“The last of the great Romans has departed.”
And Damaris—
“The latest of the great saints has entered into life.”
As always, death completed life. And they first saw the noble life in its true meanings and proportions in the silent sculpture of death. They felt he was indeed Leo the Great; and only at the altar, as Monica had said to Augustine, could be his highest commemoration: “With the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven” rendering thanks for all he had done, and been, and become.
When they returned to the Aventine from the solemn obsequies of the Shepherd and Father of Rome, Marius said to Ethne—
“Thou hast never been perplexed by anything that seemed doubtful in the great Bishop’s life; not about his contest with Hilary of Arles, nor even about his forbidding the ordination of slaves.”
“Why should I?” she said; “Leo never claimed to be anything in himself. Has he not taught us all to say day by day in our prayers, that ‘we can do nothing good without God’? Has he not taught us never to be satisfied with ourselves, but always to pray on and on continually for ‘the increase of faith and hope and charity’? Has he not taught us that the ‘world is ordered by the governance,’ not of emperors or generals, or the greatest in the world, or the holiest in the Church, but ‘by God’? Has he not taught us that the destiny and mission of the Catholic Church, from the lowest to the highest, is not to rule, but to ‘serve Him in all godly quietness’?”
“Many think he is building up a new tyranny,” Marius said, “in the kingdom of God.”
And Ethne replied, with her far-away look as of second sight—
“As far as what Leo builds is only Rome, will it not perish like the other Rome? As far as it is chiefly Peter’s, did not the blessed Peter himself sink beneath the waves, only to be saved by the outstretched hand of Peter’s Lord? But as far as it is Christ’s kingdom and Peter’s rock, which is Christ, it cannot fail to stand. We make aqueducts; God only opens the fountains. We build our little houses of clay, which if the life dies out of them become prisons or tombs; the living God creates living worlds. We make empires; God gives us a little child, His Eternal Son, the manger and the cross. Did not Leo tell us that ‘Peter is saying still every day throughout the Catholic Church, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”’? And is not our Leo also saying that for ever now, here below, and above?”