“This wish will I put into my cup, and when to-morrow dawns, and Jesus finds the first-fruits of this new Easter laid at his feet, thou shalt have thy answer.”
Then came a soft chorus of welcome and congratulation, breaking forth among the flowery worshippers, but the angel of the bell held his peace.
And in the morning, when the sun flung his golden curtains across the east window and crowned the saints and virgins thereon with richer gems than living monarchs wear, the Paschal procession came winding through All Hallow’s church, and no one missed the little chorister Benignus. But when his turn in the anthem came, a voice seemed to float from some unseen corner, and a shower of bell-like crystal tones rang in triumphant cadence to the very roof, and no one could tell if it were Benignus or an angel singing. The organ ceased, and the monk Cuthbert looked anxiously along the lines of white-robed choristers, but the child was not there. Still the voice sang on, and it seemed as if it floated now from the chalice on the altar to the distant belfry-tower, and then back again to the fragrant forest of exotics in the choir. And Cuthbert, looking up among the half-opened buds of the early roses that were piled up directly over the tabernacle, thought he saw one more lovely than the others just break gently from the frail green stem, and fall in showering petals around the pall-covered chalice, at the very minute the wondrous voice ceased in one long reverberating “Alleluia.”
Then Cuthbert knew who had been singing and where Benignus was, and he sang the “Gloria in Excelsis” as he had never done before.
But the angel of the bell was sad, because the child would have helped him to bear abroad the message of God’s truth to men.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CATHOLIC CONGRESS IN MAYENCE.
FROM DER KATHOLIK.
It is evident that we have reached a turning-point in the history of the world; that a crisis of terrible interest for the church, for Christian Europe, for peoples, and for nations, is at hand. It must, indeed, soon be decided whether Christianity shall continue to be, in the life of the nations, what from its very nature and design it is intended to be; whether it shall remain what it has been acknowledged to be since it overcame the heathenism of old, the light of the world, the supernatural leaven permeating all the relations of life, purifying and ennobling them; or whether it shall be cast out of public life as an illusion, and at most—and who knows how long even that?—be tolerated as a species of superstition. The nations—and especially the recently founded German Empire—must soon decide whether they shall accept as their basis the laws of eternal justice, whose root is in the holy and personal God, and in him alone; whether they will hold to that Christian civilization which reposes on the public recognition of Christianity, of the church as a divine institution not subject to the arbitrament of man; in fine, whether they will respect as sacred those prescriptive rights of mankind which every one must respect who believes in the divine government of the world—rights of which history is the evidence; or whether they will yield to the pressure of the revolution and of false science, throw Christianity and Christian civilization overboard, proclaim the present will of the dominant political powers or party the only and highest law of the state, and, having done this, to use their immense power to infuse this “modern” spirit and these “modern” principles into the life of the people, and force it on them by every means at their disposal, through legislation, government patronage, their system of public instruction, and the whole organization of society; in short, whether they will place naturalism and rationalism instead of Christianity, the vital principle of national and popular life, and thereby—no intelligent person can doubt it, for reason and experience conspire to teach it—hasten for the nations the inevitable catastrophe of which the burning of Paris was only a premonitory symptom.
And precisely at this fatal moment in the history of the world it is that, in Germany, a number of men, among them a few who have deserved well of the church, blinded to a degree which it seems hard to account for, have raised the standard of rebellion against their mother, the church, because the Œcumenical Council did not think fit to decide as they thought best, because it decided as it pleased the pastors of the church and the Holy Ghost. The foundation-stone of the church, laid by Christ himself, to preserve unity and love within it for ever, has become a stumbling-block to them. They have made shipwreck of the faith, and burst the bonds of love that held them in union with their brethren in the faith. Following the example of those who before them rebelled against the church, they call themselves defenders of the faith, while denying the very principle on which all faith reposes. Proclaiming human science the supreme authority in matters of religion, placing it above the highest authority in the church, above the Pope and the council, above the assent of the whole Catholic world, they have ceased to be servants of God and of his church; they have gone over to the rationalism and naturalism which are striving so hard to do away with Christianity entirely, and to constitute themselves in its place a new cosmopolitan religion.