"To these reasons, suggested by the situation of affairs, they added higher and more general views, drawn from the future of European society, and the impossibility that monarchy should ever again find any solid resting-place. On this point I did not go so far as they. Limited monarchy, in spite of its faults, had always seemed to me the most desirable of all forms of government, and I only saw in the republic a momentary necessity until things should naturally take another course. This difference of opinion was serious, and hardly allowed of our working together in concert. Nevertheless, the danger was urgent, and it was absolutely necessary either to abdicate at this solemn moment, or frankly to choose one's party, and bring to the help of society, now shaken to its very foundations, whatever light and strength each one had at his command. Hitherto I had taken a definite position with regard to public events; ought I now to take refuge in a selfish silence because the difficulties were more serious? I might indeed say that I was a religious, and so hide myself under my religious habit; but I was a religious militant, a preacher, a writer, surrounded by a sympathy which created very different duties for me from the duties of a Trappist or a Carthusian. These considerations weighed on my conscience. Urged by my friends to decide, I at length yielded to the force of events, and though I felt a strong repugnance to the idea of returning to the career of a journalist, I agreed, in concert with them, to unfurl a standard on which should be inscribed together the names of Religion, the Republic, and Liberty."
This was the origin of a new political journal, the Ere Nouvelle, of which he commenced the publication in the spring of 1848. Nor was this all. The city of Marseilles elected him a representative in the constituent assembly; and, in his white Dominican habit, he took his seat there on the extreme left. We need hardly say that his political career was a bitter disappointment to himself, and a disappointment, too, to many of his friends. There was only one party with which his principles permitted him to ally himself; but that party, as he saw it in the assembly, could not enlist his sympathies. "I could not sit there," he said, "apart from democracy, and yet I could not accept democracy as I saw it there displayed." He held his seat only two weeks. On the 15th of May, a mob invaded the hall of meeting, and for three hours held their representatives intimidated. The next day Lacordaire resigned in disgust. "I found out," said he afterward, "that I was nothing but a poor little friar, and in no way a Richelieu; a poor friar, loving nothing but retirement and peace." Very soon afterward he withdrew likewise from the Ere Nouvelle, and here it may be said that his public life came to a close. He preached for some time longer in Notre Dame, but the boldness of his language gave offence, and, after the coup d'état of December, 1851, he resisted all entreaties to appear again in the cathedral pulpit. The strengthening and propagation of his order now took up all his attention. He visited his brethren in other countries, and made a short trip to England. Then, at the age of fifty, he resolved to devote himself to the education of the young. He founded houses of the third order of Dominicans for the express purpose of carrying on this important work, and in one of them, at Sorèze, he finally settled down to pass the remainder of his days. Here, with powers yet unimpaired, the man whose eloquence had stirred all France applied himself to teaching the Greek and Latin grammar. He had no fixed system of education, but his personal magnetism made up for other defects; he gathered around him the best instructors; he lived like a father in the bosom of his family; he filled the place with the odor of gentleness and piety. Here, on the 21st of November, 1860, after an illness of nearly a year, he preached his last.
Important as the labor was in which Father Lacordaire had spent the closing years of his life, we cannot help feeling that it was not the labor for which he had been specially endowed, nor was it that in which his heart was most deeply engaged. It is rather as the preacher of Notre Dame than as the president of Sorèze, rather as the reconciler of religion and society than as a teacher of boys, that he stands before us in the page of history. What a bitter comment is it upon the condition of affairs in France, fifteen or twenty years ago, that such a man could be stopped in such a career! The story of Lacordaire often reminds us of a passage in one of George Eliot's novels, where the life of one who had gone through bitter sorrow and disappointment is described as being "like a spoiled pleasure-day, in which the music and processions are all missed, and nothing is left at evening but the weariness of striving after what has been failed of." It was partly so with his life; not wholly, of course, for the reward of the striving came at evening, though the object of the struggle had been missed. Disappointment and weariness were the burdens which God laid upon him, and he leaves a brighter renown, as well as reaps a brighter reward, for the sweetness with which he bore them.
Sayings Of The Fathers Of The Desert.
Abbot Isaac said: I know a brother who was reaping, and who wished to eat an ear of corn, and he said to the master of the field: Are you willing I should eat one ear of corn? And he, hearing these words, was astonished and said: The field is thine, Father, and dost thou ask me? So scrupulous was the brother.
Abbot Sisois once said in confidence: Believe me, I have been thirty years without praying to God on account of my sins; but when I pray I say this: O Lord Jesus Christ, save me from my tongue. And yet it causes me to fall every day, and be delinquent.
Abbot Pastor said: As the bees are driven from their hives by smoke so that their honey may be obtained, even so does bodily rest banish the fear of the Lord from the soul, and take from it every good work.
A certain old man determined that he would drink nothing for forty days. Whenever he was tormented by burning thirst, he took a vessel, and, having filled it with water, placed it before him. And when his brethren asked why he did this, he answered: In order that, seeing what I greatly desire, and yet not tasting it, my suffering may be the more intense, and hence that the reward which God shall give me may be greater.