A JEWISH CONVERT: A REMINISCENCE OF VIENNA.
Among the pleasant capitals of Europe through which a long tour carried the writer of this sketch, one of the most brilliant is Vienna. It has many associations of genius to consecrate it; Mozart and Beethoven, not to mention many lesser princes of music, found there both home and appreciation; it has been the resort of elegance, the rendezvous of talent, the paradise of diplomacy, even while graver ecclesiastical and historical events have centred in it. It has its old cathedral, which, though disfigured by some unfortunate internal bungling of the style of the Renaissance, nevertheless has not lost its impression of religious solemnity, heightened by the deep, narrow, and sombre choir with the wonderful windows of old stained glass. Inimitable and unapproachable even in its fragmentary state, this old glass is perhaps the most interesting thing in the old church of St. Stephen, if we except the stone pulpit, cunningly carved and placed in a recess of the exterior wall of the building, the pulpit from which, so runs Viennese tradition, the second Crusade was publicly preached. There is among the records of the foundations at St. Stephen’s one that sets forth the desire and prayer of the people, during a pestilence in the middle ages, that a Mass should be daily offered in that church for the cessation of the epidemic. Tradition says that a great wind arose, and the pestilence was stopped. The Mass, however, continues to be said daily, and it certainly is a remarkable fact that there is not one day in the year, summer or winter, wet or dry, when the wind does not blow in Vienna. The Austrian capital, however, has yet more interesting associations for us than are called up by the cathedral, and the many other monuments and chapels by which it is historically distinguished. In the Advent season of 1865, a young Jewish convert preached in the Schotten-Kirche a short course of the most eloquent sermons it has ever been our privilege to hear in any language or any land whatever.
His name is Marie-Bernard Bauer, and his family, of Hungarian descent, is among the most influential and wealthy of those settled in Vienna. The Jews of that city have indisputably as large a share of the talent as of the riches of the country. The oldest brother of young Bauer is one of the greatest bankers in Austria. At an early age, the young Jew, fiery and enthusiastic, and already gifted with singular eloquence, threw himself into the ranks of the Revolution, and became one of its most ardent emissaries. At eighteen, he was entrusted with important missions and considered a rising Freemason. But during his travels he became acquainted with a young Frenchman, a zealous Catholic, whose influence and friendship laid the foundations of his conversion. He visited his friend’s mother, also, who by her example more even than her exhortations contributed to the work of grace begun in his soul by her son’s solicitations. Bauer wore, at the request of these two, a medal of the Immaculate Conception; and we need scarcely remind our Catholic friends of the part this blessed badge fulfilled in the conversion of another illustrious Jew, the Père Marie Ratisbonne, the founder of the Dames de Sion, who has since devoted his life to the instruction and conversion of Jewish girls at Jerusalem. After being fully instructed in the faith, Bauer required nothing but grace to believe. Being at Lyons with several worldly acquaintances, he happened to be standing on a prominent balcony, on the feast of Corpus Christi. The procession of the Blessed Sacrament was to pass below, and they, with cigars in their mouths and mockery in their hearts, were waiting for the pageant. No change came to the young Jew until the canopy under which the priest carried the Divine Host was close beneath the balcony. The change at that moment was lightning-like. Faith entered his heart, or rather—as he himself reluctantly admitted when pressed by his superiors at a later time to lay aside false humility and declare the works of God in his soul—a conviction so absolute that it distanced faith made itself felt throughout his whole being. The same knowledge, so to speak, returned to him many times since while consecrating at Mass, and he said that he could not believe merely, in a matter of which he was so blissfully and unerrably certain. As Jesus passed, Bauer threw himself on his knees and professed himself a Christian. A very short time elapsed before he entered the novitiate of the Carmelite Friars. His mother, who was living in Paris, endeavored to see him, but was refused access to him by his superiors. Later on, when he had passed through the novitiate, he might have seen her, had it not been for the machinations of his family. For five years every friend and relation he had among his own race cruelly ignored him, and he was kept away even from his mother’s death-bed by their relentless sternness. His mother alone never ceased to love him, and had a picture painted of him in his monastic cowl. This portrait hung opposite her bed, and she died with her eyes fixed on it and her hands lovingly stretched out towards it. When after her death he was allowed by his family to visit her chamber, he saw a curtained picture at the foot of the bed, and, drawing the curtain aside, stood face to face with this touching proof of a mother’s undying love. After some time, his fame as a preacher spreading fast, his family received him once more into their circle, and, with strange inconsistency, now made almost an idol of him. During his novitiate, and according to a rule of his order, he used to preach in turn with his fellow-novices in the refectory during meals, at which time the generality of the young men in training for a religious Demosthenes would receive but scant attention from their companions. When Bauer’s turn came, the contrary, however, was observed: the food was untouched, and the young audience sat transfixed, hanging upon the words of their eloquent and gifted companion. From the first his health was delicate; the effort of preaching rendered it weaker day by day, till at length the zealous and impassioned speaker, whom his friends prophesied to be the future Lacordaire, was one day carried fainting from the pulpit, having broken a blood-vessel. A year in Spain and complete rest of mind and body did nothing more than just save his life, and the Holy Father, who was very much interested in the young convert, advised him to leave the Carmelite Order, for the austerity of whose rule his shattered health now rendered him unfit. This paternal advice—or, let us say, command—proved a great trial to the enthusiastic religious; but, bowing to the will of God, he accepted his altered life, and prepared to make it as fruitful in good works as his short monastic career had proved. Although his health precluded him from the exhausting work of preaching long Lenten stations or continued missions, yet, as often as suitable opportunities offered, he was to be found indefatigably working in the pulpit; and we leave it to those who have had the good fortune to hear him, to judge of the loss the Catholic world has sustained in one whose eloquence and fervid enthusiasm rivalled that of Lacordaire, and whose steadfast faith and unerring logic far distanced that of the unhappy Hyacinthe.
In 1865, having already preached before the Emperor of the French in Paris, and been greatly commended by the most distinguished people there, both French and foreigners, he was called to Vienna, where his family resides, and where all his former associates and co-religionists awaited him with the greatest curiosity and interest. The six lectures or discourses he gave in the Schotten-Kirche, opposite his brother’s residence, at which he was an honored and fêted guest, were attended by crowds of his own Jewish friends, besides all the élite of Viennese and foreign society. The impassioned tone of his voice, his closely knit arguments, the air of apostleship about his slight figure and pale, inspired face, the presence of his nearest and dearest relations, and, above all, his own position toward them, in the very centre of his youthful Revolutionary triumphs—all concurred in making this short station of Advent one of thrilling interest. At the end of each sermon, or conférence, as the French say (they were delivered in French, which is like a second mother-tongue to Marie-Bernard Bauer), he addressed a prayer to God, and, while the language of each succeeding discourse increased in sublimity, that of the concluding prayers seemed to take such flights of unparalleled grandeur that the audience could only kneel in motionless attention and unbroken silence for some minutes after the preacher had ceased to speak—the highest tribute, perhaps which an impressed people can offer to an orator. Marie-Bernard Bauer has since received the Roman title of Monsignore, and been appointed chaplain to the Emperor of the French. He accompanied the Empress Eugénie to the opening of the Suez Canal, and preached a magnificent sermon on the occasion, in presence of the assembled potentates. But whatever else he has done, whatever else he may be destined to do in the future, he will scarcely be able to surpass his admirable achievements of the Advent station of 1865, when he became, as it were, the champion and apologist of Christianity before one of those representative Jewish assemblies which contained within itself so much enlightenment, so much talent, and so much successful individuality.
At the time when he preached these sermons, of which we will now endeavor to give some idea, as far as a translation will allow, he was only thirty-six years of age, and his frail, delicate body made him seem even younger. The following is the third in order of the Conférences, and was preached on the 17th of December, 1865. The text is given entire, and the subject, as expressed in the published edition of these sermons, was:
CHRISTIANITY AS A HISTORICAL FACT.
I would fain hope, my brethren, that the two last conférences have contributed, in some degree, to revivify in believing hearts both the energy of faith and the enthusiasm of virtue; that they have cast doubts in doubting hearts, upon the very uncertainty which creates doubt; that they have shed around hearts petrified, so to speak, in the darkness of fleshly bondage, some rays of the twilight which is the forerunner of the full light of God’s grace, and which manifests itself in such hearts through this question, solemnly and shrinkingly put: After all, might I not be in error? Might there not be, despite all, another life, a real responsibility, a moral law, supernatural duties, a judgment, a judge, a God, and this God the God of Christianity?
No matter to what level the Sun of Truth may have attained on the horizon of your inner life, you will allow me, nevertheless, to retrace, in a few short words, the doctrinal substance of the two previous discourses [conférences].
Man, such as we see him, is a fallen being; he is born with the taint of original sin, and if to this, which is the form of evil, he adds—and it is practically inevitable that he should—his own individual sins, which are evil’s natural outgrowth, he does but widen, at each moment of his existence, the abyss that parted him from God since the very hour of his birth, and which, thus ceaselessly widened, becomes such, at last, that nothing short of a miracle will suffice to bridge it over. Death then, suddenly intervening, cuts short all things here below, and hurls the man whose whole life has been spent without God into the chasm of the unknown. From a phase of being where all is transient, he is hurried to another where all is abiding, and from that instant the separation from God in which he has lived, and which before was transient in its turn, becomes abiding, and from temporal changes to eternal. Such are the conclusions of reason, which, leaning upon faith, point out to us in this eternal separation the fitting seal of an eternal woe.
It would not enter into my design toward the hearers which Providence, having gathered together before me, seems to have specially predestined to hear the words of eternal life from my unworthy lips—it would not, I say, enter into my design to show them these dark spiritual perspectives, without pointing out at the same time some vista of supernatural light, some promise and way of salvation, some hopes of life, nay, even life itself. No! God forbid that I should become as the treacherous guide who draws the lost wayfarer to the very edge of the precipice, and there leaves him to himself and to the terrors of the ravenous depths below. Yet, mark it well!—the mystery of life leads towards death, through paths that skirt a giddy abyss where no man’s self-possession is proof against danger; but there is, nevertheless, an infallible road that leads to life through and in spite of the manacles of death. It is called by a name with which my lips cannot become familiar, as with a common word indifferently bandied about in careless conversation—a name which I confess myself unable even to pronounce without feeling my whole being tremble with love and bow down in worship; a name which, when spoken from this pulpit for the first time, only a few days ago, produced an impression, or rather a mysterious shock, that neither you nor I have yet forgotten—the name of Jesus Christ.