FullReads

“How is that?”

“Because–‘Voe quum benedixerint mihi homines!'” [1]

[Footnote 1: “Woe unto me when all men speak well of me!”]

The appointed morning, when it came, was one of those exquisite days in which there is such a universal harmony, that worship rises from the heart like a spring.

“Truly,” said Pere Jerome to the companion who was to assist him in the mass, “this is a sabbath day which we do not have to make holy, but only to keep so.”

Maybe it was one of the secrets of Pere Jerome’s success as a preacher, that he took more thought as to how he should feel, than as to what he should say.

The cathedral of those days was called a very plain old pile, boasting neither beauty nor riches; but to Pere Jerome it was very lovely; and before its homely altar, not homely to him, in the performance of those solemn offices, symbols of heaven’s mightiest truths, in the hearing of the organ’s harmonies, and the yet more elegant interunion of human voices in the choir, in overlooking the worshipping throng which knelt under the soft, chromatic lights, and in breathing the sacrificial odors of the chancel, he found a deep and solemn joy; and yet I guess the finest thought of his the while was one that came thrice and again:

“Be not deceived, Pere Jerome, because saintliness of feeling is easy here; you are the same priest who overslept this morning, and over-ate yesterday, and will, in some way, easily go wrong to-morrow and the day after.”

He took it with him when–the Veni Creator sung–he went into the pulpit. Of the sermon he preached, tradition has preserved for us only a few brief sayings, but they are strong and sweet.

“My friends,” he said,–this was near the beginning,–“the angry words of God’s book are very merciful–they are meant to drive us home; but the tender words, my friends, they are sometimes terrible! Notice these, the tenderest words of the tenderest prayer that ever came from the lips of a blessed martyr–the dying words of the holy Saint Stephen, ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.’ Is there nothing dreadful in that? Read it thus: ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.’ Not to the charge of them who stoned him? To whose charge then? Go ask the holy Saint Paul. Three years afterward, praying in the temple at Jerusalem, he answered that question: ‘I stood by and consented.’ He answered for himself only; but the Day must come when all that wicked council that sent Saint Stephen away to be stoned, and all that city of Jerusalem, must hold up the hand and say: ‘We, also, Lord–we stood by.’ Ah! friends, under the simpler meaning of that dying saint’s prayer for the pardon of his murderers is hidden the terrible truth that we all have a share in one another’s sins.”

Thus Pere Jerome touched his key-note. All that time has spared us beside may be given in a few sentences.

“Ah!” he cried once, “if it were merely my own sins that I had to answer for, I might hold up my head before the rest of mankind; but no, no, my friends–we cannot look each other in the face, for each has helped the other to sin. Oh, where is there any room, in this world of common disgrace, for pride? Even if we had no common hope, a common despair ought to bind us together and forever silence the voice of scorn!”

And again, this:

“Even in the promise to Noe, not again to destroy the race with a flood, there is a whisper of solemn warning. The moral account of the antediluvians was closed off, and the balance brought down in the year of the deluge; but the account of those who come after runs on and on, and the blessed bow of promise itself warns us that God will not stop it till the Judgment Day! O God, I thank thee that that day must come at last, when thou wilt destroy the world, and stop the interest on my account!”