I write down these closing memories in our monastery under the Southern Cross, in the great South American city where my brethren in Saint Benedict, active and devoted men, but far too few for the ever-growing work that lies ready to their hands, are leading the same life of prayer and liturgy, untiring, pastoral labour, and the education of the young in religion and letters, which has been the mission of our Order all through the Christian centuries. It is high noon on this Brazilian summer's day, and the fierce sun beats down from a cloudless sky on the luxuriant tropical garden which glows beneath the window of my quiet cell. At the foot of the last page I inscribe the same words as the monastic annalist inscribed of old beneath the laboriously-written manuscript which had been the work of his life:
Explicit chronicon lx. annorum
Deus misericordie miserere miseri scriptoris.
And then, as, my task completed, I lay down my weary pen, there come into my mind some other words—those of a great thinker and a great writer of our own time: "Our life is planted on the surface of a whirling sphere: our prayer is to find its tranquil centre, and revolve no more."
So may it be!
[[1]] The good old abbot died three months later, on August 13, 1913.
[[2]] Colonel David Hunter-Blair of the Scots Fusilier Guards, whose conversion to Catholicism, when I was a boy at Eton, had made a great impression on me. He died of consumption at Rome on March 31, 1869.
[[3]] "We implore Thy protection also," petitioned a certain Dean at family prayers, "for the minor canons of this cathedral; for even they, O Lord, are Thy creatures."
[[4]] Appointed Archbishop-bishop of Malta in 1914.
[[5]] I liked to hear once-a-year (not oftener) the prolonged musical masses which were the "festival use" at the Oratory. Once, arriving rather late at the church, I found an old friend (a Gregorian-lover like myself) waiting in the porch, and asked him how far the service had progressed. "Thank God!" said old W—— P—— devoutly, "the worst is over—they have just finished the Gloria!"
[[6]] It can be matched, I think, by two lines from a university prize poem—not, of course, by a poet laureate!—on the "Sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers":