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.