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To suffer? After all, what was pain of the body? Ought one not to be glad to carry the cross along with Simon of Cyrene? During all these days he made it a point to obey, like a child, the doctors and his director of conscience.

His body was wasting away, yet all his mind was present and under control. He received his loved King and Queen, ambassadors and distinguished visitors from many lands, glad to have final talks on points in politics and religion. Early Thursday morning, two days before his death, Lord Halifax arrived from London, and the Abbé Portal from Paris. They hurried to the hospital; for it was clear now that the fifth Conversation on the union of Churches would not be held in Malines a few days later, but in the little white room at once if indeed at all.

And what joy to the Cardinal this meeting! He drew Lord Halifax to his breast in affectionate embrace. They assisted at Mass, the Cardinal taking Communion for the last time. Then the supreme Conversation and a final summarizing of the discussion by the Cardinal, after which he sank back, greatly fatigued, but delighted. As they were leaving, he again drew Lord Halifax nearer and, slipping off the pastoral ring given him twenty years before by his family, indicated that he wished to leave it to him. A last farewell, and the two friends withdrew.

But he would not yet relinquish Thursday. He called his secretary and dictated a four-page letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, recalling the secretary later to ask that three words

he quoted sentences from memory -be replaced by three others more effective.

Friday. Prince Leopold had been seven months in Africa. The Cardinal wished to live to see him again, and the wish was granted. For on Thursday he returned, and on Friday morning

VOL. 137-NO. 5

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was on his way to the little room. What was said, I do not know, but after the visit His Eminence lay back and smiled and folded his hands in prayer.

In the afternoon he questioned: 'What day, what hour is it?' On being told, he asked that the vicars-general and the family be called, and that his nephews read the prayers for the dying. He took his glasses and the book, and repeated with them faintly, though distinctly, the beautiful words. The doctor, fearing too great exhaustion, tried to give him relief, but the Cardinal refused: 'Now the soul, not the body.'

Still lingering, he joined again early Saturday morning in the Mass, trying at the end to give to all his episcopal blessing. That last gesture was like the waving of a flag toward Heaven. From then until three o'clock he but murmured 'Angelus' at noon, and the light of faith and love illumining the face and filling the room was the evidence that life was there. To the very verge of the tomb he demonstrated the triumphant power of the spirit, by illustration answering the question, 'O grave, where is thy victory?' The Brussels journalist could write, 'His death will prove as fecund as his life.'

How true! Healing and heartening for Belgium have been these days of a common emotion of inexpressible admiration and love, of a single sense of personal and national bereavement. And for the world, as it followed step by step. Even German papers offered their tribute to the man who in the same breath they admitted lost them the war.

Among the reminiscences evoked far and near was the story printed in the Berliner Tageblatt of a German underofficer. One day in 1916, as he stood before a painting in Malines Cathedral, Cardinal Mercier, passing, asked of a priest in Latin, 'What age, think you,

has that young officer?' To which the young man himself replied in Latin, In Malines to-day he has twenty years.' The Cardinal turned and spoke some beautiful words, adding, 'Will you not take lunch with me, that at least your birthday will not go uncelebrated?' There were gifts, a bit of chocolate and a marked book of prayers, and there is to-day a German officer who remembers.

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A grandiose national funeral, with the fervent participation of an entire people. History has rarely recorded so striking a manifestation of public mourning. Long before the appointed hour veritable multitudes had inundated all open spaces near the cortège route, outlined by flanking cavalry and quaintly marked by the black-veiled lighted street-lamps. The greatest concentration was near the station where the body was to arrive from Malines. Astonishing was the transformation of the Gare du Nord. Once past the façade, hung with black and silver, and inside the vaulted interior, sumptuously draped to the very track ends, one had the feeling of being in a great temple. Beauty and quiet were there. As we waited, one by one representative groups arrived and silently found their positions. Suddenly the Brabançonne announced the coming of King Albert, and soon a beautiful solemn music marked the arrival of the funeral train. So slowly that it seemed scarcely to be moving, it approached. Clergy of Malines received the coffin covered with the scarlet robe and began the march, preceded by four seminarists presenting the Cardinal's hat, the arms of the Archbishop, and two red-velvet cushions bearing his many decorations.

Immediately behind the coffin the King walked with Maréchal Foch and

Prince Leopold. Then the family, innumerable representatives of State, the Church in splendid vestments, army officers from several countries, members of universities, of the French Institute, missionaries from the Congo, the Papal Nuncio, and Archbishops of France and England. Once outside, our eyes could follow, from time to time, a long reach of this magnificent procession tracing its narrow way through the silent human sea.

In Sainte Gudule Cathedral the services were solemnly beautiful, yet I could not hold my thoughts to what was then passing. It was again 1916; the steel ring enclosed Belgium. Outside, the Somme; inside, the deportations. We had packed the Cathedral as we packed it this morning, and, scarcely breathing, waited. It was Belgium's Independence Day, and we had heard that the Cardinal would come from Malines to speak to us. Outside the gray Invader ruled; beside us, we knew, were his agents. The hours passed. Had His Eminence been prevented? Would he come? The black catafalque erected for the unknown dead, surrounded by tall flickering candles, rose where to-day we had placed his body. Then a murmur and fear allayed, as the tall, scarlet-robed figure appeared in the choir and began the Mass.

What a leader! On his every act was the seal of grandeur. With what love all eyes followed him as he mounted the pulpit. Would he dare to refer to the national holiday? His voice, charged with faith and courage, rang through the nave. 'Fourteen years from today (the one-hundredth anniversary of Belgium's independence) our restored cathedrals and rebuilt churches will be thrown wide open; the crowds will surge in; our King Albert, standing upon his throne, will bow his unconquered head before the King of Kings.'

With irrefutable logic and prophetic power he built up his argument. Here was the sovereign word! The sea of rapt faces was held toward him.

So I saw him, and not in the coffin where he lay, surrounded by a forest of candles.

Cardinal Mercier, in 1914, had needed no preliminary period of consideration to see things as he saw them. To the teacher who had accepted the mission offered him by Leo XIII, to revive at Louvain the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the way was as clear as sunlight. The essence of his position can be briefly stated: 'God is good, and this goodness connotes justice not a relative, but an absolute, justice. If justice is violated, I must oppose the violation.' There had been no moment's hesitation; thirty years ago he had said, "The ideal is not a dream, but your practical duty of every day.'

He was experienced, too, in intrepid defense. Scarcely more than thirty years old when he had launched in full tempest the bark of the revived Thomistic philosophy, he had had to meet attack, derision, even the attempt, at Rome, to have him condemned. And he had met them victoriously.

The people silently standing during the national funeral, looking backward, saw in and out of an all-prevailing darkness the flaming robe of their Cardinal as he moved among them to cheer them and among their oppressors to defy and restrain them. They heard still that single sentence in which he summed up the results of the four years' conflict: 'Right violated is still right; injustice supported by force is still injustice.' With synthetic vision they saw in him the expression of the Belgian conscience. With him they were interring a part of the conscience of each one of them.

They saw him, too, going on foot

from cottage to cottage to succor them

practising love. Always he had looked behind the scene. The terrific war-panorama did not blind him. 'All present cataclysms,' he wrote, 'are nothing compared to what is going on in our own souls.' While cannon thundered, now as never before, he must make his flock see where eternal goodness lies in eternal love. This was the very core of his belief. He preached and practised love. To-day the people had an overwhelming sense of his love for them.

And they felt something more, which they would have been unable, probably, to express. Belgians, strangers, believers, nonbelievers-welded in an emotion so deep that on the surface there was an almost mysterious immobility. Observers sought to interpret it. One said: "We witness this sublime spectacle because Cardinal Mercier did not exalt himself except for first causes.' Another, elaborating that phrase: 'Because he was not only a great patriot but the defender of the Ideal City that he had built in his spirit, the city as God wishes it to be, filled with justice, order, peace. These to him were the first causes of civilization. Men felt that he had affirmed the Absolute. His words passed the calculations of politics, the material interests of the world, the passions let loose by the chaos of war. Because of these words they felt awaking in their own spirits ideas which God has placed there, but which material interests stifle. Always violently moved by great things, even when they cannot clearly explain them, the people saw him wholly attentive to the affairs of God on earth, and inhabiting a sphere of serenity so high that they felt him to be great. So they stood as they did.'

From Brussels we went the following day to Malines, to attend the more intimate ceremony of the Church for its

own. The most beautiful carillon in the world played Chopin's 'Funeral March' as the cortège passed from the palace to the Cathedral. Entering it again, I realized that nowhere in Belgium would I ever feel more securely at home. The church was flooded with the Cardinal's spirit of loving welcome.

And, as in Sainte Gudule, I saw, more clearly than the densely crowded black nave of mourning, anotheraflame with color, and the Cardinal officiating.

Acolytes moved dimly about the choir; one by one candles were lighted. Then silently the procession moved toward the altar. Unhurriedly, unbrokenly, the tide swelled down the aisle. White and brown capes, ermine and purple, crucifix and candle, and the body carried aloft by the blackhelmeted honor guard. On and on they poured until the choir was a sea of color in which the coffin was literally imbedded. The Mass, the eulogy, and absolutions. In the evening the actual

entombment; and the Cardinal lies where he asked to lie.

Inside the church, as outside, he will be called the Great Cardinal. Who, in recent times, has done more for Catholic thought, leading, as he did, the renaissance of Thomism in conjunction with the development of the modern sciences, until Louvain has become the citadel of Catholic metaphysics? Who has in his imagination gone further in picturing the Catholic as indeed the Church of the Christian world? Who in the Church has been a more rapt contemplator of divine mysteries, has more completely lost himself in the vision of divine love? Who was more convinced of the possibility of present union of the human spirit with the divine? Who asked less for himself, gave more to others? And who, finally, has left the Church and the world a more precious ultimate gift - that perfect illustration of his own utterance: "To die is the greatest and most beautiful act possible to man'?

MUSSOLINI

BY ROBERT SENCOURT

MUSSOLINI'S three years in power have been concerned with administrative tasks; it is only now that he begins to enunciate the theory of politics and economics which he has always held in reserve as the raison d'être of his revolution. He saw at once what Italy most needed: a field for emigration, a firm currency, a due supply of grain, and in general a balance of production to

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consumption. But before he could attain these he had to give Italy the discipline of a strong government, the tonic of a patriotic ideal. He glorified the soldier, therefore, and especially the disabled soldier; he exalted the monarchy, and with the monarchy he associated the Church as integral to the Italian tradition and its propagandist in other countries; he attacked

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Masonry as being secret, international, and anti-Catholic; he furthermore assured his own position by terrorizing his opponents and by assuming command over the press; and, not the least astute of his moves, he shifted the chief weight of taxation from the bourgeoisie to the masses. He thus made Italy's two most powerful institutions the Church and business -into his supporters. Of the old Liberal Party, the Masons, who were so closely identified with it, and the common laborers have been anxious to make an opposition, but they have had no chance. Like the sons of Zeruiah, Mussolini lays his axe to the root of the tree, and indeed his politics have an extraordinary effect on Italy. He has dealt with the country's practical difficulties with a success which the practical man not only must acknowledge but also may very profitably consider.

For what is the practical alternative to Fascism? The only possible one is the system of parliamentary government. Parliamentary government in Italy had broken down. It had become what Senator Giovanni Gentile, Italy's subtlest and clearest thinker, describes, not inaccurately, as 'the wretched skirmish and intrigue of ephemeral groups in a Vanity Fair of endless ambitions. In 1922 this system left Italy without a Government at the end of January. Six weeks of skirmish and intrigue passed before another could be formed, which lasted only a few months. More weeks without a Government followed. And the third proved absolutely ineffective. The lira dropped from 88 to 108 to the pound. The grain supplies ran short. Strikes were so frequent that the service of trains and posts was disorganized several times

1 As informed readers know, this statement is too condensed for complete accuracy. The Church is manifestly divided. - THE EDITORS

in the year. It was almost an unusual thing for the electric light in a leading town like Florence to burn for a whole evening. evening. Fights took place in the streets, and the gutters were stained with blood. Profiteers charged what prices they liked, and the whole country was tortured by a lack of discipline. This was the year that witnessed the rise of Fascismo from a conglomeration of armed bands to the only administrative power in Italy. The speeches of Mussolini had won the confidence of business men, and fired the enthusiasm of the masses. The Confederation of Guild Corporations, which enunciated the economic policy of Mussolini, had shown him favorable to the capitalist system; Socialism and Communism had failed; and finally Mussolini guaranteed to support the monarchy. It was so that he prepared for the revolution against parliamentary government, and at the crucial moment secured the King's support.

We cannot understand Fascism till we realize what it replaced. The unification of Italy, the famous movement known as the Risorgimento, was not free from sordid episodes. It was, in fact, the work of that antichristian and, indeed, atheistic type of Freemasonry-so entirely different from what is known as Masonry in England and America which is known as the Grand Orient. This fact is asserted by both the Clerical and the anti-Clerical historians of the Risorgimento, and cannot be disputed. It was a movement that aimed, and perhaps still aims, at establishing a world republic on nonreligious lines. It had attracted some of the worst elements of the Italian populace, along with a certain number of rich and able men; but so unscrupulous had been its methods, so disreputable its members, so hostile to all representatives of religion had it been, that Pope X advised

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