"Requiem æternam dona eis Domine
Et lux perpetua luceat eis."
It seems that after all the lamentations of the "De Profundis" and the "Dies iræ," the presence of God, who comes then upon the altar, brings consolation, and sanctions the confident and solemn pride of that melodious phrase, which then invokes Christ, without dread and without tears.
The mass ended, the celebrant disappeared, and, as at the moment when the corpse entered, the clergy, preceded by the Suisses, advanced towards the body, and in the blazing circle of the tapers, a priest, in his cope, said the mighty prayers of the general absolution.
Then the liturgy took a higher tone, and became still more admirable. Mediative between the sinner and the judge, the Church, by the mouth of her priest, implores the Lord to pardon the poor soul: "Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo Domine"—then after the amen given by the organ and all the choir, a voice arose in the silence, and spoke in the name of the dead:—
"Libera me!"
and the choir continued the old chant of the tenth century. Just as in the "Dies iræ," which appropriates to itself fragments of these plaints, the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the dead the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the Judge will come with the crash of thunder to chastise the world.
The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it with beads of holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul, consoled it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no waking, far from earth's noises.
Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted her up to the hour of his death.
Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly dust heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries: "From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord!" but at the end of the general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its back, is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children's voices.
Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said: "We have done what we could, but ... but ..." And in the funereal silence which followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be made into soap at the factories.