the strength to sustain or to restore in all classes of society; but above all in the working class of our cities. It is especially to the family that the first education of the child must be entrusted.
In primary education, there are two things which need especial consideration—the place and the agent. The place is the domestic hearth; the agent is the mother.
The domestic hearth! There it is that the cradle of the child ought to be, there that its first years ought to be passed. Has not Providence implanted this instinct in the heart of all his creation, even in the species inferior to ours? Does not the bird build its nest in the soft moss, under the shelter of the hedge and among the branches of the tree? Is there not in all the orders of nature a special place, a sacred spot, where the first hopes, the first joys, and the first sufferings of life should be experienced? Ah, well! among all these other cradles, the human race has a right to a sacred cradle, too; it has a right to a domestic hearth which shall be free from the infection of filth and disease, and whose atmosphere shall not be fatal to the life either of the body or of the soul of the child.
It is at this fireside that must first begin the education of this young soul, of its imagination and budding perceptions. These walls are not merely walls, this roof is not alone a collection of shingles and slate, this furniture is not merely collection of common objects: I say that all this speaks a deep language, that all this exercises a powerful influence in the moral order. Have not we Catholics, in our divine religion, sensible signs that are called sacraments, water, wine, bread, oil; in short, matter—but matter which reveals and communicates in different degrees invisible things! In the order of nature, and in what I will call the religion of the fireside, there is also a mysterious influence of places and of things—a secret communication of the habits, of the virtues, of the soul of the family by these material objects themselves. The child will see what its parents have seen; it will mingle its life with objects filled with recollections of them, and, so to speak, penetrated by their souls; he will receive some impress from it, and as an indelible character that he will carry through the errors of youth and even under the white hairs of the old man. If there be poetry in this, gentlemen, it is practical poetry; it germinates in facts; it has its roots in the nature of things. It makes us feel, besides, of what importance it is for the child to be reared with its father and mother, and not under a strange roof.
I have said that the mother is the principal agent in the fireside education. It is not that I disregard the part of the father; and if it were appropriate for me to say all I think, I should reproach some Catholic writers, who fail to make sufficient account of it. We are in danger of forgetting the father in the presence of the mother—this type so pure, so gracious, so Christian.
But I cannot give here an exhaustive treatise upon family education, and I insist above all upon the importance of this primary education of which the care devolves almost exclusively upon the mother. At this period of life, the body and the heart of the child must be formed; reason will have its turn later, but it will only develop itself upon the double soil, physical and moral, a body and a heart worthily prepared. Now, the hands of the wife are alone capable of this divine field-culture, agricultura Dei; they alone are pure enough and tender enough to touch this virginal and suffering body that an imprudent touch might bruise or blight; they alone are powerful enough to awake in him that organ of the heart which is, according to science, the first to be born and the last to die, primum saliens et ultimum moriens, the power to love which remains so often stifled or corrupted in its germ. As the hands of the priest are consecrated to touch the body of Christ upon the altar—this body glorious but subjected to the fragile conditions of the sacrament—so the hands of the Christian woman, by the benediction of marriage and through the graces of maternity, are sanctified to touch worthily the body of the child, a body infirm but glorious, because it contains a soul; I had almost said because it contains a god. By baptism it has been made a living member of Jesus Christ. (Applause.)
The fireside and the mother! Where are they to-day for the people of our great cities? Ah! I touch two great, hideous sores of our contemporaneous society: the pitiable condition of the working part of the community, and the absence of the mother from the domestic hearth. Here is one of the most unrecognized and most active principles in the evil which we suffer; it is here, in this disorganization of the family, in this demoralization of the people, that are formed those black spots which finally rise in the atmosphere, and become there an ever-increasing cloud which at last bursts in a great tempest.
Is it a fireside or is it a den, this damp, dark, infected cellar from which the poor are absent all day, and in the evening return only to horrible poverty and disorder? Is this the dwelling of the living or the tomb of the dead, this narrow, suffocating garret, where, in order to extend himself upon his bed—I cite a fact recently come to my knowledge in Paris—the fatigued workman is obliged to open the garret window during the night and to put his feet upon the roof? I ask, are such dwellings tolerable for the free citizens of France or Belgium; for men redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ? (Applause.)
If at least the mother were there, her look and her smile would illumine the clouds, transform the ugliness, and make a joyous festival in the midst of this sadness. But labor, barbarous labor, has deprived her of performing the sacred duties of the mother, and has drawn her, weak and tottering, into the great workshop, full of the noise of work and the sound of blasphemy, whence she can not hear the cry of her son carried far from her to an indifferent or covetous stranger, who will restore him to her dead or at least blighted.
I do not exaggerate, gentlemen; these are but too common facts, and which are tending to become the law in these great industrial masses. Ah! well, it is the duty, the imperious duty of Catholics to unite among themselves and with the Christians of all churches and feeling men of all opinions, to make one supreme effort in favor of the working classes. Let us work to restore to them the family which has been taken away from them. Let us work to restore the fireside, modest and poor undoubtedly, but decent and pleasant, where the mother remains with her children and gives them those cares of the heart and the body in which no one in the world can replace her. (Applause.)
I do not wish to be a Utopian, and I have not the credulity to believe that these things can be accomplished in a day. Whatever assistance may be rendered, it will require years and still years before the family life, so deeply violated among the people of our cities, retakes its vigor and beauty. In the meantime, gentlemen, what shall we do? Charity has marvellous inventions. To those who are homeless, it has opened children's homes and asylums; to those who have no mother, it has prepared devoted hearts of teachers, whatever may be the dress and name they bear. It has prepared, above all, three centuries ago, through the heart of Vincent de Paul, that extraordinary woman whose mission was reserved especially for the nineteenth century, for the great crisis of the laboring classes, the helper of the workman as of the soldier, upon the field of battle, of labor, and of suffering—the sister of charity. If any one could replace the mother at the cradles of the people, it would be the sister of charity, (applause;) it would be this nun, unsecluded and unveiled, who, not being of the world, yet lives in the world, and who unites, in an unexampled combination, the heart of the virgin and the feelings of the mother. (Prolonged applause;) Let us leave the child to the sister of charity; we will leave it to the instructor and instructress who fill to it the place of parents, to the infant-asylum and school that supplies to it the place of home. Let us not permit that any hand, under any pretence, snatch it from this cradle-education, and give us that spectacle, which would be loathsome if it were not lamentable— the workman eight years of age. I feel the need of speaking the truth with regard to this grand industry, that has been flattered even to baseness by some, and disparaged even to abuse by others. I belong neither to the class of courtiers nor to that of traducers, and I estimate that the best homage one can render to a power of this world is to believe it great enough to hear the truth. I will say, then, to trade, that it has never a right to put its hand upon a child before the age denoted by nature and by religion. To do this is to commit a crime more odious than that which has so long stained America, and that she has been obliged to wash out in waves of blood. Among those men who owned other men there were those who were just and good, who were more the benefactors of their slaves than their masters. But there were also those who were without conscience and without feeling. They saw in the negro only an instrument, and they required of him unmeasured labor without repose. This was the oppression of the body. But all oppression, as all liberty, passes from that of the body to that of the soul. If the truth could come in them, the truth would deliver them! No communication, then, with those who possess science, with men who speak too high, nor with books that teach too thoroughly. And, finally, to intellectual oppression, these cautious and cruel tyrants added moral oppression. They were doubly right, for, of all the accessories of liberty, the most dangerous is not science but virtue. No virtue, then, for the slave! He has been deprived of the gospel; he must also be deprived of nature! And because in the absence of the gospel, and even in the ruins of human nature, when this nature has not entirely perished, there yet dwell two noble sentiments, two powerful roots, whence all can spring up again and flourish—conjugal love and paternal love—family life was rendered impossible, and in these horrible cases men could no longer embrace, in honor as in tenderness, the companion of their misfortunes and the fruit of their love.
You shudder, gentlemen, and you are right. But nothing which has been lost, however great may be the evil, is ever entirely without remedy. This negro is an adult, a man grown; and if, in a childhood more happy than his maturity, he has been warmed upon the bosom of a black but Christian mother, nigra sed formosa, and has drawn the chaste and healthful milk of virtue; if he has known the gospel, and if he has loved Jesus Christ, he holds in his innermost life concealed resources; he will feel the sudden and powerful awakenings of an honest conscience and of Christian truth, and against the triple tyranny of the body, of the intelligence, and of the heart there will be victorious rebellions.
Gentlemen, the being most effectually oppressed, the victim irremediably crushed, is not the man; it is the child. It is the little white slave of our Europe, who has known neither his cradle nor his mother, and who has awakened to life in the dark workshop, a kind of hell on earth, of which we may write—
"You who enter here leave all hope behind."
His active lungs breathe in full draughts of air which are simply draughts of poison; his little limbs, bent under the work before being formed, are dedicated from infancy to decrepitude. His intelligence, too, arrested in its early budding, is sadly locked in darkness. It is in vain that, later, in fruitless remorse, we would attempt to imbue him with some truths. The negro will recollect himself after years of brutishness; the child will learn no more after a few months of this odious system. He will never hold in his hand the three keys, at once common and sublime, which open so many things in life and in the soul—reading, writing, and arithmetic. He will never possess those rudiments of science which ought to be the portion of all—something of the form and life of this globe that he inhabits, and much of the glory and destinies of that country which he ought to love and to serve. Never, above all, will he have the clear and strong revelation of his own soul and of God. His soul and God! it is not only ignorance which steals them from him, it is vice. What has taken place in this dark workshop, in this hell, precocious but not the less hopeless? I will not attempt to speak it, but will listen to the words of a poet [Footnote 46] of our age, eloquent interpreter of the frenzies and anguishes of evil in the depths of the human soul:
"The heart of man, unspotted, is a vase profound;
If the first water poured into it be impure,
The sea may pass over without washing away the stain,
For the abyss is unfathomable and the spot in its depths."
[Footnote 46: Alfred de Musset.]
(Applause.) O hands that have abused the child! you will be cursed in spite of all your splendor, in spite of all your science, and in spite of your riches! Hands of a relentless industry, you will remain dry and withered as the hand of the tyrant of Israel under the malediction of the prophet of Judos, "The hand of Jeroboam withered and he was not able to draw it back again to him, because the Lord had cursed it." You have committed the most cowardly, the most revolting, and the most irreparable of crimes. (Prolonged applause.)
II.
The Education Of The Workshop.
I have been too diffuse upon the primary education of man. The fault, gentlemen, is in your attention and sympathy; and then in the empty cradle, the absent mother, this gloomy fireside, where I had need to weep and hope with you.
The home education is concluded by that grand religious ceremony, the first communion, which serves as the first emancipation of the child. More precocious in that than the sons of the rich, the sons of the workman enter from there a sort of public life; from the family, they pass to the workshop. Am I mistaken, gentlemen; is there not a school between the family and the workshop, the primary school first and the professional school afterward? No; the school is not between the family and the workshop, it is beside them. It does not form, in connection with them, a third degree in the popular education. In a word, its part is not principal and independent, but secondary and subordinate. I am full of sympathy and respect for those modest and courageous teachers of the people, to whatever corps of instructors they may belong, whether they wear the religious or the layman's dress, provided they remain at the height of their profession. I will never associate myself with the gross and unmerited injuries of which they are the objects, in different senses, on the part of all extreme parties. But grand as is their mission, I repeat it, it is secondary; and practical reason fails to see in the school what a large number of our contemporaries see in it—the most efficacious instrument for the elevation of the laboring classes. Permit me, gentlemen, to cite the words of an economist, a patient, impartial, and wise observer, whose name and works I would wish to popularize among Catholics. "With a free and prosperous people," says M. Le Play, "the instructor occupies only a subordinate position. The true education is given by the family, aided by the priest; it is completed by apprenticeship to a profession, and by the observance of social duties." [Footnote 47]
[Footnote 47: Social Reform in France, by M. Le Play, author of European Laborers, Commissioner-General to the Universal Exhibitions of 1855, '62, and '67. 3d edition, vol. ii. p. 369.]
The workshop is, then, after the family, the second centre, the second home, for the education of the people. But what is a well-planned and well-organized workshop? It is one where the dignity and rights of personal being are recognized in the workmen, and especially in the child. A personal being is always an end, never a means; it cannot be used as an animal without reason, nor as an instrument without consciousness. If one expect services of it, and receive profit from it, it is necessary to dispose of it, as God does of us, with a great respect; cum magna reverentia disponis nos. What is a well-appointed workshop? It is one which has at its head a patron who is an honorable man, a patron truly worthy of the name he bears. Some have seen something ridiculous and disagreeable in this name; but, for my part, I find it very grand, very elevated, and, above all, very Christian. I see in it the idea of paternity, and in this very idea the practical solution of our problem, by the relations of mutual affection in a free but, nevertheless, close and durable association between the masters and the workmen. In such a workshop, under this father of the laborer, an immediate gain will be sacrificed, however great it may be, to the formation of intelligent and virtuous apprentices. It is not proposed to produce only much and quickly; it is desired that trade may be grand by its workmen as well as by its works; from its moral as well as its material side. The kingdom of God and his righteousness is sought first; and all the rest is added, for righteousness and utility have more bonds between them than we think, and science has recently stated that in the products of labor not only the degree of intelligence, but also the degree of morality of the workmen, may be recognized.
Aided by devoted and qualified foremen, such a patron will make the workshop he directs the best of professional schools. The good workman is made, like the good soldier, less by precept than by example, less by general and theoretical knowledge than by a practical struggle with the realities of his trade.
Come, then, young conscript of labor! I would have many more of this kind and many fewer of the other. (Applause.) Yes, the conscripts of agriculture, in these vast open workshops that we call the fields, and the conscripts of trade, in the more confined but not less fruitful workshops of our cities—the great, peaceful army which forms the true power and superior influence of a nation. (Renewed applause.) Come, conscript of labor! Enter upon the field of battle of the workshop! Fight those combats which are not always without dangers, never without courage and glory! And you, inured foreman, captain of this noble militia, follow it, guide it, exercise it by look, and word, and gesture! See how it avenges its first defeats by valiant exploits; how it puts its victorious hand upon this wild beast, this matter, revolted against man. It seizes it, it twists its mane, and finally curbs it, subdued, pliant, and docile, to carry on the inventions of science and the creations of genius. (Applause.)
Gentlemen, yet a word with regard to the workshop. It is a place which ought to complete the formation of the moral and religious character, at the same time that it perfects the intelligent and qualified workman. It is not alone the school of excellence in the profession; it is also the school of life. The family, with its auxiliaries, the school and the catechism, has provided the theory of life more than it has given the practice. The good precepts have fallen upon the consciousness of the child in the form of a mysterious revelation, of which he has felt the power and the beauty, but of which he has not been able to seize all the significance. Every theory, so far as it remains abstract, differs more or less from the reality; it is essential that it descend into the region of facts, and that it enter into a contact with them which, far from destroying, confirms, but at the same time modifies and fructifies, it. This is the true tendency of practical life.
When, then, the mother and the priest have grounded this sublime, true, and eternal theory of religion and of virtue, it belongs to the workshop to submit it to its necessary and decisive proof, to give or refuse it citizenship in practical existence. If, finally, everything in this new school says to the young apprentice, Your teachers have deceived you or are themselves deceived; the great movement of men and things is not, and cannot be, what they have told you; if this contradiction of the faith of his childhood penetrate his mind and heart through the constant teachings of word and example, by all the influences of these moral mediums, which act upon us with far greater force than physical mediums, it will come to pass that he will abandon the principles of his parents and instructors as a weak support, and will allow himself to glide down the seductive declivities of doubt and pleasure. But if, on the contrary, he find one of these workshops too rare to-day, which are the continuation of the school and fireside experience; if he hear and see the practical commentary on all he has believed and loved; if he breathe the pure air of healthful souls which refreshes and fortifies the conscience and the heart; you will soon see developed to manly stature those virtues of childhood instilled in him by the sacred influence of home and of religion, warmed by the contact of those two hearts which are equal—I dare not say that one surpasses the other; God has clothed them with so nearly the same tenderness and the same piety, for the cradle of mankind—the heart of the mother and the heart of the priest. (Applause.)
III.
Education By Means Of The Sunday.
I have just compared the priest and the mother. And indeed, gentlemen, if I have spoken separately of the family and the workshop, I have not intended by that to separate them from religion. With these two primordial laws of love and of labor of which I have indicated the double home—the family and the workshop—is connected, and, as it were, interlaced, a third still grander law, which forms with them the divine net-work of human existence—prayer.
We cannot be the disciples of an independent morality, because we are not participators in an impersonal deity. We have a morality which comes from the living God and which returns to him, and in this golden chain which binds the earth to heaven all the links are not the duties of man in respect to man; and when one desires to be an honorable man in the fulness and holiness of this term, so often profaned, he must not disregard in his practical respect the most living and sacred of all personalities. Now, this intercourse of the living and personal soul with the living and personal God is what we call prayer, in the fullest and most comprehensive sense of the word. It is not sufficient to think of God; it is necessary to pray to him. When one habituates himself to reach him only by thought, he finishes by no longer believing in God; he vanishes, or at least he transforms himself into a mass of confused and icy clouds—evanuerunt in cogitationibus suis—and of the Being of beings there remains only a sublime but chimerical ideality. It is necessary to have a heart, to have the arts and movements of a soul which looks up with respect and tenderness to the God who makes it to live upon the earth, to the Father who awaits it in the heavens. Not even individual prayer suffices; collective prayer is necessary—the meeting and communion of souls in the same illumination and fervidness of love. This prayer has a sacred day and place—the Sunday and the temple. It is of this day and this place, gentlemen, that it remains to say to you that they are, after as before the first communion, the highest school of the child, of the youth, and of the man.
This is why the first and most essential of all popular liberties is the liberty of keeping the Sunday. There are men who do not comprehend this need of repose for the soul and for the body. They are usually those who direct work, but who do not perform it; who receive the profit without knowing the fatigue. They are those who have not pricked their hands on the hard asperities of labor, with the thorns and briers of the workshop, and who have not been bowed down during six days over the earth with their brows bathed in sweat and their souls exhausted with suffering. As for such, I can conceive of their objections to the law of repose. I can comprehend their repugnance to the liberty of the Sunday. But the laborer, whenever he is not under the pressure of material or moral violence, whenever he is left to his own instincts; he claims as his most dear and sacred right the enjoyment of this day which makes him truly free, truly husband and father, truly a child of God. The sentiment of human dignity requires it; it is the exigency of family life; it is the religious need of souls; it is the cry of all that is most noble and imperious in our nature.
I still recollect what I experienced in my childhood. Permit me this confession, which is yours as well, and which would be also that of our workmen. In the morning, when I awoke, I felt distinctly that it was Sunday! In the clump of trees near the window, the birds sang more sweetly; the church-bells pealed more joyously; the air was filled with more harmonies and perfumes; the sky was so beautiful, the sun so brilliant! I did not understand this mystery. I asked myself many times how nature thus became transformed on a fixed day. Later, I understood it. Child, still warm from the waters of thy baptism, throbbing from the caresses of thy mother, it is a reflection of thy religious soul which passes over nature and makes it more beautiful and more like thyself. (Applause.)
The child will arise transported. It will go into the temple, which is the house of God, but which is also the house of the people. The rich have their palaces; they can content themselves with a modest chapel. For the people we must have cathedrals, (applause,) and festivals such as are not given to the princes of the earth, such as religion alone can realize. The true popular festival—let me speak the word so much abused, the true democratic festival—is Sunday. In the vast basilica, all the arts, united around the altar, have mingled their enchantments into one supreme enchantment—architecture, statuary, painting, music, above all, eloquence. Yes, eloquence! However unpolished the words of the priest may sometimes be, by the nature of the truths he must announce, by the chords which he is sure to touch in the human heart, the priest is necessarily eloquent. (Applause.) The people enter, and they feel its grandeur. And the little children, as they cross the threshold, are welcomed like kings by the grand voice of the organ; they breathe the perfumes of incense and of flowers; they listen to those majestic and tender chants, those Latin words, which they do not comprehend, and which nevertheless say to them so many things—words of eternity dropped down into time, mysterious secrets of the fatherland, a glimpse caught in exile. Transported with faith, with hope, and with love, they come from the fireside to the altar; from the altar to the fireside they recarry to the mother the kiss of God, as they have carried to God the kiss of the mother.
This is the day of which their friends wish to deprive the people—false friends, who believe only in the body, who see in it only material needs, the work and the pleasures of the beast of burden! Courtiers of democracy, you who flatter the people and despise it, believe in its soul, crede animae, and by that begin to believe in your own. (Applause.)
Yes, this law of Sunday, so religiously democratic, is to-day everywhere unrecognized. Patriotism imposes upon me still greater consideration for my country when I speak upon soil which is not her own. I am mistaken; my country asks of me only equity, and I know that if much evil can be said of France as she is to-day, much good may also justly be said of her. I will speak, then, freely; I will complain of the violation of the Sunday in the great industrial cities of France. Sometimes I must pass through the streets in going to the church to speak the sacred word. I revolve in my heart the lessons of the Gospel and all along the way are visions of hell; heavy wagons, axle-trees that groan, pavements that reek, clouds of dust which hide from me the sun and the face of God. I cover my eyes with my hands and say, groaning, It is France that does this.
The answer comes, Undoubtedly; but this is liberty. Respect the liberty of France! Respect the conscience of your fellow-citizens! Ah! I have nothing to say against liberty. I speak of it with lips as much more sincere and fervent as they are more Christian and more Catholic. The hour is not yet come, gentlemen, but the hour will come, in which misapprehensions shall cease, and it will be said before the end of this century that the pontiff so great and so unappreciated, Pius IX., who has most valiantly combated against revolution, is the same who has opened the initiatives the most bold and most fruitful—yes, in spite of apparent reverses, I say the most fruitful for the liberty of Europe. Let us not do that with which St. Paul reproaches the Christians of Corinth. We will not depart from Christ; we will not divide ourselves from Pius IX., divisus est Christus! As for me, in all the extent of his glory I accept him; from his prosperity so pure to his misfortunes so touching; from the raising of the standard of reform and progress in his royal and priestly hand, previous to 1848, to the convocation of the ecumenical council which unites at this hour to the applause of Catholics the sympathy of Protestants and Rationalists.
No! we will not lessen liberty. We will not wound the interests of labor nor the exigencies of trade. What contemptible sophisms these are! Do you not see two great free nations, two great industrial nations, which are equal to yours, if they do not surpass you—England and the United States? I have had the happiness to visit London. I shall never forget the emotion which filled me at the sight of this city, similar to the ancient metropolis of the sea which the prophets paint; the woman who is seated upon the waters, mulier quae sedet super aquas. And in the deep waves I saw no abysses, but only an immense and solemn fluctuation, and as the majesty of an ever moving but firmly established throne. And the great queen of the seas was there, commanding the islands and the continents, reaching out in the distance over kings and peoples, no longer, as her predecessors, the rod of oppression, but the beneficent sceptre of her riches and her liberty. And I heard the sound of her vast trade, and in the streets passed the living flood of men and chariots. Then one day broke as the days of my childhood; one day such as public life no longer shows me in my country; one day which did not resemble other days. No longer the noisy cars in the streets, no longer a crowd full of business; the gigantic machine which muttered and thundered the evening before had suddenly stopped, as before the vision of God. The grand movement of English trade was arrested, and I saw in the streets only those who went, collected and happy, to the place of prayer, and I heard only the sweet harmony of the Protestant bells, which remembered having been Catholic while waiting to become so again. (Applause.)
Let not any one say, England is an aristocratic and feudal power; its Sabbath-rest is one of the remnants of the middle ages which modern breath will soon have swept away. I look to the other side of the sea, and I find again this Anglo-Saxon race which can clothe the same grandeur under the most diverse forms; this time it is not the middle age and aristocracy; it is the most advanced prow of modern civilization, sailing across all glories and indiscretions toward an unknown future. This is, I love to think, the people chosen by God to renew things and to prepare for truths and institutions which can no longer do without newer and stronger vestments. Well, the United States observe the Sunday as England does, and send back to us across the ocean this same response of the silence of God to the blasphemies of men. (Applause.)
In praising these great countries, gentlemen, I do not intend to recommend to you a servile imitation, and I do not ask that what is not in our manners shall be inscribed in our laws. The law exists in France, it is true, but in the state of a dead letter. I do not desire to see it applied. I am persuaded that in such countries as France and Belgium great inconvenience would arise by this means. What I ask is not the obligation, it is the liberty of the Sunday; liberty by the Sunday and the Sunday by liberty. (Cries of Good. That is it.) Yes, I repeat, the liberty of the people by the Sunday and the observance of the Sunday by liberty. If I had the right to speak to governments, I should do it with that respect which is their due even in their faults. Even here, we have applauded the beautiful words of M. de Maistre on the subject of Russia: "I respect all that is respectable, the sovereigns and the people." I say, then, to them, Give your example, and I ask of you no other support for the cause that I defend. Let the public works scrupulously respect the Sunday, and the state force the individual to blush before it. (Applause.) And you, princes of trade, organizers, legislators, and monarchs of labor and of wealth, you can do more here than crowned heads; you have been powerful agents in suppressing the liberty of the Sunday; you will be more powerful in restoring it. (Applause.)
And now, gentlemen, before closing, suffer me to address one last and earnest appeal to your zeal in favor of these three great restorers in the bosom of the laboring classes—the family, the workshop, and the Sunday.
Yesterday, in language which belongs only to himself, but which interprets our feelings as well, M. Le Compte de Falloux said to the illustrious Bishop of Orleans, "My Lord, you have recommended us to arise early; but you have joined example to precept; you have ever been the standard-bearer in all good causes." Well, what I could wish is, that each one of us could also be among the standard-bearers; that we could have the honor, we Catholics, of being in advance of others in the practical knowledge of what is preparing in the approximate future.
What is approaching? It is called by an illy-defined name, which awakens passions and dissensions—democracy. Two years ago I attempted to explain this word at Notre-Dame de Paris, [Footnote 48] and I have been blamed for it by some. I have since found a similar definition in the recent writings of the honored bishop whom I have just named. I retake it, then, with pride, and I say to all those who invoke this name, There are two democracies in the world. Which is yours? Is it radical revolution? Does social hierarchy, entirely prostrated before the force of numbers, constitute the grandeur of intelligence and virtue? Is it the brutal level which passes over all things to crush and to lower? If this be your democracy, it is the worst of barbarisms, and we will combat it, if necessary, even to the shedding of our blood. But if democracy be the gradual and peaceable elevation of the laboring and suffering masses, who are called peasants in the country and workmen in our cities; if it be their elevation to a more extended knowledge, to a more secure well-being, to a more efficient and refined morality, and by legitimate consequence to a more extensive social influence; we are with this democracy, not only because we are the sons of our century, but because we are the sons of the Gospel. [Footnote 49]
[Footnote 48: Advent Conferences of 1865. (3d conference.)]
[Footnote 49: "If democracy be the rising of the common people, of the peasants and the laborers, to a higher standard of education, of well-being, of morality, of legitimate influence, the church is with democracy." —Atheism and Social Peril, by Monsignor the Bishop of Orleans. 1866. p. 166.]
I see it arise. I salute it in your name; this Christian democracy, having its deep and solid foundations in the homes, the workshops of trade, and in the sanctuary of our temples. It will change history, which, in the past, has only recorded the intrigues of the wily or the conquests of the strong, the powerlessness of policy, the too frequent corruption of riches and art. It will give to the sages a subject of meditation in the intelligent and faithful working out of the laws of private life, to which public life itself is subordinate when it is understood. It will cause a great people to spring up who will seek the practical welfare of their existence, as well as the inspiration of their literature and art, in family affection, the struggles and joys of labor, and in the chaste emotions of prayer and the splendid festivities of religion.
Undoubtedly, the crisis that we are passing through is one of the most important and terrible that our race has known. Let us raise our efforts, our courage, and our faith to the height of these solemn events, but never doubt the final issue. I can explain the ruins of pagan society; but the society which has touched Jesus Christ, the humanity which has possessed for centuries the spirit of the Gospel—in a word, Europe—she may suffer, she may be in the pangs of death, but she cannot die. (Prolonged applause.)