Sermon IX. Omnia pro Christo

Let Nehemias be a long time remembered, who raised up for us our walls that were cast down, and set up the gates and the bars, who rebuilt our houses. ECCLUS. xlix. 15.

If the command of authority had not bid me speak to-day, I should not have ventured on this task. It would be a hard task to any one. It is a harder task to me than to most. It is beyond the power of any of us to speak as we ought of the great Pastor and Prince of the Church, who lies here in the midst of us. It is altogether beyond mine. I have, moreover, a farther hindrance; the private sorrow for the loss of the truest of friends, the last in this kind I can ever have in life.

But as he, in his last days, unknown to me, and when I was afar off, laid on me this command, I fulfil it as I can. It is the last obedience I can render to him, whom it has been my happiness and my hon-our for these thirteen years very feebly but faithfully to serve.

It would not, however, become me on such a day of public mourning to speak of any private sorrow of my own. For to whom is not this a private sorrow and a personal grief?

I see before me the Bishops of the Catholic Church in England shorn of their chief glory. The light which went before them is gone out, and the strong arm which struck for them is still in death. And yet it is not only a public but a private grief also to you. On most of you that hand impressed the Episcopal character. He was guide, teacher, and friend to many of you, who grew up around him as his disciples and his sons.

Of the priesthood gathered here, perhaps the greater number, either in Home or at Oscott, learned from his lips, were upheld and guided by his voice. The hands of many were anointed by him with unction of the Holy Sacrifice. Many, perhaps, would never have held out in the dangers which beset their vocation, but for his encouraging voice and his sustaining hand. You too have lost not only a pastor, but a father and a friend.

Many here are his spiritual children in the gospel of Jesus Christ. They would never have known the perfect truth as it is in Jesus, but for him. Many would never have been penitents, many never Christians, but for the voice of the Good Shepherd which spoke by his lips. Many of you loved him as the kindest and tenderest of friends; many as a benefactor, a counsellor, a comforter. To all of us, then, it is a private sorrow. And yet it rises into something more than a personal grief. There is a mourning to-day throughout the Catholic Church in England. The Pastor who has led the whole flock in the last fifteen years is gone before us, and has left us in the wilderness. The solemn requiem is ascending throughout England for the repose of that great soul.

Not in England alone, but wheresoever the English speech is known, the name of Nicholas Wiseman, the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, is a title of honour cherished and revered.

And not only where our tongue is spoken, but in all languages within the unity of the Universal Church, the name and fame of our beloved and lamented Pastor is in veneration.

The other day, when he recalled me to his side, everywhere as I travelled homewards, the first question was of that precious life. They only knew that I was an Englishman; but their first inquiry, full of sympathy and condolence, was of his state.

But most of all, where he was best known and most cherished, in Eome, among the friends of his youth, now princes in the Sacred College, his life was counted as of great price, and his death as the extinction of one of the brightest lights which surround the Holy See. When the Sovereign Pontiff knew that hope was all hut gone, he lifted his hands and eyes to heaven, and said: ' This and the loss of the Archbishop of Cologne are two heavy blows to me. The Archbishop for Prussia, and the Cardinal for England, at this moment were of inestimable worth. But the will of the Lord be done.'

Our private griefs, then, lose themselves, and are ennobled in this universal mourning. There will be a world-wide sorrow wheresoever the Catholic name is spread. We are all poorer by this loss; and the voice which has taught, cheered, elevated, and strengthened tens of thousands in every land will be heard no more on earth. Henceforth it is mingled with the voices which are eternal.

What, then, can I say? You know all, you feel all, that can be spoken. I cannot narrate a biography, the outlines and dates of which have been during these last days in all our hands.

I cannot undertake a criticism of his wonderful gifts and powers, and of the rich fertility of the mind which will fascinate us no more. It would be a cold and heartless task.

Least of all can I pronounce a panegyric. The name Nicholas Wiseman is a panegyric in itself. The life which is hefore you in all its completeness, its unity, its expanding powers, its multiplying honours, its exuberant works, its calm tranquil sunset— all this, which you already know, sets before you a noble and stately picture of a great Christian, a chief Pastor of the flock, a Prince over the Church of God.

What, then, is left to me?

I can but draw most faintly and hastily the outlines of a great life. Here and there I may put in a few personal features, single touches of the beautiful colours which played about him; and a few words from that voice, which, though we shall hear it no more, yet speaks by the accents of the past hanging in the air, or inscribed deeply in works which cannot pass away.

It was but the other day we were preparing to welcome as a festival the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Episcopal consecration. The tenacity to life with which he held on, through mortal sickness and ever-returning dangers, had misled us into a sanguine expectation that the twenty -five years would run their course. But we shall celebrate it otherwise now. The act of to-day is, as it were, the vigil of that festival which we may keep still, but with other thoughts and with other records of his great career.

For a great period it was. From 1840 to 1865 is perhaps the most pregnant and vivid period in the Catholic history of modern England since its separation from unity. I am well aware that in those five-and-twenty years many devout Catholics, Priests, and Bishops, of whom some are here to-day, laboured powerfully in the work of building up in England the ruins of Catholic order. I bear this always in mind, when I speak of the career of the Cardinal Archbishop. They were around him and at his side; some were in the field before him; many have done great and notable works; some had their hands upon the very same works which are identified with him. Nevertheless, they will bear a glad and generous witness to my words, when I say that he towers above them all. The works of which I shall speak were not exclusively his. No; because the works of the Church are all in common. It has one heart, one will, one strength, one arm. And yet, though not exclusively his, they are emphatically his; that is, the will and providence of God used him as its instrument with special and distinguishing pre-eminence.

It was in the year 1863 that the Sovereign Pontiff, speaking to me of the Cardinal, described him as ' the man of divine providence for England.' The words struck me as visibly exact and true. But I do not know that until now I have ever seen their full meaning. We have his life now before us, from its rising to its setting. We can trace it in all its times, — in its period of preparation, in its period of active power, in its period of withdrawal from the field. And there seems to be a singular completeness about it, and a visible correspondence to the time and the country for which he laboured.

His mission was to England in the nineteenth century, and to the most critical period of that century for us.

The Church in England had already endured its three hundred years of desolation. The time of the liberation of the Church had come. Catholics were free once more. The Holy Sacrifice was restored with public manifestation upon the altar. The Emancipation was not the beginning of a movement, but itself an effect of causes long in action, afar off and in other lands. The great oscillation to and fro, which restored so much of the Catholic inheritance in foreign countries, began to work upon England. The horrors and impieties of the first French Revolution had produced a reaction towards Catholic faith and Catholic piety. The tide had turned upon the Continent, and its undulations reached our shores. When the tide turns, the tidal rivers rise. England began to feel the weight and the pressure of a broader and nobler religious spirit than was to be found in the three hundred years of its past history. The change of our polity in 18*28, 1829, let loose a flood upon this country. It had been ice-bound for generations. But the thaw had set in. After the frost comes the flow, and as in the floods which inundate the land, all things are lifted, the fruits of the earth, the trees of the forest, the dwellings of men; so it was in England, when the old tradition of three centuries gave way before the larger spirit of modern legislation.

Still more; under the surface there was a movement as of many contending currents, intellectual and spiritual, hardly known while as yet the old exclusiveness held all activity in check. These vigorous and vehement movements went on, year after year, multiplying in speed and volume. A crisis was come. Doubt, uncertainty, restlessness, great discontent, great license of opinion, a craving for truth, unity, and peace, and withal an earnest seeking for it at all costs, absolute mistrust of the guidance and teachings of men — all this, from 1830 to 1840, had been preparing a crisis in the religious life of England. ' There was no balm in Gilead, no physician there.' Multitudes of thoughtful and earnest men were seeking for some mind, some voice, some guide, some teacher to lead them in the way of truth and life. And as the crisis had been preparing for him, so he had been prepared to meet it.

The first stratum of his mind, if I may so speak, was deeply tinged by the soil in which he was born. There was about him, to the end of life, a certain grandeur of conception in all that related to the works, the creations, and worship of the Church, which is evidently from Catholic Spain. His pious mother laid him as an infant upon the altar of the Blessed Mother of God in the Cathedral of Seville. His aims and designs for the service of the Church overleaped the measure of ordinary minds. He had been born in an atmosphere of Catholic splendour, and all his conceptions and visions of the sanctuary were as he had seen it in childhood, and as it ought to be, rather than as it is in the chill and utilitarianism of modern England.

Upon that came another formation. The education of St. Cuthbert's College, at Ushaw, made him the solid, manly Englishman, of whom Englishmen have learned to be proud. He described himself, in a little unpublished poem which bears the marks of the heavy hand of sickness visibly upon it, as 'a lone unmurmuring boy,' who studied while others played, who could find no pastime so sweet as a book. The other day, a house by the roadside between Ushaw and Durham was pointed out to me, into which Nicholas Wiseman was once driven by a heavy storm of rain. It was there, and at that time, that his first grave and deliberate thought of the priesthood came upon him. It was, therefore, the hour and place of his vocation. Who could have ever dreamed of the career of light of which that thought was the first spark?

But there was another and more vital formation yet to come. At the age of sixteen, he went to Home. This was the turning-point of his life.

He has often told me that in those days he was a light and short sleeper; a habit which in after years told heavily upon him. He would study through the night, sometimes he would walk to and fro in the corridors of the College. While others slept in the heat of midday, he was at his books. Great and facile as his powers were, he was a laborious student. Few men ever traded more watchfully and industriously with the talents intrusted to them.

All this time, he was being fashioned for the mission on which he was to go. He was gazing upon the pattern in the Mount, on the outline and the splendour and the beauty of the Church of God in its unity, universality, and diversity, as it can he seen only in and around the Holy See. In no other place is this lesson to be learned as 'in Eome. It is, under the new law, what Jerusalem was under the old — the city of the Incarnation, the home of the Word made flesh, the especial patrimony of the Son of God, who reigns by His Vicar in Home, and from thence throughout the world. Kome is the last spot which is held by Christianity in all its fulness, and in all the royalties of Jesus. Free, independent, and therefore sovereign, the Holy See owns no master upon earth. It is the exclusive throne of a Sovereign who is in heaven. It is also the city of the Blessed Sacrament, which in three hundred churches fills and pervades Kome with its presence, and with the radiant fragrance of the holy Name. It is especially the home of the Blessed Mother of God. Her name and her form are to be seen in all its streets, in the palaces of the rich, in the dwellings of the poor, shedding abroad ' the fragrance of cinnamon and the odour of the balsam.'1 It is the city of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, who reigns with the prerogatives which Jesus communicated to the chief of His Apostles.

1 Ecclus. xxiv. 20.

T

There Nicholas Wiseman studied for twenty years. There he dwelt under the shadow, or rather within the light, of the Pontiffs. There, too, he lived in the midst of martyrs and Saints, of whom in after life his mind was ever full. Their relics and their sanctuaries were his cherished study.

And lastly, it was there that he entered into the light of the great theology, or science of God, which in Rome is in its focus, and is enunciated by the living tradition of a language, which men count as dead, but Rome speaks as its mother tongue from the hour when the Apostles preached until this day. All this complex manifestation of the Divine presence, surrounded by beauty and splendour, by the visible witnesses of the prerogatives of Jesus, of the diversity, fertility, unity, universality of the Church seen from its centre — all this constituted the pattern which impressed itself indelibly and in all its fulness of outline and detail upon his reason and imagination.

It was then and there that he conceived the great idea, vision, dream — call it what you will — of the conversion of England, and then that he offered himself to it. As he has often told me, he would go by night into the chapel of the English College, and all alone pour out his heart in prayers and tears, full of aspirations, and of a firm trust; of prompt-ings to go, but of fear to outrun the bidding of our divine Master. He was wont to offer himself, and to pray that, if needed, he might be called; if not needed, that he might never do anything unbidden. It was then that he drew up a series of Latin prayers for the conversion of England, which have been used until late years, day by day, before the Blessed Sacrament, in the chapel of the English College.

Perhaps there is hardly anything in his life which has so called down upon him the reproach of a visionary and a dreamer, over -sanguine, unpractical, and self-deceiving. Let us examine what the conversion of England means; for we shall have to speak of it again before we have done. What was it but the burning desire to see the country which he loved so well once more in union with all the disciples of Jesus in the unity of His kingdom? He longed to see all religious controversies extinct, all bitterness turned into sweetness, all divisions healed, all the miserable rents in households reunited in the unity of faith and the bonds of peace, all his countrymen kneeling before the same altar, embracing one another in the kiss of peace; all the strifes and variances of life softened and mitigated by the law of love and the mutual bonds of Christian brotherhood. There was nothing very unreal in all this; nothing very aggressive, or hostile, or intrusive in such a prayer and in such a purpose. On what was it founded but on faith in the revelation of God, in the words, God ' would have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth;' and on hope that God would once more revive His work in the midst of our days, rising into confidence that what God wills He can do; that in one moment, as He breathed upon Eome, and the empire turned towards Him like the rivers of the south, so He may again call to the Spirit from the four winds to blow upon the valley of the dry bones, and they shall stand upon their feet and live? It was founded also on charity, on the love of God and of Jesus, and of the souls for whom He died, which makes sin and unbelief, schism and heresy, more piercing and agonising than wounds which rend the flesh. There was surely nothing in this desire and prayer that a good man ought not to cherish; nothing for which a Christian, if he be a true disciple of Jesus Christ, is not bound to pray; and to promote not only by word and deed, but even by the sacrifice of life.

Such, then, were the desires which burned within him, and such the ultimate form with which Spain and England and Rome had progressively invested his soul; the measures of which, natural and supernatural, in a signal degree surpassed the stature of ordinary men.

It was at such a moment that Nicholas Wiseman appeared in England. He had indeed in 1835 hegun to survey the field upon which the issue of hattle was to be tried. He had spoken to English ears and to English hearts, and they had listened and believed. But the time was not yet. He returned for another period of retirement to Rome, and there in secret matured his purpose of apostolic charity to our country. The Sovereign Pontiff, Gregory XVI., who well knew his singular merits, as I am credibly assured, had already in secret destined him for the dignity of the Sacred College. But he had other thoughts burning within him. As he has often told me with his own lips, he offered to the Holy Father to resign the office of Rector of the English College, and the career to which it led, and to return to England for the purpose of founding a secular congregation of missionary priests. One who knew him with the intimacy and love of a son, who hears me now, has told me that he received from him the following statement: 'One day,' he said, ' having to wait at the Sapienza for the Hebrew lecture, I went to pray in the Church of St. Eustachio, where the most Holy Sacrament is reserved upon the altar of our Immaculate Mother; and I thought that as the English nation, in the solemn oath imposed upon the chief personages in the State, ahjures these two mysteries, it was my duty to lahour for them in England.'

It was about this time the Sovereign Pontiff chose him to be coadjutor to one of the Vicars-apostolic, and in the retreat before his consecration he wrote down a list of works which he purposed by God's help to accomplish in England. He has told me, from time to time, that each head upon the list was disappearing. In his last days, the last was morally accomplished.

Then opened the active period of his life, from 1840 to 1860 — twenty years of vigour and intellect, and of power in the maturity of reason and resolution of will. It was a noble time, to which it would be hard to find a parallel. The first ten years of it were chiefly spent in a work for which he was eminently prepared, the intellectual discernment and appreciation of the movement and confusion into which the Emancipation had cast the educated minds of England. To this period may be referred some of his most valuable theological essays, which have, under God, led multitudes onward in the path of divine faith. The dream of the conversion of England began to take form and substance. Many good and prudent men looked at the same horizon, and saw no signs, no harbinger of the morrow. They treated the Bishop of Melipotamus as sanguine and visionary, whom hope had distempered. They saw nothing in England but the hard surface of the earth seared by the old storms of religious controversy which had furrowed the land. He saw beneath the surface, and discerned the delicate and vivid lines of new habits of thought, new aspirations after an inheritance which had been forfeited by the sin of others. At this time it was he wrote one of his most noble-hearted letters, in which, with great gentleness, implying but not expressing what he endured, he says:

' If one must err, if in mere tribute to humanity one must needs make a false step, one's fall will be more easy when on the side of two theological virtues, than when on the cold bare earth of human prudence. If I shall have been both too hopeful in my motives, and too charitable in my dealings, I will take my chance of smiles at my simplicity, both on earth and in heaven. Those of the latter at least are never scornful.'

But it was the ten years from 1850 to 1860 which have indelibly inscribed the name of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster in the annals of England. In 1850, the renewed Catholic Hierarchy in England was created by Pius IX., as the ancient Hierarchy had been created by St. Gregory I. What the pontifical power had done once, out of the plenitude of its imperishable prerogatives, it did again. The Bishop of Melipotamus became the first Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal Priest of the Holy Koman Church. The hurricane which swept over the land we can all remember. We remember, too, the pastoral letter to his flock. But I will not now revive so much as a trace of the confusion which is year by year mellowing and sinking out of sight in the kindlier light of calmer and happier days. Let me, however, ask one question. How was it that the same race of men, who but ten years before filled England with sarcasm when a statesman dated his letter from the castle of his sovereign, should have failed to see that no Pastor of the Church, save only its august Head, can date from within the walls of the city of Kome? And yet such formalities, through popular ignorance, are enough in an atmosphere and in an age of prejudice to poison and pervert the minds of men.

That pastoral letter, read, as I read it a day ago, under the roof where the hand that wrote it lay calm in death, sounds to me as a noble proclamation of a noble deed, uttered in language commensurate to a reality to which the history of England for twelve hundred years has nothing proportionate. It is simple truth that by that act, 'your beloved country has received a place among the fair churches which, normally constituted, form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion. Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished; and begins now anew its course of regularly adjusted action round the centre of unity, the source of jurisdiction, of light, and of power.' Every year which has passed since then has proved this truth. What the last fifteen have begun, the next fifty will manifest with a more luminous evidence of light, order, and perpetuity. But I have no time to dwell on these things. Personal topics will be more in place, and they are more in number than I can enumerate. Still one word, before I part with the Catholic Hierarchy of England. This great Pastor of the flock knew his country when he uttered words which read now like prophecy. After a noble lamentation on the intemperate speech of those who should have calmly reigned from the silent tribunals of justice, he broke out: ' When the very highest judicial authority has prejudged, and cut off all appeal from us, what resource have we yet left? what hope of justice? One in which, after God's unfailing providence, we place unbounded confidence. There still remains the manly sense and honest heart of a generous people; that love of honourable dealing and fair play, which, in joke or in earnest,.is equally the instinct of an Englishman; that hatred of all mean advantage taken, of all base tricks and paltry claptraps and party cries employed to hunt down even a rival or a foe.

' To this open-fronted and warm-hearted tribunal I make my appeal, and claim, on behalf of myself and my fellow-Catholics, a fair, free, and impartial hearing. Fellow- subjects, Englishmen, be you at least just and equitable. You have been deceived — you have been misled, both as to facts and as to intentions. I will be plain and simple, but straightforward and bold. I will be brief also, as far as I can, but as explicit as may be necessary.' And he has not been deceived in his hope.

I will not now attempt to recite the course of these ten years, in which the Cardinal Archbishop, surrounded by his twelve suffragans, traced out once more upon the soil of England the limits of a new order, into which the influx of the Universal Church, hoth from its centre and from its circumference, enters in all the fulness of infallible truth and supernatural power. It would he out of time and place to dwell upon the gradual and steady formation of thirteen dioceses, ever expanding from their centres, and multiplying every kind of spiritual life and fruitfulness: or upon the Councils of Westminster, provincial and diocesan, which have sat and legislated with the unerring instinct and plastic wisdom of the living Church of God. There is hut one word I will add. In these last days, I have read again and again such words as these: ' Great beginnings doomed to a great disappointment. Lofty undertakings, and, it must be confessed, closed by a signal failure.' Not so fast, men of this world; not so lordly and confident, wise and prudent of the earth. The ploughing of December may be drenched with the rains of January, and the February snows hide all things from the eyes of men. But the sweat of the ploughman and of the sower is not in vain; there is a life in the sod, a stature, a symmetry, an expansion, and a maturity deep down, out of sight, coiled together and yet unfolding in silence. There must yet come binding frosts, and scourging hail, and raving winds; but the summer's sun and the autumn fruits are sure as the march of time, the changes of day and night. You have it in an old book — not much read, it may be, in these days of light:

'As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater, so shall My word be, which shall go forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it.'2

And again: ' The husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth; patiently bearing till he receive the early and latter rain. Be you therefore also patient, and strengthen your hearts; for the coming of the Lord is at hand.'3

The conversion of England! Do men think that we expect the twenty millions of Englishmen to lie down Protestants at night, and to wake up Catholics in the morning? Do they so little know the calm wisdom of the illustrious dead who lies here, the centre of our veneration and of our love, as to think that he was such a dreamer of day-dreams, so unreal and fantastic in his hopes? He was a believer like one who for a hundred and twenty years built the 2 Isaias Iv. 10. 3 St. James v. 7, 8.

ark; and a hoper like him who all alone entered imperial Home a simple fisherman, but the Yicar of the Son of God.

Such were his expectations; and when he closed his eyes upon England, he had already seen the work he had begun expanding everywhere, and the traditions of three hundred years everywhere dissolving before it. Time is not with the Church of God. Converging lines may stretch beyond our sight, and overpass the horizon; but they must intersect at last. So with the work of grace upon the country of our birth and of our love: its desolations are not for ever.

Thus far he saw accomplished. Much that he had pondered and intended is indeed gone with the great mind which was ever at work for the Church and for England. They who were about him in these last five years, when the weight of mortal disease began to weigh upon him, will know with what a creative fertility he was ever forming to himself new intentions for works of usefulness, charity, and piety. The last five years were like the hours of a still afternoon, when the work of the day begins to linger, and the silence of evening is near. He seemed to be resting after twenty years of active toil. It was a time of survey and of reflection; and with those who were about him, he used often to go over the past, and cast up the changes he had seen. He knew too well what the work of the Church is upon men — especially in a country such as this — to expect great and sudden changes, like landslips or inundations. But his eye traced keenly and surely the outline of the Pattern in the Mount, which had heen the rule and original in all his labour. He could see its symmetry and its proportions emerging from the spiritual wilderness around him. And he has bequeathed to you, each in your sphere, the duty of carrying onward to its perfection the work of which he was the chief master-builder.

It would seem to me, that in the career of this great Pastor of the Church there are four principles or laws which he diffused in life, and has bequeathed to us in death.

The first is a filial love to the Vicar of Jesus Christ. With him it was an instinct and an affection. It was not merely a dictate of reason and of theology, but a love of his heart. His twenty years in Home made the person of the Sovereign Pontiff an habitual vision to him, which governed all his life. In his book on the four last Popes, he has said Ultramontanism is not so much a peculiar form of opinion as a singular love of the Vicar of our Lord.

This feeling he bore, in all its tenderness and devotion, to the person of Pius the Ninth, to whom every affection of his heart hound him. He never named him without a veneration which was perceptible to all.

Next was a special love of sinners. His birthday was the festival of St. Alphonsus, to whom, as the Apostle of the Sacrament of Penance, and of the spirit of benignness to sinners, he had an especial devotion. He was formed upon the same model, and he loved the generosity of heart which our Lord enjoins in the words, ' Freely have ye received, freely give.' He expressed his own character when, to a religious who was about to give a retreat to priests, he said, ' Do all in your power to make them largehearted and benign in giving absolution to sinners.'

Thirdly, he has in all his life testified to the supremacy of faith, of doctrine, pure and inflexible as emanating from a divine Teacher, and refusing all compromise with the opinions of men. In the theology of the world, doubt is held to be the legitimate parent of faith. In the theology of the Church, faith is a gift of God which excludes the possibility of doubt. To have doubted is supposed by the world to be the necessary condition of perfect faith; never to have doubted is, in the ways of God, the highest maturity of faith. When, then, I say that our great pastor and teacher had never doubted of any article of the revelation of God, but that the infused grace of faith grew up in him and with him to a solidity and maturity which formed a part of his life, a second consciousness of his spiritual being, I do not mean that he had not faced and handled, tested and weighed, the doubts of other men. He has often told me of the period of suffering, amounting to a kind of agony, which he endured in Kome while reading the German rationalistic criticisms on Holy Scripture, through which pain he believed himself bound to pass, like Him who was his divine example, that he might succour them also that were tempted. And yet not so much as a doubt fastened on him. When he came forth from the furnace, the smell of the fire was not upon his raiment. And this adds a wonderful emphasis to one of the noblest acts of his life, when, in obedience to the pontifical law, he summoned his Chapter about his dying bed, and, vested in his insignia as a Prince of the Church, made his profession of faith, and, kissing the holy Gospels, testified that in all his life he had faithfully held and taught, and never doubted any one of those articles, and that he desired to transmit the faith intact and inviolate to his successor.

OMNIA PBO CHEISTO.

Lastly, he has bequeathed to our custody one more great principle most vital in these days: that is, the harmony of revealed and natural truth, and the unity of Catholic culture. The first work which made his name celebrated was the Connection of Science and Revealed Religion; and to this great thesis he remained faithful to the end. His last studies, I may say, were upon it. For some time past he had been collecting materials for a new essay upon the relation of modern sciences to faith. He had formed to himself the purpose of writing a series of Pastoral Letters, to be read from Septuagesima to Easter, treating of this theme as a frontier traced about the faith of his flock, which is, in these days and in this city, perpetually assailed by the specious and pretentious menaces of superficial science. At this time his voice would have been heard among us. But God has willed it otherwise.

Among his last and most anxious thoughts springing from this subject was the intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church, and the method of teaching and of study by which that tradition of truth is kept pure and undefiled. This was but the practical application of the early principles of his youth to the last duties of his pastoral office; and he left to us as his last injunction to preserve unsullied the streams u of spiritual and of intellectual culture, which, though distinct, are intimately blended in the tradition of Catholic training, and descend in the unity of the Church from age to age, refusing all intermixture or contact with foreign and alien methods of education.

Such is the outline of the bequest he has left us: the love of Home, the love of sinners, the supremacy of faith, the purity of Catholic education. It was the school in which he had been formed. From it he derived the completeness and equable expansion of mind which gave him a signal elevation above other men.

But I am conscious that hitherto I have spoken of him only as he was seen by the eye, and measured by external observation as a great Pastor and Prince of the Church. His true greatness remains to be told. It was not upon his outward form, like his pontifical array, but deep in the soul, hard to reach, and truly known by few. His true grandeur was not in what he knew, nor in what he did, but in what he was — in the gifts and in the culture of his head and heart. Few men have, perhaps, ever been so little understood; few men so widely misunderstood. Among many kindly and generous words from other hands, it has been a strange phenomenon in these last days to read the description and estimate that one public critic has made of him. It would grate upon our ears to recite it in this place. But one point I must notice. One who desired to be exquisitely discerning has told us, that in the exercise of his intellectual gifts he was impelled by a desire to display a universality of acquirements; that he desired to be theologian, philosopher, poet, critic in art, man of science, and the like; that all this was the result of conscious aim and studied intention. Now, nothing can be less true. The very reverse is the truth. Nothing was ever more unconscious, natural, inevitable, than the exercise of his great and versatile gifts. His works were exacted of him by his duties, drawn from him by the necessities of his state, or prompted by the simplest kindliness of heart. No man was more spontaneous and unconscious than he, in many of those things which have made for him a celebrated name. His works, which, when clustered together, present a wonderful combination of the most various and graceful intellectual gifts, were elicited from him almost without his will. His first writings, composed in Borne, were perhaps the most studied works of his life. And we have it from one who was daily at his side, that, while writing his books, hie would escape from the English

College before the morning meditation, and go to the Koman College to ask the Fathers whether he ought not, through fear of vanity, to cease from writing altogether. His work on science and revealed religion was written for his students; so also the lectures on the Holy Eucharist. The lectures on the Doctrines and Practices of the Catholic Church were preached from this very place as a missionary. His theological controversies were forced from him by the Tracts for the Times. Fabiola, the most beautiful creation of his mind, was written at the request of others, to help in providing a series of Catholic popular books. His little dramas were written to amuse children at school; his popular lectures for the kindly and warm-hearted purpose of giving pleasure to the English people. The last act of his life, by which his failing strength was over-taxed, was to prepare a lecture on a subject dear to this country. What can be conceived more benevolent, unconscious, and unostentatious than such an exercise of such noble gifts? He went like the sower, casting the seed as the time required; hardly knowing how, or when, or why, save only that it was the work of his life to use his powers for the welfare and the happiness of others. Thus much I have thought it well to say of his intellectual gifts. But I say no more, because they were the least things about him. There are greater things to say. The true grandeur of his character was the most concealed. It may perhaps surprise many to be told that of all men he was the most reserved. He had the shyness of a child. There was something beautiful to see a man so highly endowed, so highly exalted, the object of the reverence of nations, superior by head and shoulders to those who were about him, yet as bashful as a youth. Oftentimes the very reverse was by misinterpretation imputed to him.

Now here we approach the real greatness of his nature. It has been said, 'Ille vere magnus est, qui magnam habet charitatem.' And this greatness was his; for his charity was of an antique kind, such as we read of, but seldom see. There were two classes to whom he chiefly showed it — to sinners and to little children. He was in truth, as his Master before him, * the friend of sinners.' The most fallen and lost in him found a father. It will never be known, until the day when all penitents are saved, how many owe their souls to him.

But it may be said that, until he was seen like our divine Lord, hemmed-in by children, it never could be known what tenderness was in his heart. He had an exquisite attraction, a joyful playfulness, an irresistible power of fascinating children by a flow of childlike mirth.

There were also two other kinds of people who drew from him his special compassion — the sick, and those who were finding their way towards the true fold. While in the English College in Kome, the sick were his portion. By common consent, he seemed to be regarded as the perpetual nurse and infirmarian. There are many who owe their lives to him. Some there are, to whom, when in the height of his dignity, he gave up his own room, and nursed them in his own bed, and in the end brought them back from the brink of the grave.

While Eector of the English College, he used to go to hear confessions in the Hospital of Santo Spirito, and to train his students to the love and care of the sick. I well remember in the year 1838 finding him in the midst of that vast hospital, serving the sick and dying.

Lastly, for those who, being disinherited of the faith, were again feeling after it, he had a great and singular tenderness. He had never known what it was to have an incoherent theology or a mutilated faith. Nevertheless he could sympathise with them, watch over them, help them with the tenderest hand, wait for them with unwearying patience, and bestow upon them in full all the graces and blessings of the Church; as the father restored the prodigal, running to meet him, and giving again all that he had before, and more than he had ever lost.

But there is one more perfection of charity which in him was conspicuous. I never heard any one speak with such forbearance of others, even of those who deserved the severest treatment. I have watched him checking the wprds which were so obvious that it seemed impossible to repress them; softening down to the utmost even the little that he was forced to say.

Another grace signally marked was his humility. A soul so united in charity with God could not fail to have a profound appreciation and a luminous vision of the Divine Perfections. The singular calm and collectedness with which he acted and spoke, seemed to me to arise from the sense of the presence of God. The thought of the divine sanctity, justice, and perfection was evidently with him at all times. And in the light of these attributes he saw himself — not as we saw him, nor invested with the apparels of his pontifical dignity, but as God saw him always, with his heart open in secret.

And springing from these was another grace, the generosity of his soul. For affliction and sorrow he had always a ready sympathy, but seldom tears. Yet by a noble action, or for a high and generous spirit, he was moved at once to tears. He had an instinctive love of good, and a quick discernment of it in others. Perhaps his generosity would sometimes make him believe that he saw goodness when it did not exist, and the unworthy had the benefit of his nobleness of heart. He had the greatest power in awakening and encouraging what was good in other men, and in setting them to work it out. He would even cast the germ of some good work into the minds of others, and then help them to develop it as if it were their own. He rejoiced in their works, and in all the good they did.

One early morning in 1860, while he was in Rome, hovering between life and death, after the terrific suffering he had to undergo, he said: ' I have not slept to-night, but I have been very quiet. I have spent the time in examining myself, whether I have ever hindered any good being done. I cannot remember that I have ever hindered any man in doing good.' A rare and noble testimony, which few men in the narrow paths of our life could bear; much less they who are the centre of so many men and so many minds as he.

But I must not run on for ever. I am not attempting a delineation of this great character, but only touching a few of its chief features. I will therefore speak only of his endurance. He was long-suffering and placable in a rare degree. The words of our divine Lord, ' seventy times seven,' were the rule of his life. If any had wounded him, he forgave as if he had never suffered. If they wounded him again and again, they would be again and again forgiven.

A life so great, and so wide-spread in its contacts with men of every kind and with works so manifold and so important, could not fail of many crosses. It is the law of our Master's kingdom. They who are nearest to Him are nearest also to His Cross. They who do most for Him suffer most in His service. The service and the suffering are commensurate. It began in His own person upon Calvary. It has been perpetuated for 1800 years in the line of His Yicars, suffering and reigning from the See and from the Cross of Peter. The Cathedra Petri rests upon the Janiculum. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was enveloped in the warfare which surrounds his loved and venerated chief and father, Pius IX. An Episcopate of five-and-twenty years, almost the annos Petri, gave large room for the sorrows and tears of the apostolic life. The ' lone unmurmuring boy' be-came the calm, majestic, uncomplaining Prince of the Church. And nothing can be conceived more calm and more uncomplaining than the large and loving heart of this true disciple of the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ.

This was most signally manifested in the endurance with which he bore for many years a mortal disease, ever advancing, consuming his strength and life. Men little thought what a secret suffering was hid under the pontifical splendour in which he seemed the very type of stateliness and power. A craving and a thirst dried up his spirit. A perpetual consciousness of restless malady made exertion painful through the day. Light wakeful sleep, broken rest, over-active thought, made his nights a weariness. Yet, through all this, for long years, he laboured on under the weight of hourly suffering; only those who were nearest to him knowing what he suffered.

But it was in these last five years, which may be called the time of his last purification for a better world, that his great endurance was most luminously manifested.

In the year 1860, during his last lengthened residence in Home, he was twice on the point of death: once by a disease which compelled the infliction of a terrible surgical operation. I was sitting at the door of his chamber, not knowing what was passing within. Two long-drawn breathings were all I heard when the work of the knife was done. The same has been conspicuous through this last season of death. But it is not in place that I should dwell upon these things now. Six weeks ago I left him, restored from the suffering which we thought was transient. When we parted, he was standing at the threshold of his room in the full height of his stature, as if once more in health. And, with his benediction and embrace, he dismissed me — to see him, I may say, no more. What passed in the month which followed, you already know, or in a more fitting way will know hereafter. We had so long watched him, and so long become familiar with his dangers and his recoveries, so often seen his wonderful tenacity of life, that no one was alarmed as soon as a stranger might have been. The end came at last: long looked for, and yet sudden still. He commanded me to return to him with all speed; and I came in time to receive a gaze of recognition and his blessing, and to bear to him the Benediction of the Vicar of our Lord. What I add is the record of those who had the happiness of tending him by night and day. Through the whole of that season his mind was calm, peaceful, thoughtful of others, grateful for every service, vividly alive to every intention of kindness in those ahout him. Once, when very ill and unable to rest in any posture, one who stood by said, 'I fear you suffer much.' He answered, 'I do not suffer at all. It would be very wrong and ungrateful in me to complain, or to call a little discomfort suffering. Think of poor people. I have a good bed, and everything possible done for me.' At another time he said, 'I have made it a rule for many years never to call anything pain till it is unendurable.' Once, when an attendant endeavoured to move him so that he should not lie on the wound which the surgeon had made, he smiled and said: ' It is sore enough always, and makes very little difference in the pain.' He was always trying to save trouble to those about him, and always showed pleasure in everything that was done for him; always saying how kind they were, and how well everything was done, just tasting and then refusing it when nature could endure no more. At one time it was necessary to give both medicines and food after midnight, while as yet it was not thought necessary or prudent to give Holy Communion by way of viaticum. This he felt most of all. He would say, ' They little know of what they are depriving me. A little fasting would tire me less than this longing.' And at another time, ' 0, how much longer am I to have patience! how long am I to wait! They are keeping me from my only consolation.' When the last days of unconsciousness began, and he was hardly able to swallow for pain, as soon as he heard the words, ' It is right to do this,' or ' You ought to take this,' he at once obeyed. He had put himself simply under obedience to those about him, as a submission to the will of God. When told that he must undergo another operation, he said, ' Whatsoever you think right, I submit to. If it is right, let it be done.' Believing that if the most dangerous of the operations were not performed, he would not live long, he afterwards playfully said, 'How unkind of them! I hoped that I should have been in heaven to-night, and they have kept me out of it.' One day he was overheard to say, as he was inwardly dwelling on his own great sufferings, and on the greater sufferings of One who was his Master and his Model in patience: ' He showed no mercy to Himself.' When his physicians finally told him that hope was gone, he thanked them with gratitude; and from that moment made his last disposition of all earthly things, and then entered into the sanctuary of God's presence, from which he never again came forth.

To one who was always at his side it seemed as if he were always praying, rapt in the thought of God. Though still among men, the words of the Apostle were emphatically fulfilled in him: he was dead, and his life was hid with Christ in God. He had ceased to speak or to hold fellowship with us; but a higher life had expanded itself in union with the Father of Spirits; and ahout the expression of his face was a peace and a sweetness which seemed as a light shining from within.

Great and noble in his life, he was greater and nobler in his death. There was about it a calmness, a recollection, a majesty, an order of perfect fitness and preparation worthy of the chamber of death, and such as became the last hours of a Pastor and Prince of the Church of God. He was a great Christian in all the deepest, largest, simplest meaning of the name; and a great priest in thought, word, and deed, in the whole career of his life, and in the mould of his whole being. He died the death of the just, making a worthy and proportionate end to a course so great.

We have lost a friend, a father, and a pastor, whose memory will be with us while life lasts. As one who knew him well said well of him, ' We are all lowered by his loss.' We have all lost somewhat which was our support, our strength, our guidance, our pattern, and our pride. We have lost him who, in the face of this great people, worthily presented the greatness and the majesty of the Universal Church. He has fallen asleep in the midst of the generous, kindly, just, noble - hearted sympathy of the people, of the public men, of the public voices of England; a great people, strong and bold in its warfare, but humane, chivalrous, and Christian to the antagonists who are worthy to contend with it. He is gone; but he has left behind him in our memories a long line of historical pictures, traced in the light of other days upon a field which will retain its colours fresh and vivid for ever. Some of you remember him, as the companion of your boyhood, upon the bare hills of Durham; some, in the early morning of his life, in the sanctuaries of Home; some see before them now his slender stooping form, on a bright winter's day, walking to the Festival of St. Agnes out of the walls; some, again, drawn up to the full stature of his manhood, rising above the storm, and contending with calm commanding voice of reason against the momentary unreason of the people of England; some, again, can see him vested and arrayed as a Prince of the Church, with the twelve suffragans of England closing the long procession which, after the silence of three hundred years, opened the first Provincial Synod of Westminster. Some will picture him in the great hall of a Koman palace, surrounded by half the Bishops of the world, of every language and of every land, chosen by them as their chief to fashion their words in declaring to the Sovereign Pontiff their filial obedience to the spiritual and temporal power with which God has invested the Vicar of His Son. Some will see him feeble in death, but strong in faith, arrayed as a Pontiff, surrounded by the Chapter of his Church, by word and deed verifying the Apostle's testimony, ' I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.' And some will cherish, above all these visions of greatness and of glory, the calm and sweet countenance of their best and fastest friend and father, lying in the dim light of his chamber — not of death, but of transit to his crown. These things are visions; but they are substance. * Transit gloria mundi,' as the flax burns in fire. But these things shall not pass away.

Bear him forth, right reverend fathers and dear brethren in Jesus Christ; bear him forth to the green burial-ground on the outskirts of this busy wilderness of men. It was his desire to die and to be buried, not amid the glories of Kome, but in the midst of his flock, the first Archbishop of Westminster. Lay him in the midst of that earth, as a shepherd in the midst of his sheep, near to the holy Cross, the symbol of his life, work, and hope; where the pastors he has ordained will be buried one by one, resting in a circle round about him in death, as they laboured round about him in life. He will be among us still; his name, his form, his words, his patience, his love of souls, will be our law, our rebuke, our consolation. And yet not so: it is but the body of this death which you bear forth with tears of loving veneration. He is not here; he will not be there. He is already where the Great Shepherd of the sheep is numbering His elect, and those who led them to the fold of eternal life. And the hands which have so often blessed you, which anointed you for the altar, fed you with the Bread of Life, are already lifted up in prayer, unceasing day or night, for us one by one, for England, for the Church in all the world.