We reached Liverpool a week ago to-day. It was about ten a.m. when
we entered the Mersey, having been detained by fog for some time at
the mouth of the river. The famous docks of the city, stretching for
six miles on the left bank of the Mersey, as you enter, were lighted
with electricity, presenting a brilliant spectacle. At ten the next
morning we were on our way to London by the Great Western R.R., which
runs through some of the finest parts of England. Rural England, at
least what we have seen of it, is highly cultivated and very
beautiful. The country traversed by the Great Western trains, from
Liverpool to London, is one vast park--great grassy plains on either
hand, with here a river, and there occasionally a mountain, and
everywhere rows of trim hedges and the majestic oaks of Old England.
We pass through smoky Birmingham, and from the railway catch a
glimpse of the twin towers of Christ's Church, Oxford, both places
fraught with reminders of the illustrious Cardinal Newman.
In London, we stay for the greater part of three days. Our hotel is
hard by Westminster Abbey. We visit the famous abbey more than once,
and each time with mingled feelings of admiration and
sadness--admiration for the noble temple itself, and sadness for the
change that has come over it, and the uses to which it is put. The
hour is half-past ten in the morning and the Canons of Westminster
are chanting their office. Decorous and sweet is the music of their
voices, but it grates upon the ear as one thinks of those old monks
of St. Benedict, who so often here offered the Holy Sacrifice, and
made the vast edifice resound with far other and more solemn music in
the centuries long gone by. Here rest the sainted bones of Edward
the Confessor, in the magnificent shrine prepared for them by the
founder of the abbey, Henry III, in the thirteenth century. Yonder
is the tomb of the ruthless Cromwell, and a few steps beyond it,
Charles Darwin, naturalist and agnostic, lies in death. Over against
the monument of the martyred Mary Queen of Scots, rises that of her
royal cousin and murderess, Elizabeth. The place is full of these
painful contrasts, though fragrant still with memories of its
glorious past--a past which, however, bids fair to renew itself, at
least in a measure, for England and her people. Is it not a token of
this "second spring" that the Faith which built Westminster Abbey,
and which people once fondly thought was dead and buried in England,
past all hope of resurrection, is now building an even more spacious
temple to the Most High, not many hundred yards from the historic
abbey, the new Catholic cathedral of Westminster.
Back of what was once the high altar of the old abbey is the
Coronation Chair, with, beneath it, the historic Stone of Scone, on
which the Scottish Kings used to be crowned for long ages before the
days of Bruce. Now the monarchs of England sit in the chair on the
day of their coronation. Queen Victoria sat in it twice, once when
the diadem of the greatest empire of the earth was placed on her
girlish brow--she was still in her teens--and a second time, sixty
years after, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. One other, more
youthful, but of low degree, sat in the royal chair since--aye, and
slept in it too, so our guide tells us. A boy from the neighbouring
schools was dared by his mates to spend a night alone with the bones
of the mighty dead, and the ghosts of the Royal Chapel. He did so,
slept in the Coronation Chair, and boylike cut his name and the
record of his nocturnal exploit in the wood on which Royalty has been
enthroned since the days of the First Edward. Many are the sights of
London. But we pilgrims are not sightseers, though of course we do
not travel with our eyes closed. During the two or three days that
we were in London, several places of historic interest were visited,
among others the famous Tower. As for myself, I went not much about,
having spent in all six days in London on the two former occasions
that I was in the city. I paid a visit to an old classmate of mine
in the Propaganda, who is now Canon Gildea, rector of St. James's, in
Spanish Place. From him I learned that there are altogether about
one hundred Catholic churches in London, most of them somewhat small
of size, and that they are so situated that the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass is offered up every Sunday within ten minutes' walk of any
Catholic home in the vast city. On the Feast of Corpus Christi I
assisted at the Solemn High Mass and Procession of the Blessed
Sacrament in the Brompton Oratory. The church of the Oratory is
easily the finest Catholic church in London. It is modelled on the
great church of St. Philip, in Rome, and is distinctly Roman in every
detail. Here Newman preached those thrilling sermons which drew
Thackeray away from his novel writing and Macaulay from some
favourite haunt in the literary circles of the city. The echoes of
that wondrous voice seem still to linger in the place. Newman's
figure in white marble, larger than life, fronting the street that
runs by the Oratory, arrests the steps of many a passer-by.
Between England and France, the distance is not great, if you reckon
it in miles, but it is leagues and leagues if you measure it by
differences of race and national characteristics. The English
Channel, with its swift tide and fretful sea, severs two entirely
different peoples. We cross from Folkestone to Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Boulogne is a quaint old-world town, and a favourite resort of
tourists. We make but a short stay, and push on to Paris. Our way
lies through an undulating country, well-wooded and well-watered,
with here and there a great stretch of pasture-land, where flocks of
sheep are grazing and shepherds with their dogs are keeping watch.
This part of France does not appear to be as highly cultivated as are
the parts of England that we have seen; but the scenery is more
diversified. By ten o'clock at night the electric light on the
summit of the Eiffel Tower is visible afar, and we know that we are
nearing Paris.
We arrived in Paris last Friday night. We leave it next Wednesday
morning. What shall I say of the City on the Seine, the gay and
brilliant capital of France? I will say frankly that I don't like
it--that I would rather live in London with its dullness and fog,
than live in Paris with its gaiety and sunshine. Why? Well, perhaps
because I am dull myself, at least in the sense of not being
gay--certainly not because I love the fog, for I do dearly love the
blue sky and the light of the blessed sun. Perhaps, again, it is
because I don't understand the French tongue or French ways as I
understand the English tongue and English ways. But most of all, I
think, what I dislike about Paris is its godlessness. The evidences
of it are on every hand. The Londoner has at least the good sense to
hide his irreligion, if he is irreligious. At any rate, he does not
wear the badge of his irreligion in the streets. The Parisian, who
is irreligious, parades his irreligion and seems to glory in his
shame. I have seen less of London than of Paris--too little of
either, indeed, to enable me to form a just idea of their condition.
But certainly the latter city seems to be the more godless of the two.
Religion there is in Paris, and piety, too, much more of it, I have
no doubt at all, than there is in the city on the Thames. But it
hides itself in church and home; the stranger in the streets sees
little of it. Take the matter of Sunday observance. Public opinion
and the law in London make people respect, at least outwardly, the
Lord's Day; public opinion and the law in Paris make people do the
very opposite, at least as far as the force of custom and example and
the spur of business rivalry can bring this effect about. Last
Sunday in Paris almost all the shops were open, and people went about
their work as on an ordinary week day. Paris does not keep the
Sunday, though many Parisians doubtless do. Is there no warrant for
the inference that Paris has ceased to be Christian?
This is a land of contrasts, and Paris is emphatically a city of
contrasts. Piety and godlessness, virtue and vice, are here more
sharply contrasted than in any other city on earth. "If the devil
reigns in Paris, God is, perhaps, better served there than anywhere
else; good and evil alike find their supreme expression; 'tis Babylon
and Jerusalem both."
In the grand churches dwells the deepest piety; godlessness is
rampant without. We are in Notre Dame Sunday, during the Procession
of the Blessed Sacrament. What a splendid spectacle! The music how
heavenly! Boys with angel voices make the stately edifice ring with
the grand old chant of the Church. Troops of boys and girls, the
boys with lighted torches in their hands, the girls clothed in
spotless white and bearing great bunches of roses which shed their
fragrance far, march in the long procession. At the end, the
Eucharistic Lord, from His throne over the high altar, blesses the
assembled multitude. It is all so solemn and so soulstirring. We
pass out from the church, deeply moved. The street is almost blocked
with worldly traffic, and men--two soldiers and two civilians--are
playing cards under the very shadow of Notre Dame.
Sunday morning, the pilgrims went in a body to Montmartre--the
priests to say Mass, the lay pilgrims to hear Mass and receive Holy
Communion. The basilica which the piety of Catholic France has
erected to the Sacred Heart on Montmartre is truly a splendid
structure. Built on a lofty eminence, it dominates the city which
seems to lie quite at one's feet. Five thousand boys from the
seminaries of France received Holy Communion at Montmartre that
morning. As one watched tier after tier of them at the high altar
eat of the Bread of Life, with every mark of piety and devotion, one
felt that there was hope for the future of the Church in France. And
yet at least to human seeming, how gloomy is the outlook! One of the
lay pilgrims, a very devout French-Canadian, told me after we left
Montmartre that morning of a talk he had with a Parisian matron the
day before. She had two children--the regulation number, for in
France, as statistics show, the deaths all but exceed the births.
She sent them to Mass, she said, though she did not go herself,
remarking that no harm would come of their going. She sent them to
the godless State school, because they would not get on so well in
the world, she thought, if they went to the Christian Brothers'
school. There is reason to fear that many of the mothers of France
are to-day like this Parisian dame--solicitous about the things of
this world, and neither knowing nor caring for the things that are
above.
At dinner, in the restaurant at Boulogne on Friday, only meat was
served. We asked for fish, but could get none. At lunch, in our own
hotel here at Paris the same evening, again no fish. True, the
railway restaurant at Boulogne and the hotel at Paris cater to the
travelling public. But do not the French themselves travel? And if,
in travelling, they eat fish on Friday, will not fish be forthcoming
when asked for? I have said that Paris does not keep the Sunday--at
least the Sunday rest; I fear that France does not keep Friday, or
keeps it but very indifferently. I speak as one less wise and under
correction. But putting this and that together, I cannot but
conclude that there is a dreadful decay of faith in France. It does
not seem possible that the France of the Catholic Missions, the
France of our Lady of Lourdes, will be lost to the Church. But if
she is to be saved to God and Church, it will be so as by fire.
Another chastisement, cutting deeper into the nation's life than that
of 1870, must first bring to her knees, and to the very dust in
penance, the Eldest Daughter of the Church.
I am at the end of my chapter, and not a word about the Exposition.
I have visited the grounds but once, and then viewed them from the
Eiffel Tower, midway to the top. The buildings, which stand on both
banks of the Seine, are certainly very grand. They seem to be more
spacious, upon the whole, than were those of the Chicago Exposition.
But they do not stand by themselves and apart, as was the case in
Chicago; you do not get one impression of them, so to say; nor is the
sight so beautiful as was that of the White City on the shores of
Lake Michigan. The view to be had from the Ferris Wheel at Chicago
was, I think, finer than that which you get to-day from the Eiffel
Tower at Paris. I am speaking only of what is to be seen of the
Exposition from without. But what of the Paris Fair from within?
That you must learn, if at all, from some one else. I paid but a
flying visit to one of the buildings, and saw a variety of things of
which I have now but a very confused notion. I have no faculty for
seeing things, as your enthusiastic sightseer has, and can find no
sort of pleasure in the process. To me it is all a weariness of
spirit--and a weariness of the flesh into the bargain. Non satiatur
oculus videndo, says the Wise Man--the eye is not sated with seeing.
To which one may add, in view of the special circumstances of the
case, sed fatigatur corpus ambulando--but the body is fatigued with
walking.
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