^4

SAINTS vs. KINGS

by

James M. Gillis, C. S. P.





SAINTS vs. KINGS

by

Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P.,

editor of The Catholic World

Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, produced

by the National Council of Catholic Men, through the

courtesy of the National ^Broadcasting Company

and associated stations.

(On Sundays from November 7 to December 27, 1937)

I. Drama in the Lives of the Saints.

II. Leo and Attila the Hun.

III. St. John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia.

IV. Thomas Becket and Henry II.

V. Catherine of Siena and Avignon.

VI. St. Paul and Agrippa.

VII. Herod Antipas and John the Baptist.

VIII. Christmas.

National Council of Catholic Men

Producer of the Catholic Hour

1312 Massachusetts Avenue,

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor

Huntington, Indiana



Nihil Obstat:

REV. T. E DILLON -

Censor Librorum

Imprimatur:

•i- JOHN FRANCIS NOlT,

Bishop of Fort Wayne

Deactdlfsd



DEDICATION

To the multitudes of listeners scattered over a wide ter-

ritory, who have been, though unseen, an inspiration to the
speaker, and in particular to those who have been kind
enough to express their pleasure in the programs of The

Catholic Hour, these talks are respectfully and gratefully

dedicated.



\



DRAMA IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS
Address delivered on November 7, 1937

The dramatists have neglected the Saints.

Strangely, unaccountably, for playwrights are at

their wits’ ends for dramatic material. Making

bricks without straw, gathering figs of thorns, mak-

ing a silk purse out of a sow’s ear are recognized

symbols of futility. But to that list we might add

w'riting plays without plots. Lacking fit material,

those who write for the stage fall back upon the

threadbare theme of adultery. But adultery is

not dramatic. Not in itself. Not as it exists in

polite society. True, Homer made fine dramatic

poetry of the abduction of Helen of Troy, wife of

Menelaus. But there was more—^vastly more—to
that episode than the stealing of a wife from her

husband. There was a raid, rape, a war, the oblit-

eration of a city (Troy was never built again; it is

“one with Nineveh and Tyre”), the scattering of a

people and the commencement of a new civilization.

In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” the queen’s “posting

with such dexterity to incestuous sheets” is inci-

dental. The drama is in the main psychological. It

takes place in the mind of the melancholy Prince.

At the end, to give the groundlings the worth of

their sixpence, Shakespeare, aware that psychology

is caviar to the general, clutters up the stage with

corpses.

Dante made brilliant use of an adultery: the in-

cident of Paolo and Francesca
;
but to bring out the

drama he had to pursue the lovers into hell. Hell

is dramatic.

I repeat: sex-sin of itself is sordid, and drama

cannot be made of the sordid. Stupidly ignoring

that rudimentary principle, contemporary play-



6 SAINTS VS. KINGS

wrights continue to ring the changes on the sex

triangle; flirtations, tricks, lies, entanglements, es-

capades, dubious humor, all this reiterated with a

monotony that is nauseating.

Even those dramatists who have a higher con-

cept of their art go back and forth, to and fro, up

and down, round-about in the same exhausted field

like a farmer trying to scratch a meagre living out

of a bit of rocky soil, while beneath his feet lie hid-

den oceans of oil
;
like a pioneer trekking a thousand

miles in search of El Dorado, over mountains rich

with treasures beyond those of “Ormuzd and of Ind.”

Meanwhile, in the lives and legends of the saints

there is enough raw material of drama to tax the

genius of a Shakespeare or a Sophocles. The ex-

ploits of Anchises, Aeneas, and Dido in Virgil, of

Agamemnon, Menelaus, Paris, and Helen of Troy in

Homer are not so stirring as the adventures of Peter

the fisherman and Paul the tent maker who went out

to turn the world upside down and did just that; or

of Leo the Great, alone on the Appian Way, defend-

ing civilization against the anarchy that threatened

in the person of Attila the Hun
;
or of the aged Tele-

machus leaping into the Arena to die in protest

against the murderous gladiatorial games; or of

Francis, il poverello of Assisi, penniless, barefoot,

ragged, confronting Saladin in his silken tent, a

little mouse of a man venturing into a den of lions to

persuade them to peace; or of Francis Xavier, all

soul alone in the midst of a group of Buddhist

Bonzes, charging them with their vices in the pres-

ence of the Daimio.

Notice, I do not urge any man to attempt the

biggest theme of all, Christ before Herod, or before

Pilate, Christ in Gethsemane or on Golgotha. We



DRAMA IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS 7

have no Aeschylus, no Sophocles, no Shakespeare to-'

day; and if we had they would be well advised to

leave the tragedy of Calvary to the unsophisticated

peasants of Oberammergau. But why couldn’t some

ambitious and courageous dramatist put on the

boards St. Paul, that restless little Jew from Tarsus

—the only authentic, non-mythological Wandering
Jew
—

“visionary” they called him, and “madman,”

who nevertheless conquered more worlds than Alex-

ander? There’s drama for you, every instant of it

from the stoning of St. Stephen to the vision on the

Road to Damascus (“Saul, Saul, why persecutest

thou Me? Who art Thou, Lord? I am Jesus Whom
thou persecutest.” What dialogue!) and through a

hundred other equally thrilling incidents until the

day when the Apostle in chains kneels on the Ostian

Way, the sword of the headsman flashes in the sun,

and the head of the little man who had challenged

and defeated the Roman Empire rolls in the dust.

In the autobiography of Edward Gibbon there is

a much quoted passage in which he says, “It was at

Rome on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing

amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the bare-footed

friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter,

that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the

city first entered my mind.” “Monks singing ves-
pers in the temple of Jupiter” set fire to the his-

torian’s imagination. Have dramatists no imagina-

tion ? Consider that theme
:
pagan Rome falls

;
papal

Rome rises; emperors pass away, the popes do not

pass away
;
the gods of the Gentiles, demons all, flee

before the cross of Christ. Can the dramatists see no

possibilities in that rich material? Or is it too big

for them?

Very well, then, let the dramatist select a few



8 SAINTS VS. KINGS

episodes here and there, and weave them together

with no more dramatic unity than is to be found in

“Victoria Regina.” Take for example Paul before

Festus, successor to Pontius Pilate. The Apostle

comes into Jerusalem to make his private prayers at

the temple. He finds himself the centre of distur-

bance. Leaders stir up the mob. The mob rages as

only an Oriental mob can. Lysias the tribune sends

Roman soldiers into the midst of the seething crowd

“lest Paul should be pulled in pieces by them,” as the

Scripture says. Paul is taken into custody for safe

keeping. Forty Jews bind themselves with a great

oath that they will neither eat nor drink till they kill

him. Paul’s nephew, his sister’s son, lying in wait,

overhears their murderous plans. Paul sends him to

the tribune. The tribune secretly and at night sends

Paul to the Governor Felix at Caesarea under guard

of two centurions, 200 soldiers, 70 horsemen, and

200 spearmen. For five days Paul is kept prisoner in

Herod’s judgment hall. The high priest from Jeru-

salem comes down with members of the Sanhedrin

and one Tertullus, an orator. They flatter Felix and

argue that he deliver Paul into their hands. Paul is

permitted to speak. He does so with such effect that

he frightens and almost converts Felix and Drusilla

his wife. But Felix is venal, expects a bribe. Paul

will give no bribe. He languishes in durance vile for

two years. Felix, being succeeded by Festus, passes

on the troublesome Jew to the new governor. Festus

sits in judgment upon Paul, but like Felix he meets

more than his match. In an attempt to “pass the

buck”, as we say nowadays, he suggests that Paul go

up to Jerusalem. Then comes the magnificent

speech of Paul: “I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat,

where I ought to be judged. To the Jews I have done



9

/

DRAMA IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

no injury, as thou very well knowest. For if I have

injured them, or have committed any thing worthy

of death, I refuse not to die. But if there be none of

these things [true] whereof they accuse me, no man

may deliver me to them: I appeal to Caesar.” “Hast

thou appealed to Caesar?” says Festus, “To Caesar

shalt thou go.”

Later Festus exhibits Paul to King Agrippa.

Now there is a spectacle: Festus the Governor sur-

rounded with grandeur to impress the King, ad-

dressed as “The Ldrd,” a title rejected by the great

Augustus; about his shoulders a gorgeous scarlet

cloak is thrown; his throne protected by the fasces

of the lictors, the swords of the legionaries, the

gleaming armor of the Chiliarchs. What a setting

for the poor little Jew from Tarsus! Yet undaunted

he pleads so eloquently that King Agrippa says “A

little more and thou persuadest me to be a Chris-

tian.” In the end Agrippa says to Festus “This man

might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed

to Caesar.” But to Caesar he had appealed. To

Caesar he goes. Under Caesar he dies.

This, I submit, is superbly dramatic material.

The man who could do that for the stage would go

down in the history of the theatre with Shakespeare

and Racine and Corneille, if his genius were com-

mensurate with his courage.

The talents of playwrights are deteriorating

from day to day because of a preoccupation with

themes that are merely sensational, or sordid, or

stupid, or vile, while there remains a world of elo-

quence and beauty and power, undiscovered and un-

explored in the lives of the saints. Unexplored? Not

altogether. Bernard Shaw wrote a play on St. Joan

of Arc, and St. Joan, for the time being purified and



10 SAINTS VS. KINGS

chastened him. Writing of the saint, he commenced

to measure up to her moral and spiritual stature.

Had he continued, with let us say Catherine of

Siena, or Francis of Assisi, or Vincent de Paul, he

might have gone to even greater heights. “Cibm sum

grandium”

,

says St. Augustine, speaking of God. “I

am the food of the full grown. Grow up and you

shall eat Me.” And that may be said of great dra-

matic themes. It takes a big man to do them; and

the man grows big in doing them.

But if one is no giant, why not an easier task?

For example, St. Agnes, beautiful, noble maiden of

Rome, a child of 12 or 13, so young indeed that Pope

Damasus—pope and poet—speaks of her as “hasten-
ing to martyrdom from the lap of her mother.” She

declares herself a Christian, undergoes a kind of

third degree of mental torture, is threatened with

the loss of her virginity, remains steadfast; is sent

to a house of shame; a young man who casts a las-

civious look upon her is struck blind: she dies like

Joan of Arc in the flames.

The facts are few and simple, but around them

have been written some of the most beautiful leg-

ends and poems of ancient times. For background

the dramatist could picture the terrible immorality

of decadent Rome. Against that background the

sweet chaste virgin and her beautiful terrible death.

Impurity has been dramatized too often. Why
doesn’t some one make a bold venture and dramatize

purity? The unusual thing, the heroic, dramatic

thing is not to fall—any one can fall—^but to stand
erect when all others fall. The Psalmist says, “a

thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at

thy right hand but it shall not come nigh thee.”

“Thou shalt walk upon the asp and the basilisk and



DRAMA IN THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS 11

thou shalt trample down the lion and the dragon.”

There is poetry and drama. Why doesn’t some one

use it?

Speaking of the Psalmist, Robert Browning, a

poet with a fine sense of drama, wrote nothing better

than his tremendous “Saul.” It is superb drama as

it stands. But some one could whip it into shape for

the stage. T. S. Eliot, not so much a poet perhaps as

a philosopher, saw drama in the death of St. Thomas

of Canterbury, and made a fine piece of it in his

“Murder in the Cathedral.” Tennyson’s “Becket” is

of course a larger and doubtless a more skilful play,

a favorite with Henry Irving. The death of Becket

before the altar in his own cathedral at the instance

of the petulant King Henry II is magnificent theatre,

but not more so than a thousand other episodes in

the lives of the saints.

Since I am not a poet, or a dramatist, I can only

attempt to present in simple narrative form, some

of these episodes during the next few weeks. I could

hope that my prose, though a wretchedly poor sub-

stitute for the poetry and drama that alone are

worthy of the lives of the saints, may not be alto-

gether unsatisfying.



12 SAINTS VS. KINGS

LEO AND ATTILA THE HUN
Address delivered on November 14, 1937

In the first quarter of the fifth century of our era

something was happening in Europe that had been

thought impossible. The Roman Empire was break-

ing up. Ave Roma Immortalis! Hail Immortal

Rome! had been the immemorial salutation of kings,

of emperors, of the Senate and people of Rome, of

patriots, friends, enemies, conquerors, captives, ves-

tal virgins, priests, votaries of Jupiter, poets, ora-

tors, even of the Delphic Oracle. All, all had believed

Rome to be indestructible if not altogether invulner-

able. From the days of Vespasian and Titus who

built the Coliseum there had been a popular super-

stition to the effect that neither the Coliseum nor the

City would fall until the end of time. We have it in
the lines of Lord Byron

:

“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand.
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall:
And when Rome falls—the world!”

Now Rome—^be it understood—was not a city,
merely. Rome was a city and a world, a city and a

civilization. For 700 years, from the days of the

Tarquin kings, Rome had been developing. By the

time of the birth of Christ it had become a synonym

for universal dominion. In our Gospels we find the

significant sentence: “An edict went forth from

Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be en-

rolled.” One man sitting enthroned by the banks of*

the Tiber scratches his signature with a stylus upon

a tablet of wax, and in consequence a couple of peas-

ants, a man and his espoused wife a thousand miles

away, start a dreary journey to the city of their an-



LEO AND ATTILA THE HUN 13

cestors to be numbered in the Roman census. With

equal ease the Emperor could set an army in motion.

A word from him and a subject king is put to death,
a city razed to the ground, a population decimated.

At his command and for his purposes taxes are

levied and tribute pours in over the famous Roman

roads from the ends of the earth. He reigns from

the Alban Hills to the Apennines, to the River Po, to

the Alps, to the Rhine, to the Rhone, to the Danube,

to Macedonia, formerly the kingdom of Philip, from

which Alexander went forth to conquer, down the

Hellenic peninsula to Athens, to Corinth, to the Isles

of Greece, to Egypt, once the domain of the Pha-

raohs and of Cleopatra, eastward to Mesopotamia,

where in an earlier day had been felt the iron rule of

Darius the Mede, to Persia, where Xerxes had gath-

ered his multitudinous hosts. The Roman legions had

pitched their tents on the Tigris and Euphrates, had

erected fortresses, palaces and—abomination of
desolation !—had set up temples to their demon gods
in the Holy Land of Solomon. Africa, from the

Pyramids to the Pillars of Hercules that guarded the

gateway from the ocean to the sea that the Romans

called Mare nostrum—“our sea”—was Roman.
From the Sahara in the South to the Firth of Forth

in the north, from the Bay of Biscay to the Caspian

Sea and the Persian Gulf, all, all was Rome, and the

diverse civilizations that had been developed in all

those far flung kingdoms had been welded into one

by the genius of the incredible descendants of Ro-

mulus and Remus. All this, the city, the empire, the

world, the aggregate of cultures, was Rome. “The

earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” said the

pious King David. “The earth is mine and all the

produce thereof,” said the impious Caesar; “every



14 SAINTS VS. KINGS

crop in every field, the metal in all the mines from

Spain to Scythia, the fish in the seas, the very birds

of the air, the fruit on every vine and branch. And

men ! every man in all the world shall bend the knee

and salute me, Caesar! Divus! Augustus! Caesar,

Lord and God
!”

In a word Rome was universal and its ruler abso-

lute. As Dr. Breasted says in his book Ancient

Times: “The emperor became for a whole Roman

world what he had always been in Egypt—an abso-
lute monarch with none to limit his power. The

State had been completely militarized and orientali-

zed. With the unlimited power of the oriental despot

the emperor now assumed also its outward symbols

—the diadem, the gorgeous robe embroidered with
pearls and precious stones, the throne and footstool,

before which all who came into his presence must

bow down to the dust.

“The gorgeous costume in which the Roman em-

peror now decked himself was copied from that of

the Sassanian kings of New Persia. . . Oriental in-

fluence on Roman beliefs. . . was now affecting the

notion of the divinity of the emperor. . . Indeed, the

Roman Empire had now become like a vast sponge

absorbing the life and civilization of the Orient. As

a divinity, the emperor had now become an oriental

Sun-god and he was officially called the ‘Invincible

Sun’. . . The inhabitants of each province might

revere their particular gods but all were obliged as

good citizens to join in the official sacrifices to the

head of the State as a god. With the incoming of this

Oriental attitude toward the emperor, the long

struggle for democracy ended in the triumph of ori-

ental despotism.”

Obviously to the Romans and doubtless also to



LEO AND ATTILA THE HUN 15

the conquered peoples it was unthinkable that such a

potentate should be dethroned and his empire de-

stroyed. One might as well speak of the dethrone-

ment of God and the annihilation of the universe.

But none the less the incredible thing was about

to happen. The first blow to the Empire had been

struck when a little insignificant sect out of Pales-

tine, called at first Nazarenes and then, even more

contemptuously, “Christians,” had looked upon the

Emperor’s assumption of the prerogatives of God as

blasphemy and the worship of him as idolatry. He

that was crucified at Golgotha dealt the first blow to

the man enthroned in a golden court in the city by

the Tiber. With that blow, struck at the prestige of

Caesar, the Empire of Caesar, built upon tyranny,

rapine, bloodshed, idolatry, commenced to wane. It

has been asserted and denied that Christianity

ruined Rome. The controversy has raged from the

days of Tertullian and Augustine to the days of Ed-

ward Gibbon and of H. G. Wells, who in this mat-

ter only echoes Gibbon. I, for one, am not reluctant

to admit that the Gospel was fatal to the Fasces, and

that the apostles, covering the same ground as the

legions, undid what the soldiers had done.

But the Christian religion alone did not destroy

the Roman Empire. Under Constantine and for a

hundred years after him, a reconciliation had been

effected between the Church and the Empire. But it

was too late. The excesses and orgies of Tiberius

and Nero and Domitian, of Caracalla and Heliogaba-

lus had set the pace for the people and the people had

grown vicious, soft, degenerate. Fifteen hundred

years ago or today, it is the same : a nominal religion

will not save. Men may give lip service to the new

God who dethrones the old idol, but still in their



16 SAINTS VS. KINGS

heart and in their life continue their ancient cruelty,

lasciviousness, obscenity. Gibbon quotes Ammianus

Marcellinus, an historianwho lived in the 4thcentury

when Rome was ostensibly Christian : “Some nobles,

who, unmindful of their own dignity, and of that of

their country, assume an unbounded license of vice

and folly. They contend with each other in the empty

vanity of titles and surnames. From a vain ambition

of perpetuating their memory, they affect to mul-

tiply their likeness, in statues of bronze and marble

;

nor are they satisfied unless those statues are cov-

ered with plates of gold. . . The ostentation of dis-

playing, of magnifying, perhaps, the rent-roll of the

estates which they possess in all the provinces, from

the rising to the setting sun, provokes the just re-

sentment of every man. . . The nobles measure

their rank and consequence according to the lofti-

ness of their chariots, and the weighty magnificence

of their dress. Their long robes of silk and purple

float in the wind. . . Followed by a train of fifty ser-

vants, and tearing up the pavement, they move along

the streets with the same impetuous speed as if they

travelled with postrhorses; and the example of the

senators is boldly imitated by the matrons and

ladies, whose covered carriages are continually driv-

ing round the immense space of the city and suburbs.

Whenever these persons of high distinction condes-

cend to visit the public baths, they assume, on their,

entrance, a tone of loud and insolent command, and

appropriate to their own use the conveniences which

were designed for the Roman people. If, in these

places of mixed and general resort, they meet any of

the infamous ministers of their pleasures, they ex-

press their affection by a tender embrace ; while they

proudly decline the salutations of their fellow citi-



LEO AND ATTILA THE HUN 17

zens, who are not permitted to aspire above the hon-

or of kissing their hands, or their knees. . . Yet

should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of

their gilded umbrellas; should a sunbeam penetrate

through some unguarded and imperceptible chink,

they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament,

in affected language, that they were not born in the

land of the Cimmerians, the regions of eternal dark-

ness.”

In a word Rome was rotten and ripe for destruc-

tion. And the destroyer was at hand. From the far

borders of a mysterious terra incognita, out beyond

even the far flung battlements of the legions, in a

land called vaguely “Scythia” or “Tartary”, a horde

of savages (Mongols or Mongoloids we have learned

to call them( started a tremendous push to the

west and the south. They were the Huns, “The

Terror of the World,” and their greatest leader,

Attila “The Scourge of God.” Before them fled bar-

barians only less fierce than themselves: Goths, Van-

dals, and the subsidiary tribes, Franks, Lombards,

Alemanni, Suevi, Belgae, Teutons, Saxons, Celts, and

a half hundred others. They came swarming down

upon civilization, like clouds of locusts before the

wind, or like wild beasts of the woods before a forest

fire, or, to employ the' more familiar simile, like suc-

cessive tidal waves inundating and devastating a

continent. Down went the Roman wall at the boun-

daries of the Empire; back came the defeated leg-

ions. In a hundred years the work of a thousand had

been undone. What Pompey and Crassus and Julius

Caesar and Titus and Germanicus had won was lost

to Alaric, Genseric, Odoacer, Theodoric. But though

these were indeed barbarians, not at all squeamish

about putting the whole population of a city to the



18 SAINTS VS. KINGS

sword, revelling in blood and lust, carnage and pil-

lage, they were, by comparison with the Huns, who

pushed them from behind, mild-mannered gentle-

men. Indeed the Goths, the Lombards, the Franks, if

not the Vandals, once they had taken possession of

Spain, Gaul, Belgium, Germany, North Italy, had

been largely converted to some form of Christianity,

orthodox or unorthodox, and were in process of be-

coming civilized.

But the Huns were savages. Attila boasted that

where his horses’ hoof had trod, the grass never

grew again. His soldiers, without any true concept

of the Deity, worshipped God under the symbol of

an iron scimitar.

At the throne of Attila were gathered “a crowd

of conquered kings to serve as guards and domestics

around his person. They watched his nod, they

trembled at his frown, and at the first signal of his

will, they executed without murmur or hesitation his

stern and absolute commands.” But Attila was

more than a fickle, cruel oriental; he had military

genius. And he had numbers, vast numbers. In the

army with which he overran the western world there

were perhaps as many as 700,000 warriors.

Now imagine such a horde under such a comman-

der moving relentlessly on towards Rome. In quick

succession the towns of North Italy fell before them

:

Vicenza, Verona, Bergamo, Milan, Pavia, Turin, Mo-

dena, Padua, Aquileia. “What city,” said Atilla, “in

the wide extent of the Roman Empire can hope to

exist if it pleases me to erase it from the earth ?”

Who was to meet him ? In the city of Rome there

were no Gracchi, no Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Julius

Caesar. The Roman people, as well as nobles in



LEO AND ATTILA THE HUN 19

whom the seeds of degeneracy had been sown as far

back as the days of Nero, had been further demora-

lized by idleness and luxury, feastings and games,

panem et circenses. They were in no condition to

meet the “Terror of the World, the Scourge of God.”

TheEmperor, himself a coward, a sybarite and a nin-

compoop, Valentinian III, appealed to the bishop of

the city. Pope Leo I. Fortunately for Rome, for the

Empire, for civilization and the Christian religion,

Leo was the kind of man who could measure up to

the formidable task of confronting and halting the

savage Mongols. Even the infidel Gibbon, who sel-

dom lays aside his scorn for Christianity, waxes en-

thusiastic in describing the mission and the success

of Leo. He says:

“The genius of Leo was exercised and displayed

in the public misfortunes; and he has deserved the

appellation of Great, by the successful zeal with

which he labored to establish his opinions, and his

authority, under the venerable names of orthodox

faith and ecclesiastical discipline. The Roman am-

bassadors were introduced to the tent of Attila, as he

lay encamped at the place where the slow-winding

Mincius is lost in the foaming waves of the lake

Benacus. The barbarian monarch listened with

favorable, and even respectful attention. . . The

pressing eloquence of Leo, his majestic aspect

and sacerdotal robes
,
excited the veneration of

Atilla for the spiritual father of the Christians.

The apparition of the two Apostles, St. Peter and

St. Paul, who menaced the Barbarian with in-

stant death, if he rejected the prayer of their succes-

sor, is one of the noblest legends of ecclesiastical tra-

dition. The safety of Rome might deserve the inter-

position of celestial beings; and some indulgence is



20 SAINTS VS. KINGS

due to a fable which has been represented by the

pencil of Raphael and the chisel of Algardi.”

By celestial or terrestial power, angels or the

man, Rome was saved. Thanks to Leo and after him

to a constant line of his successors in the See of

Rome, savagery and barbarism never entirely des-

troyed civilization. Again and again the city has

been devastated : its art and sculpture and architec-

ture have been destroyed and its wealth exhausted a

dozen times by tribute demanded by conquerors and

paid out to them by a shamed and helpless popula-

tion. But Rome as a civilization has never perished.

All historians, regardless of their theological—or
anti-theological—prepossessions, have admitted that
the credit belongs to the popes.

The fact is significant for today. I have left my-

self little time to draw the moral. But perhaps I may

say in a sentence that now once again barbarians are

battering at the gates of a very sadly contracted

civilization. Wars, declared and undeclared, far

more savage than those of the Goths and the Huns,

are in progress
;
perfidy prevails, such as would have

shamed even an Attila who, though a bloody warrior,

believed in keeping his oaths
;
complete breakdown

threatens the last remnants of international moral-

ity
;

decadence, degeneracy, unnatural vice, effe-

minacy of the extremest type, are rife in all our big

cities : and all in all, whether we see it or not, we are

face to face with a peril perhaps greater than that

of the fifth century when Attila and his Huns

threatened the world. And now, as then, there is but

one leader able to stand in face of the hordes of des-

troyers that are closing in on us and, with the power

of the supernatural, to drive them back. That one

leader today is where he was 1400 years ago, in



LEO AND ATTILA THE HUN 21

Rome. Valentinian and his Senate called upon Leo

I : if the rulers of the world today will but call upon

Pius XI and give him the plenipotentiary authority

conceded to his illustrious predecessor of so long ago,

he will achieve an equally miraculous result



22 SAINTS VS. KINGS

ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM AND THE
EMPRESS EUDOXIA

Address delivered on November 21, 1937

The idea broached in the first of these talks

—

that the lives of the saints are rich in material for

drama—is verified in the thrilling career of St. John
Chrysostom. In line with that idea—I hope it is not
fantastic—I beg leave to present, as it were, a sce-
nario that could be worked up into a play for the

stage or the screen.

Let us have first the dramatis personae.

John, called Chrysostomos, that is “golden-

mouthed” or as we say today “golden-tongued,” is

one of the supreme orators of all time. His is a ver-

satile genius; he has much of the classic grace of

Cicero, the power and sweep and rhythm of Demos-

thenes, the prophetic zeal of Savonarola, the com-

bination of philosophy and piety characteristic of

Lacordaire, and the popular appeal of Daniel O’Con-

nell. His master Libanius, a pagan, being asked

which of his disciples was destined to the highest

fame and fortune, answered “John ! if the Christians

had not stolen him from us.”

Chrysostom is of the nobility, son of Secundus, a

commander in the armies of the Emperor, and An-

thusa, a mother worthy of a place by the side of St.

Monica. It was Anthusa who drew from Libanius

the exclamation: “Ye gods, what women there are

among the Christians
!”

In youth John was not immune to vanity and

ambition, but thanks to his mother he was preserved,

says one of his biographers “from the glittering



ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM AND EMPRESS EUDOXIA 23

fascination of the idealized paganism taught in the

schools of Antioch.”

Recognizing in himself a tendency more danger-

ous than ambition—a passionate enthusiasm for the
theatre, then, even more than now, a medium for

the exploitation of vice—John applied the prophyl-
actic. He retired to one of the monasteries on the

wooded hills outside the gay city, and for six years

practised a really terrifying austerity. Returning,

he abandoned the profession of public advocate, in

which he had been initiated, was ordained deacon,

then priest, consecrated bishop of Antioch, and

presently became Patriarch of Constantinople, the

capital of the world.

^ H: H: li: Hs ^

The second of the dramatis personae, “leading

lady” (in the lingo of the theatre), is the Empress

Eudoxia, consort of Theodosius the Great. She is

young, beautiful, vivacious, temperamental
;
at times

pious—sincerely or hypocritically—^but habitually
worldly, self-indulgent, perhaps more pagan than

Christian, ambitious, imperious; when opposed, an

exemplification of the saying “hell hath no fury like

a woman scorned.” She selects for companions three

vain, vicious, intriguing women, Castricia, Eugra-

phia, and Marsa. These three evil women on occa-

sion “rage with all the fury of drunken maenads.”

^

The third outstanding figure in this drama is

Theodosius the Emperor, a Goth, born in Spain,

whose twofold genius as general and statesman had

won for him dominion over the Roman Empire, east

and west, with his throne on the shores of the Bos-

phorus. He is a Christian, more militant than Con-

stantine the founder of the city and of the dynasty.



24 SAINTS VS. KINGS

An opponent of paganism, he destroys hjeathen

shrines, outlaws pagan sacrifices, omens, witchcraft,

and the obscene rites of the heathen. Also he is a

“hammer of heretics”; he enacts severe penalties

against Manichees and Arians. These laws, how-

ever, were not carried out, and the punishments

were seldom inflicted, for, as his biographer and

friend Sozomen says, rather quaintly, “the Emperor

did not wish to punish but only to frighten his sub-

jects that they might think as he did about Divine

things.” None the less, he could on occasion punish

with savage fury. A riot arising in Thessalonica, in
revenge he massacred 7,000 citizens. If this were a

drama of his life rather than St. John Chrysostom’s,

it would be proper to tell of that crime and of the

Emperor’s penance done at the command of St. Am-

brose. It is the Old Testament story of David and

Nathan over again.

Close by the throne of Theodosius, is the ill-

omened Eutropius, once a slave and eunuch in the

imperial palace; now prime-minister; in prosperity

arrogant, in adversity abject; once rich, tyrannical,

wielding the whole force of the Empire, but in a

moment fallen so low that the courtiers and menials

spit upon him, and members of the palace guard

threaten to murder him. Chrysostom, though he too

had suffered from Eutropius and had reason to des-

pise him, saves the miserable wretch : “You shall not

slay Eutropius,” he says to the soldiers, “unless you

first slay me. Take me to the Emperor
!”

But that too is another story.

One more chief actor in this crowded drama is

the despicable Archbishop Theophilus, patriarch of



iT. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM AND EMPRESS EUDOXIA 26

Alexandria, madly jealous of Chrysostom. He heads

a permanent conspiracy, instigating a group of en-

vious, vicious, greedy, worldly ecclesiastics to ruin

John Chrysostom complains that they made of the

Church a veritable whirlpool of intrigue: whisper-

ing, plotting, playing politics, wire pulling; a cur-

ious and scandalous coalition of clerics, courtiers,

and wicked women of the queen’s household. In all

the history of court intrigue there has been none

worse than that of Constantinople. Even at the

Tuileries in the days of Louis XIV, there were not

such cross currents of plots, counterplots, schemes,

artifices, falsehoods, hypocrisies.

4: He 4: H: 4:

Let that suffice for the dramatis personae. Now
for the scene of the action. It begins in Antioch and

shifts to Constantinople.

First, Antioch, third largest city of the world

;

the see of St. Peter before he went to Rome
;
the city

in, which the followers of Jesus were first called

“Christians.” When Chrysostom was born, it was

still largely pagan : the Christians had come “out of

the catacombs” only 20 or 30 years earlier as a result

of the edicts of Galerius and Constantine. The pagan

atmosphere had been only partly dispelled: in the

theatres the performances were lascivious; in the

hippodrome not only did the horses race but fac-

tions, the Blues and the Greens, fought. Often the

riot spread over the city and took on the proportions

of civil war. It is the Orient, where mobs go mad on

slight provocation : Pontius Pilate knew those mobs,

he had them in Jerusalem: Felix and Festus and

Agrippa knew them in Jerusalem and Caesarea. The

mobs of Antioch were perhaps wilder than either of



26 SAINTS VS. KINGS

those we read of in the Gospels and the Acts of the

Apostles.

At Antioch—to continue the picture—^the pagan
baths still remained, vast and architecturally mag-

nificent, a city in themselves, with parks, play-

grounds, lounging places, libraries, swimming pools,

eating houses, central heating, flood lighting, and

every sybaritic luxury. In the streets were un-

counted statues, monuments, arches of triumph,

wide boulevards, aqueducts running high into the

hills. All in all it was a wealthy, prosperous, blatant,

riotous city.

In its suburbs were the notorious groves of

Daphne, stretching for ten miles along the River

Orontes, a place of pilgrimage in pagan days, to

which came devotees who sacrilegiously expressed

their piety to the local goddess by rites of obscene

debauchery. Slave girls were imported in thousands

to perform the function at once of priestesses and

prostitutes. The Daphnitici mores, the doings in the

groves of Daphne, were a byword even to the Ro-

mans, not unacquainted with the orgies that had

been held in the gardens of Nero. Juvenal, poet and

satirist, complained that Antioch had taught Rome

how to be vile. “The Orontes,” he said, “has fiowed

into the Tiber.”

When John Chrysostom was born in 347 the

atmosphere, the memories, the corruption of

heathenish abominations still lingered.

Where there is lasciviousness there is cruelty.

Venus and Mars are worshipped together. Or, as

a modern French writer prefers to say: “Lust is

not barren. She brings forth a daughter. Fero-

city.” In the days just preceding those of Theo-

dosius and John Chrysostom, Diocletian, last of



ST. JOHN CHEYSOSTOM AND EMPRESS EUDOXIA 27

the persecutors, after slaughtering perhaps a

thousand times more Christians than Nero, died a

suicide. Maxentius, contender for the crown, was

drowned in his armor, in the Tiber. Licinius was

treacherously put to death. Constantine killed his

eldest son, who might have succeeded him. Con-

stantius, successor to Constantine, commenced his

reign, like Herod of old and Lenin in our day, by

“liquidating” all possible rivals for the throne.

Constantins II died in battle while invading the

territory of his brother Constans; Constans was

murdered by his soldiers. Callus was beheaded by

Constantins. Julian the apostate died at the age

of 37 in disaster and failure, probably shot by an

arrow from the bow of one of his own soldiers:

Jovian, who succeeded Julian, was suffocated af-

ter a reign of 8 months: Valentinian I died in a fit

of anger : Gratian was murdered by his own

guards: Valentinian II was found dead in a field

on the banks of the River Rhone.

As with the emperors, so mth their families,

their prime ministers, the heads of their armies,

rivals, usurpers, friends, enemies. Marcellinus, an

eye witness, says that in those years the vultures

fed not on common carrion but on the corpses of

kings.

Now, into that world comes John Chrysostom.

Inevitably he falls foul of a hundred enemies. The

fact that he avoids politics and takes no part in

court intrigue cannot save him. Cardinal New-

man says “Chrysostom’s gift of speech, as in the

instance of two great classical orators before

him” (Cicero and Demosthenes, I suppose) “was

to be his ruin.” But not his gift of speech alone.

A man endowed with the divine gift of eloquence



28 SAINTS VS. KINGS

may squander it, ministering to his own vanity

and that of sycophantic friends and patrons. He

will be “safe.” But when to eloquence there is

joined a godly zeal and indomitable courage, the

orator cannot but stir up opposition. The greatest

orators that ever lived were the Hebrew prophets.

All of them, says Jesus, were slain. The last and

greatest of them. John the Baptist was beheaded

by the infamous King Herod at the request of the

dancing girl, Salome. John Chrysostom was not

unmindful of the fate of his namesake, the Bap-

tist. But heedless of fate, he commenced a cam-

paign, like John the Baptist, against licentious-

ness. Like John the Baptist, he attracted the

common people. Indeed in all history there never

was such a favorite with the masses. They flocked

to hear him, as they had swarmed into the arena

to see the gladiators or into the hippoidrome to

watch the races and join in the inevitable fracas

that followed the victory of this jockey or that.

Even in the house of God the congregation ap-

plauded the golden-tongued orator, shouted ans-

wers to his rhetorical questions, laughed outright

at his satirical thrusts, writhed under his sar-

casm, wept and groaned with him, and though

they were fickle, emotional, volatile, like all Ori-

entals, indeed like some of our own in this west-

ern world, they doubtless made holy resolutions

while under his spell. It would seem, from the ac-

counts of eye witnesses to this amazing action and

reaction between preacher and people (we have by

the way, short-hand reports of his sermons) that

Chrysostom exercised an even more magnetic in-

fluence over the mind and heart of the crowd than

Savonarola over the Florentines of the Renais-



ST. JOHN CHEYSOSTOM AND EMPEESS EUDOXIA 29

sance era or Daniel O’Connell over the Irish of

yesterdaj^ In one of his sermons he says to the

people, in phrases that remind us of Jesus and of

St. Paul, “You are my fathers, my brothers, my

sons, my limbs, my body, my life, my crown, my

consolation, my anointing, my light.” So great

was his dominance over the citizens, first of An-

tioch and then of Cnnstantino*ple, that he could

have been the most powerful demagogue in his-

tory; so insecure were the foundations of the em-

pire and of civilization that with a gesture or a

cry he could have decided the fate of the throne

and of the world. But he refused to play the de-

magogue. He spoke not of politics but of morals.

He inveighed with terrifying effect against the vices

of the rich and of the poor, against the corruptions

of the clergy, the vanities of courtiers. With true

oratorical instinct he descended from generalities to

particulars : “He attacked avarice and luxury until a

cry arose that he was trying to set the poor against

the rich. He fulminated against immorality. He

spoke of the popular shows of the theatre and the

circus with execration. Nothing was too small for

his indignant satire. He denounced the use of ear-

rings, which would have maintained a thousand of

the poor. He ridiculed the gold bits used for horses,

the gold bracelets on the arms of menials, the rich

carpets on the floors of the palaces, the walls in-

crusted with marble and ivory, the silver couches,

the gold utensils. He advised the dandies of Con-

stantinople to wear their magnificent boots on their

heads instead of their feet. He rebuked the ladies

for their silk robes and gold embroideries. He drew

vivid pictures of the prevalent gluttony and friv-

olity. He did not hesitate to make his hearers laugh



30 SAINTS VS. KINGS

at their own follies, while at the same time he gave

vent to unsparing invective on the idle church at-

tendance which led to no moral amelioration, and

evaporated in excited applause of ‘crocodilian

tears’.”

Eudoxia the Empress and her evil trinity of

maenads, Marsa, Castricia, and Eugraphia, were not

spared. As one writer says, “When he was painting

in language of humorous scorn the picture of some

faded and bedizened dowager, or of some ‘lisping

hawthorn-bud’ of the court, there were ladies and

courtiers who would grow uneasy, and would under-

stand the smiles and meaning glances of their par-

ticular friends. Eudoxia, and the three ladies who

formed her council vowed revenge, and joined them-

selves heart and soul with the enemies of Chrysos-

tom.”

Of course they “got” him. Such women always

get their man—one way or the other. They stop at
nothing. They have no scruples. The women at the

court of Herod, as we read in the Gospels, were more

deadly than the monster himself. As at Jerusalem,

so at Constantinople. With spies who, failing to find

evidence, manufactured it, with sycophantic cour-

tiers playing into the hands of an angry empress,

with jealous clerics only too eager to join in the hue

and cry against the Archbishop—as if they were
Pharisees and Sadducees and he were Christ again—

.

it was not difficult to frame a case. The determining

occasion was the erection of a statue to Eudoxia in

front of the Cathedral. With characteristic Byzan-

tine extravagance it was of solid silver, upon a col-

umn of porphyry supported by a lofty base. For a

week or more public games were performed around

the statue, with ribald songs, riotous choruses, in-



ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM AND EMPRESS EUDOXIA 31

decent dancing, and the general demoralization that

accompanied such carnivals in the Orient. It was

like paganism revived, resurrected, rampant once

again in the streets. It was too much for John Chrys-

ostom. He opened his mouth and denounced the

whole indecent exhibition. The Empress was in-

furiated. To her the Archbishop’s protest was Use

majeste. She besought the Emperor and certain ser-

vile members of the hierarchy to convoke a synod

and depose the offender. John, refusing to be awed

by the imperial wrath, delivered a sermon so devas-

tating that all copies of it seem to have been confis-

cated and destroyed. But the commencement has

been preserved in Sozomen’s history: “Again Hero-

dias raves
;
again she is troubled

;
she dances again

;

again she detnands the head of John upon a

charger.”

That was the end, as he very well knew. Two at-

tempts were made upon his life; he was imprisoned

in his own home, and finally was deposed and ban-

ished. In chains he was taken across the Bosphorus

to the Asiatic shore, and led away prisoner into the

cheerless hinterland of Bithynia. He made no outcry

and no resistance, fearing for his people if they

should rise to rescue him, the fate that befell the

7,000 at Thessalonica.

Even so there was a tumult for which some of

his followers paid dear. His church was set afire, as

soon as he had left it, perhaps by his friends, per-

haps by enemies. Serapion, a monk, known to be

loyal to him, was seized and tortured with such

cruelty as would have shamed the Persians or the

North American savages. Others suffered the con-

fiscation of all their property, were sent into exile,

doomed to poverty and death.



H2 SAINTS VS. KINGS

One old chronicler says “The angel of the Church

went out with Chrysostom.” The golden candlestick

of the Church of Constantinople was removed.

The Pope, Innocent I, protested against the in-

justice and cruelty inflicted upon the patriarch of

Constantinople and his followers, but the Emperor

of the East was hostile, and the Emperor of the

West was beset with a thousand problems. Just then

the barbarians were threatening Italy and Rome. So

Saint John Chrysostom, illustrious orator, prophet,

saint, was left to his fate. He might have said with

Hildebrand: “I have loved justice and hated iniq-

uity; therefore I die in exile.” But his last words

were even more worthy, more like those of Christ,

“Glory to God for all that happened. Amen.”

Is there any need of repeating* the suggestion

that here is drama supreme, even sublime? K it be
thought sacrilegious to make a play of the passion

and death of Christ (unless indeed it be done piously

by simple peasants in the Tyrolese Alps) there can

be no such tabu against a drama on the life, conflict,

death, and ultimate vindication of John Chrysostom.

Great masters have written of Antony and Cleo-

patra, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet. Why

should not some modern master dramatist, if we

have one, take as his subject, if only for a change,

Chrysostom and Eudoxia?



THOMAS BECKET AND HENRY II. 33

THOMAS BECKET AND HENRY II.

Address delivered on November 28, 1937

Eight Henrys have sat on the throne of England,

but of them all only two, the second and the last, are

remembered outside England. Henry VIII, the

Bluebeard who married six wives and killed two of

them, will of course never be forgotten. His amatory

adventures make his fame—such as it is—secure.
Also he has a distinct place in Anglican ecclesiastical

annals as the first king who was also head of the

Church.

The other unforgettable Henry of England is the

Second. He was great grandson of William the Con-

queror in whose person the French took possession

of the throne of England, as did the Dutch in the per-

son of William of Orange, and the Germans with

George I.

In particular, the Irish have reason to remember

Henry II, for it was under him that the traitor king

of Leinster, Dermod, with Richard de Clare “Strong-

bow,” introduced the English occupation that was to

tease and torture the Irish from 1170 until 1916

—

seven centuries and a half of tyranny on the one side

and martyrdom on the other.

However, in this present series of dramatic epi-

sodes, I am not concerned with Henry’s invasion of
Ireland, though that piratical expedition from the

point of view of drama, not to say tragedy, was far

more important than the episode I have in mind for

consideration today. But since we are concerned

not with dramatic episodes merely, but with dra-

matic episodes in the lives of the saints—and there
was no saint at the invasion of Ireland—I have



34 SAINTS VS. KINGS

selected the conflict of Henry II with St. Thomas

Becket ending with the murder of the Archbishop in

the Cathedral of Canterbury.

Let us, therefore, present in accordance with our

custom in this course the dramatis personae.

Henry II, the first Plantagenet, had inherited two

provinces of France from his father and two from

his mother (provinces and the people were chattels

in those days), and when he married his queen, Elea-

nor, she brought him a dowry of seven provinces

more, so that he possessed one-third of France be-

fore he came across the Channel. In his twenty-first

year he fell heir to the kingdom of England, and so

became one of the most powerful sovereigns of the

twelfth century.

In character he was not unlike his ancestor the

Conqueror of a hundred years earlier, talented, am-

bitious, indefatigable, impetuous. One historian, the

excellent and accurate Lingard, says: “He was elo-

quent, affable, facetious
;
uniting with the dignity of

the prince the manners of the gentleman : but under

this fascinating outside he concealed a heart that

could descend to the basest artifices, and sport with

its own honour and veracity. No one would believe

his assertions or trust his promises: yet he justified

this habit of duplicity by the maxim, that it is better

to repent of words than of facts, to be guilty of false-

hood than to fail.”

He was an autocrat, jealous of power. He would

tolerate no other authority than his own. It was his

custom and his delight to humiliate and degrade any

nobleman who might perhaps begin to be too prom-

inent. Henry of course was not unique in that mat-

ter. Autocrats in all ages, perhaps most notably in



THOMAS BECKET AND HENRY II. 85

Russia today, use the “purge” to make sure that no

contender will get the better of them.

Giraldus Cambrensis, the famous chronicler of

the invasion of Ireland, who spent much time in the

company of the King, describes him as prone to an-

ger even to the point of apparent madness. He would

rage, on occasion, like a wild beast, his face scarlet,

his eyes blood-shot; and in that mood he would pour

out torrents of imprecation. When one of his minis-

ters of state ventured to say a good word for the

Scots, Henry in a paroxysm “threw down his cap,

ungirt his sword, tore off his clothes, sat down and

commenced to gnaw the straw on the floor.” When

a page boy on one occasion presented a letter he

didn’t care to receive, the King tried to tear out the

boy’s eyes.

Yet on the other hand, this spasmodically mad

monarch could be quite gentle, even charming and

captivating. His successor, Richard I, “The Lion

Hearted,” has been called “Richard Yea-and-Nay.”

Henry deserved the same dubious compliment. Now-

adays we call it Jekyll-and-Hyde.

The second important personage in the drama of

“Murder in the Cathedral” is Thomas Becket, son

of a rich and important merchant of London, a man

of extraordinary ability and of a dominant person-

ality. Educated in London, Oxford, Paris, Bologna,

Auxerre, his native ability rounded and developed by

travel as well as by study, Thomas, returning from

the Continent, became the favorite companion of the

King. Henry loaded the young courtier with favors,

made him warden of the Tower of London, custodian

of the Castle of Berghamsted, and allotted him 140

knights for his retinue. Thomas enjoyed this magni-

ficence, entertained like a prince, joined the king in



36 SAINTS VS. KINGS

his hunting trips and perhaps on less blameless

pleasures, though even his enemies, who naturally

were many—^the basis of most enmity being jealousy
—admit that Thomas was marvelously, supernatur-
ally chaste.

He became chancellor of the Kingdom, the high-

est office in the State, virtually governor of all the

domains of the King, in England and France, and he

held that exalted office until the death of Theobald,

Archbishop of Canterbury in 1160. Thereupon

—

strange though it seem in this our very different age

—^the King insisted that his chancellor, with whom
he was at the time travelling in Normandy, should

succeed Theobald. Thomas protested, alleging many

excuses, but being overruled, said to the King with

characteristic courage and honesty: “Should God

permit me to be archbishop of Canterbury, I should

soon lose your majesty’s favour, and the great af-

fection with which you honour me would be changed

into hatred. For your majesty will be pleased to

suffer me to tell you, that several things you do in

prejudice of the inviolable rights of the Church,

make me fear you would require of me what I could

not agree to : and envious persons would not fail to

make this pass for a crime, in order to make me lose

your favour.”

Besides his protestation to the King, Becket, at

least in the imagination of Lord Tennyson, made

protestation to God. The poet puts the words in

Thomas’ mouth:

“Am I the man? That rang

Within my head last night, and when I slept,

Methought I stood in Canterbury Minster,

And spake to the Lord God, and said, ‘O Lord,



THOMAS BECKET AND HENRY II. 37

I have been a lover of wines, and delicate meats.

And secular splendours, and a favourer

Of players, and a courtier, and a feeder

Of dogs and hawks, and apes, and lions and

lynxes.

Am I the man? And the Lord answered me,

‘Thou art the man, and all the more the man.’
”

He was ordained, consecrated, installed in the

primatial See of Canterbury. Presently his troubles

began
;
his prophecies of a rift with the King came

true. Henry had apparently imagined that with his

favorite friend both chancellor of the Kingdom and

archbishop of Canterbury, he, as king, could control

Church and State. If so, he did not know Thomas.

The union of Church and State in England under one

head, the king, was not to be. Not yet. Not for 400

years yet. Henry VIII would succeed in subjugating

the Church to the State, but he was to have the slip-

pery sycophantic time-serving apostate Cranmer,

archbishop of Canterbury, to help him. Thomas

Becket was no Cranmer. His was an independent

soul, unafraid of majesty, indomitable. As soon as

he had taken Holy Orders, he put aside worldliness,

lived abstemiously, in fact austerely; surrendered

the Chancellorship and devoted himself with the

single-mindedness of a Chrysostom or an Ambrose

to the service of Holy Mother Church.

Now there were the makings of conflict and of
superb drama : two strong men, conscious of power,

inflexible, immovable, confronting each other for one

more duel between the Church and the world, the

spiritual and the temporal.

As usual, the State, personified in this instance

by Henry, threw down the gauntlet to the Church,



38 SAINTS VS. KINGS

represented by Thomas Becket. Also, as usual, the

Church seemed to be beaten : the archbishop was an-

nihilated by the king’s fury. But once the crime is

done, the crucifixion complete, the Church like Christ

always ultimately triumphs. When Becket’s blood

stained the stone pavement at the foot of the altar

and, as the realistic chroniclers tell us, his brains lay

spattered over the floor, all Europe was aghast.

Hilaire Belloc says the murder of Becket became

recognized as “perhaps the most important fact of

the early middle ages.”

It’s a mysterious Thing—this Everlasting
Church. And paradoxical. When She thrives She

fades
;
when She dies She lives. Kings, emperors, all

sorts of worldly potentates fail to see that fact. From

Herod to Nero, to Diocletian, to Attila, to Barbaros-

sa, to Philip the Fair, to Napoleon, to Bismarck to

Hitler to Lenin and Stalin, they blunder one after

the other, and all in the same way. They never

learn. They are not statesmen. A statesman, ac-
cording to the adage, never makes the same mis-

take twice. Say also, a statesman doesn’t make the

same mistake that some one else has made. Too bad

they don’t read the Bible. There they would find his-

tory, philosophy, wisdom, experience, prophecy, ev-

erything. “Touch not my anointed,” says God in the

Sacred Writ. Kings are never so stupid as when they

kill the priests or the prelates of God’s Church.

However, let’s drop the moralizing and return to

the drama.

The conflict between Henry the King and

Becket the Archbishop centered about two points

:

first, the immunity of the clergy from punishment

inflicted by the State. In those days the Church had

courts of its own and insisted upon its right to judge



THOMAS BECKET AND HENRY II. 39

those who belonged to the clerical state. There was

wisdom in that custom, in an age when kings were

arrogant and powerful and would in many cases be

only too quick to oppress the Church by imprisoning

the clergy or putting them to death. Let us grant

that conditions are different today, and pass on to

the other cause of conflict which is most decidedly

not different today.

Henry demanded that Thomas should sign a

document called “The Constitutions of Clarendon.”

One of those “Constitutions” reads as follows: “The

custody of every vacant archbishopric, bishopric, ab-

bey and priory of royal foundation, ought to be

given, and its revenues paid to the king; and the

election of a new incumbent ought to be made in con-

sequence of the king’s writ, by the chief clergy of

the church, assembled in the king’s chapel, with the

assent of the king, and with the advice of such pre-

lates as the king may call to his assistance.”

That is to say, the king had his eyes on the rev-

enues of the Church. In this he anticipated Henry

VIII by four centuries. Furthermore, he thought he

had the Archbishop and the Pope gagged and bound

by another one of the “Constitutions” which forbade

the excommunication of any tenant of the king, or

officer of his household, without the king’s permis-

sion. Shrewd ! The king could appropriate the pro-

perty or the funds of the Church and as Henry VIII

did, later bestow them on tenants, officers, courtiers

of his own choosing, pay his debts with them and

what not. The only recourse of the ecclesiastical

authority in such circumstances was excommunica-

tion, but there could be no excommunication unless

the king agreed

!

Yet another one of these cleverly framed “Con-



40 SAINTS VS. KINGS

stitutions” reads that no archbishop, bishop, or

priest, could go overseas without the king’s permis-

sion. That is to say, there could be no visiting the

pope unless the king said so.

Against those tyrannies Thomas stood like a rock.

In retaliation the King fined him. Thomas paid the

fine. The King fined him again, demanding an ut-

terly impossible sum, 44,000 marks. Then came the

“third degree.” The king, face to face with Becket in

the royal palace, threatens him with exile or death. A
door opens behind the archbishop, a body of knights

appears, their garments tucked up and swords

drawn.

The contest went on, Becket in one instance

seeming to waver, but he quickly recovered himself

and again declined to surrender the Church into the

keeping of the king. The Earl of Leicester, at the

head of the barons, is sent by Henry into a convoca-

tion of the bishops to read sentence against Thomas.

Thereupon the Archbishop makes a noble speech:

“You know with what fidelity I served the king, how

reluctantly, to please him, I accepted my present of-

fice, and in what manner I was declared ‘by him free

from all secular claims. For what happened before

my consecration, I ought not to answer nor will I.

Know, moreover, that you are my children in God.

Neither law nor reason allows you to judge your

father. I therefore decline your tribunal, and refer

my quarrel to the decision of the Pope. To him I

appeal; and shall now, under the protection of the

Catholic Church, and the Apostolic See, depart.’ As

he walked along the hall, some of the courtiers threw

at him knots of straw, which they took from the

floor. A voice called him a traitor. At the word he
stopped and hastily turning round, rejoined: ‘Were



THOMAS BECKET AND HENRY II. 41

it not that my order forbids me, that coward should

repent of his insolence.’ At the gate he was received

with acclamations of joy by the clergy and people

and was conducted in triumph to his lodgings.”

The people had the true instinct. From first to

last they recognized the Archbishop as their friend

and champion, the only buffer between them and the

tyrannies of the King and the barons.

But the King and the barons' were to have their

way. Thomas had managed to get to France and

to Rome. He saw the Pope and returned to his fate.

The King, impetuous, hot tempered, unrestrained in

speech, exclaimed “Will no one rid me of this pestil-

ent priest?” Four subservient Knights, not ashamed

to become assassins, at what seemed to them to be

the suggestion of the King (their names are infam-

ous, Reginald Fitzurse, William Tracy, Hugh de

Moreville, and Richard Brito) hurried to the Cathe-

dral, found the Archbishop praying before the altar

and cut him down in cold blood in circumstances of

appalling savagery.

The people mourned and threatened rebellion.

The Pope summoned the murderers to Rome, treat-

ing them mercifully when they arrived, apparently

stricken with repentance. The King protested inno-

cence, went into deep mourning, refused for months

on end to take any comfort in life and was in the end

saved from the consequences of the crime, doubtless

because of the prayers of the saint whom he had sent

prematurely out of the world.

From that time forth Canterbury has been a

place of pilgrimage. From all parts of England,

from all corners of Europe pilgrims have come to

Canterbury for 800 years. St. Thomas Becket, with

his countrymen St. Thomas More and St. John Fish-



42 SAINTS VS. KINGS

er, will be held forever in renown and veneration by

all who love justice, hate tyranny, and dread the

dominance of the State over the Church.

Today the worst portent to those who love liberty

is the totalitarian state in which king or dictator

may at will proscribe religion and deny the rights of

conscience. Against the menace of the totalitarian

state we may well invoke that champion of the free

conscience and the'free Church, St. Thomas Becket.



CATHERINE OF SIENA AND AVIGNON 43

CATHERINE OF SIENA AND AVIGNON.

Address delivered on December 5, 1937

Every public speaker, indeed every writer or pub-

licist in any medium whatever, is tempted at times

to exaggerate the importance of the subject he hap-

pens to be discussing. He must therefore beware of

superlatives. Exaggeration is poor art and bad ar-

gument.

None the less, while I thus warn myself of dan-

ger, I venture the sweeping declaration that St.

Catherine of Siena is the most amazing woman in

history. The century in which she lived was the most

deeply demoralized that has been seen since Chris-

tianity began. Society, both lay and clerical, politi-

cal and ecclesiastical, was in a condition of chaos,

and in consequence she seems the more unaccount-

able. In the next century came Joan of Arc, whose

career was so supernatural as to seem incredible. Yet

Catherine had ten talents where Joan had but one.

Joan’g life centered around her king. Catherine was

guide, philosopher, and friend, sometimes a very

stern friend, to all the kings of Christendom. Joan

started as a shepherdess and became a general. Cath-

erine was a dyer’s daughter, who came to be an

oracle to all the world. Joan, when her king proved

craven, appealed to the Pope. Catherine achieved

ascendancy over kings and queens, and encouraged,

admonished, upbraided, guided the Pope while still a

girl in her twenties. Without what the world calls

“birth” or “breeding” with no political or social

prestige, with little or no formal education, Cather-

ine dominated her century by sheer personality. Her

genius was not intellectual like Hypatia’s, or aesthe-



44 SAINTS VS. KINGS

tic like Sappho’s; her renown was not based upon

preternatural wickedness like that of Messalina, or

Lucrezia Borgia, or her infamous namesake Cather-

ine of Russia, but upon the loftiest kind of genius:

sanctity.

But since we are following in this course of talks

the idea that the lives of certain saints afford mar

terial for superb drama, let us have as it were the

setting.

When Catherine was born at Siena in 1348 the

most devastating plague in history, the Black Death,

was raging. It had appeared in Constantinople and

Greece in the preceding year, passed like fire to

Genoa, Milan, Siena, Florence, swept the whole Ital-

ian peninsula from the Alps to Sicily, leaped to

Spain, to France, to England, to Germany, and fin-

ally to the entire European continent. It took a toll

of life greater than that of any war that was ever

fought. In all Italy one half the population perished.

In certain localities the mortality ran as high as 65

to 70 percent. In the city of Paris the tumbrils car-

ried off to the burial pits 800 bodies a day for a,per-

iod of two years. In one small town of 1000 souls

there remained only eight when the pestilence had

passed. Twenty-five million persons in all died

swiftly, terribly in the Black Death. Thousands un-

touched by the plague died of fear. Mothers forsook

their babies. Husbands killed their wives, their chil-

dren, and themselves. Fanaticism flared up; flagel-

lants scourged themselves bloody in all the streets.

Crime fiourished, and debauchery. Some of those

that escaped death, or thought they had escaped, in-

dulged in hysterical orgies. Jews were murdered,

12,000 of them in one city, Mainz. Of all classes of

persons priests especially fell victims to the plague



CATHERINE OF SIENA AND AVIGNON 45

doubtless because they ministered to the stricken. In

England half of all the clergy died, a fact that helps

to explain the demoralization that ensued.

In a word the Black Death of the 14th century

was the most devastating phenomenon of historical

times. Petrarch called it II Trionfo della Morte, the

“Triumph of Death.”

Another calamity of that tragic era was the aban-

donment of Rome by the popes in consequence of

political disturbances. From 1306 to 1377 nine popes

in succession lived at Avignon in Southern France.

For those 72 years the government of the Church
'

was under French influence. What with the machin-

ations of kings, queens, and a corrupt court, the

honor and prestige of the papacy suffered a blow

from which it did not recover in two centuries. That

fact helps to explain the success of the attempt, in

the sixteenth century, to divide Europe against

itself, and that in turn helps to explain what ails

Europe today.

The “Babylonish Captivity” of the Church in Av-

ignon was as scandalous as it was tragic. St. Cath-

erine with tears and groans, persuasion, warnings,

threats of the wrath of God, besought the Pope to

leave the beautiful beguiling enervating Provencal

country. Petrarch, great poet that he was and after

his own fashion something of a saint, declared Avig-

non to be “the fountain of anguish, the dwelling

place of wrath, the school of errors, the temple of

heresy, a guilt-laden Babylon, a forge for lies, a hell

upon earth.” A drastic indictment, perhaps it seems
hysterical. But St. Catherine says worse things of

the papal capital in Provence. She organized an ex-

pedition—one of the strangest in history, herself at
its head, her mother, a number of young men who



46 SAINTS VS. KINGS

had been converted from their sins; an ex-criminal

or two, a Dominican priest, some simple matrons of

the Rosary Society type—this amazing cortege, part
on foot and part on mule-back, made its way over the

Alps around the Mediterranean shore to the French

Babylon.

At Rome meanwhile there was desolation. The

Lamentations of Jeremias over Jerusalem could be

repeated of Rome: “Now doth the city sit solitary

that was full of people! how is the mistress of the

Gentiles become as a widow, the princes of provinces

made tributary ! Weeping she hath wept in the night,

and her tears are on her cheeks: there is none to

comfort her among all them that were dear to her

!

All her friends have despised her, and are become

her enemies . . . The ways of Sion mourn, because

there are none that come to the solemn feast : all her

gates are broken down : her priests sigh : her virgins

are in affliction, and she is oppressed with bitter-

ness.”

St. Peter’s and St. John Lateran’s were in ruins,

roofless, open to the sky and to the elements. Grass

grew on the floors of the churches; cattle grazed

even at the foot of the high altar. The Coliseum and

other monumental buildings became a quarry. “More

marble was quarried at Rome than at Carrara” says

Ludwig Pastor. Italy was dominated by tyrants, and

overrun with bandits. Cities fought one another,

while factions carried on feuds within their walls.

Little armies of mercenaries imported from Ger-

many, Brittany, Hungary, England, ranged up and

down the land, selling their services to the highest

bidder. One of the maddest, fiercest of these legions

of desperadoes was that under the leadership of Sir

John Hawkwood of whom they said that he was “an



CATHERINE OF SIENA AND AVIGNON 47

Englishman Ital,ianate, a devil incarnate.” It was he

who seeing two of his ruffians disputing the posses-

sion of a woman in a captured and looted town, drew

his sword, cut her in two from head to foot with one

blow as with a butcher’s cleaver, and said “Each one

take half.” St. Catherine came face to face with this

monster, overawed him, berated him as a school

teacher might scold an unruly pupil, wrote letters to

him and if she couldn’t save his soul it must have

been because his crimes had made him reprobate.

However, not only soldiers, brigands, outlaws,

bands of hired gladiators contributed to the chaos in

the Italian peninsula in that terrible 14th century.

On occasion even monks, friars, clerics, fought and

killed one another. The nobles were an especially

murderous lot. Bernardo Visconti, despot of Milan,

vicar of the Emperor, condottiere, was a monster,

subject to paroxysms of bestial fury. He kept on his

estate 5,000 hunting dogs, as wild as wolves. If

anything went wrong with these beasts, their keep-

ers were flogged, tortured, blinded. Two Franciscan

friars who had the hardihood to remind Visconti of

death and judgment, were first ridiculed and then

burned to death. This raging tyrant who would be

imprisoned today as a homicidal maniac, was Duke

of Milan, patron of the fine arts, a lover of poetry, a

Maecenas to writers, and into the bargain he was

something of a Napoleon of military strategy. In

an age of faith he was an infidel, fought the Pope,

scoffed at excommunication. When the Pope sent a

messenger to hand him a bull of excommunication,

Visconti made the messenger eat the document, seal

and all, then dressed up a lunatic in ridiculous vest-

ments and had him excommunicate the Pope. He

combined in himself, says Augusta Theodosia Drane,



48 SAINTS VS. KINGS

the brutality of the 11th century, the astute cunning

of the 16th, and the skepticism of the 18th.

Yet even this Mephistopheles stood in awe of St.

Catherine, accepted her rebukes without remon-

strance, and begged her to patch up his “reputation

as a pious Christian.” She wrote him, “to glory in

one’s human power is folly and madness
;
no man can

be called Lord or master of anything here below; any

one who revolts against Jesus Christ in the person of

His Vicar on earth is mad.”

Even that plain language the savage Bernardo

accepted meekly and asked Catherine to pay a visit

to him and his wife Beatrice Scaliger (La Scala), the

“proudest, vainest, most ambitious woman of her

time,” who called herself Queen, and wrote for her

own epitaph “Beatrice, Queen, the Glory of Italy
!”

Far worse than Beatrice was the notorious Jo-

anna, Queen of Naples, who, as some historians say,

was the cruelest and most vicious woman that ever

lived. Her contemporaries called her Regina Mere-

trix, which may just as well be left untranslated.

-But even this unspeakable creature respected St.

Catherine, accepted her rebukes, listened to her ad-

monitions and was on occasions for a brief spell con-

verted by her.

Truly it was a wild and terrible world with more

than its share of incredibly violent people. Ludwig

Pastor, greatest of the historians of the Popes, says,

“Hardly ever has a country fallen into such anarchy

as did the Italian peninsula when bereft of her prin-

ciple of unity by the unfortunate decision of Clement

V to fix'his abode in France.” (I. 63).
Though I am as a rule rigorously refraining

from preaching or moralizing in these talks, may I

interject the remark that, if by an impossibility, the



CATHEEINE OF SIENA AND AVIGNON 49

papacy and all that it means were to be removed

from the world today as it was from Italy in the 14th

century, the world, like Italy, would fall a prey to

anarchy.

The worst is still to be told. From 1378 to 1417,

that is for 39 years, there was always an anti-pope,

sometimes two anti-popes, each one creating card-

inals, appointing bishops, and each one excommuni-

cating the others. This was the most desperate con-

dition in which the Catholic Church ever found her-

self—the Black Death, the Babylonish Captivity, and
the Great Schism all in one century; what wonder

that in exactly another century after the close of the

schism, Luther was able to preach revolt and to a

degree succeed? But if ever there was a vindication

of the prophecy that the “gates of Hell should not

prevail” against the Church it is in the fact that She

survived that anarchy, reconstructed faith and

morals out of the chaos, and regained Her position

in the forefront of the moral forces of the world.

That She did so is due in no small measure to

Catherine Benincasa, the dyer’s daughter of Siena,

whom we now call St. Catherine. Any one less cour-

ageous than this girl—she was only 20 when she
commenced her public career and only 33 when she

died—I say any woman less heroic or with a less ro-
bust faith would have accepted Hamlet’s injunction

to Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery;” but though

Catherine did become a Dominican of the Third Or-

der, she entered no convent. Her field of action was

not the cloister, but all Italy, France, Europe, the

world. She prayed as much as any cloistered nun,

but she found time none the less to fight the battle

for God in person all over Christendom. She inter-

vened between feudists, confronted bandits, acted as



50 SAINTS VS. KINGS

ambassador between warring families and cities.

She interviewed every powerful personage, good,

bad, wicked, devilish: more than once she stepped

forth upon an actual battlefield, into the midst of

blood and death; she went into prisons, converted

murderers; renewed the faith of atheists; held a

group of young men in the hollow of her hand and

made saints of them
;
directed the activities of Ray-

mond of Capua, master general of the great Domin-

ican order
;
dictated while in ecstasy one of the most

eloquent and moving books in the history of litera-

ture; wrote letters innumerable to kings, queens,

dictators, tyrants, captains of soldiers; dealt on fa-

miliar terms with the Popes, came at their invita-

tion to the papal palace, reminded them of their

duty, warned them of the judgments of God, com-

manded them to clean house, called them by the pet

name Babbo mio, “my papa.” From the audience

chamber of the Pope,' she would go to the palace of

the Jezabel of Naples, 'Joanna
;
to the madman Vis-

conti and his “Queen” Beatrice
;
to the field camp of

the murderous Sir John Hawkwood; to a jail, to a

scaffold, to the hospitals, to a sick bed, to a pest-

house. Popes, priests, women, good, bad, and worse,

young men, old men, saints, devils, bandits, kings,

warring nobles, criminals at Rome, Genoa, Pisa,

Florence, Naples, Avignon, everywhere, called this

girl in her twenties “Mamma.” A handsome dashing
young nobleman, Stefano Maconi, used to ride like a

Centaur through the streets of Siena at the head of

a company of armed men, shouting the battle cry of

his house, doing battle in the narrow streets with

the forces of rival families. His own mother bade

him put an end to these senseless feuds, and sug-

gested Catherine as arbitrator (The saint was al-



CATHERINE OF SIENA AND AVIGNON 51

ways arbitrating in these internecine wars). Ste-

fano laughed and said “Tell her to say her rosary
!”

She did say the Rosary and the young fellow came

like a dog to her feet. Under her guidance he made

peace, went to Confession, and changed his life.

Young fellows like himself, who had fallen under the

spell of the saintly virgin, were nicknamed “Cater-

inati,” be-Catherined (bedeviled, as it were, or be-

witched). Maconi became one of them. On another

occasion when a man unjustly condemned to death

was cursing and reviling God, she went to his cell,

calmed him, bestowed a supernatural peace upon

him, went to the scaffold with him, knelt beside the

block and when the axe fell, caught his head in her

apron.

Of course she didn’t succeed in all her attempts.

But it is safe to say that if it had not been for the

influence of St. Catherine of Siena civilization might

have bogged down so deep that not even yet could it

have come to the surface again.

I conclude as I commenced—with the expression
of my belief that the character and career of St.
Catherine of Siena are amazing in the highest de-

gree. Here then is material for a noble drama, not

mythological as in the Greek classics, not borrowed

from old stories and legends or adapted from inac-

curate chronicles as was so often the case with

Shakespeare, but even though it be so startling and

spectacular as to seem fictitious, nevertheless authen-

tic; in other words, incredible but true; and what

can be more dramatic than that?



52 SAINTS VS. KINGS

ST. PAUL AND AGRIPPA
Address delivered on December 12, 1937

The essence of drama is conflict—conflict of per-
sons, or conflict of forces. In the case of the apostle

Paul and King Agrippa there is a conflict both of

persons and of forces, and the drama is consequently

heightened. First let us look upon the two men who

are central figures in the action that took place at

Caesarea in Palestine about 17 years after the death

of Jesus at Jerusalem.

Agrippa was a Herod. Perhaps that tells it all.

Of the many dynasties, great and small, short-lived

and long-lived, that have graced or disgraced the

pages of history the Herods are the most notorious.

Not the Pharaohs, not the Ptolemys, not the Cae-

sars, not the Sassanidae, not the Romanoffs, but the

Herods are remembered as paragons of cruelty and

lechery, past masters in murder, adultery, incest,

sexual promiscuity. If there be any renown in

achieving the loftiest heights or the nethermost

depths of wickedness, that renown belongs to the

Herods.

This superlatively wicked house commenced with

Herod called “the Great,” who occupied the throne

when our Savior was born. His father. Antipater,

had been a friend of Julius Caesar and Mark An-

tony. Caesar had bestowed Roman citizenship upon

Antipater and made him procurator of Judea.
_
It re-

mained for the son to be King of the Jews.

Herod Agrippa II, like all the Herods, fawned on

the Romans. A tyrant in Palestine, he was a lick-
spittle in Rome. Claudius the imbecile emperor, and

then Nero the incredible demon, were his friends.



ST. PAUL AND AGRIPPA 58

There is sardonic irony in the fact that when St.

Paul in the presence of Agrippa appealed to Caesar

he was escaping Herod only to fall into the hands of

Nero

!

Herod Agrippa was not the only one concerned

in the trial of St. Paul. The Apostle had passed

through the hands of no less than three provincial

nabobs before he reached the King, four before he

reached the Emperor. All readers of the Gospel are

familiar with the fact that Jesus in His passion was

sent back and forth from Pilate to Herod and from

Herod back to Pilate again. St. Paul was taken in

charge first by Lysias in Jerusalem. But Lysias was

only a centurion, a kind of captain of military police.

He had sent his soldiers into the streets to rescue

Paul from a mob that would have torn him to pieces,

just as a police captain today, knowing nothing and

caring nothing for the right or wrong of a case in

dispute, sends his men into the midst of a mob to

snatch away some one who happens to be the bone

of contention.

Having picked Paul up, Lysias would have been

glad to drop him like a hot coal. In fact he would

have thrown him back to the mob, as one throws a

chunk of meat to a pack of yelping hounds, as Pon-

tius Pilate had thrown Jesus to the bloodthirsty fan-

atics in the streets of Jerusalem. Like his Master,

Paul was about to be scourged but saved himself

with three magic words: “Civis Romanus sum,"

which even the great Cicero was wont to speak with

reverence and pride, “I am a Roman citizen.” Lysias

awed, if not frightened at the realization of how

close he had come to a crime against the Roman

State, threw a cordon of soldiers around the pris-

oner, took him to the hall of the Sanhedrin. Here



64 SAINTS VS. KINGS

and now occurred an incident characteristic of the

always unabashed St. Paul. The high priest, a des-

picable person named Ananias, an appointee of

Herod and like the Herods, tyrannical, rapacious,

greedy, violent, profligate, who had been summoned

to Rome but was saved from the consequences of his

crimes by the perjury of an actor and a concubine,

ordered St. Paul to be struck on the mouth. St. Paul,

turning to the high priest, said “God shall smite

thee, thou whited wall !’’ Some pious readers are sur-

prised if not scandalized at this outburst, so unlike

the' patient forbearance of Jesus. They forget that

Jesus had said just that and a hundred times more

to the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Indeed “whited

wall” is a toning down of Christ’s own expression

“whited sepulchre.”

The trial proving nothing, Lysias had the pris-

oner brought to his palace for safe keeping. Forty

young men, probably sicarii, hired assassins with

daggers, doubtless at the instigation of the high

priest, took a terrible oath that they would not sleep

or eat until they had killed Paul.

But Lysias, gathering a formidable company of

400 soldiers, sent Paul by night over the 35 miles of

bandit-infested road to Caesarea. Doubtless he

heaved a great sigh of relaxation when the horse-

men came back with the report that they had handed

over the agitator to the Roman governor Felix.

Between Paul and Felix another dramatic epi-

sode occurred. Drama was always breaking out

wherever St. Paul happened to be. Felix was a

Roman but a loathsome specimen. As successor to

Pontius Pilate, he had obtained his office by» bribery.

Pretending to prosecute the bandits that infested the

famous Roman roads, he really shared the spoils of



ST. PAUL AND AGRIPPA 66

murder with them like any modern politician who

plays along with criminals. “Graft” is a modern

name for an' ancient evil. The “rake off” was not

discovered or invented yesterday.

“Felix had been a slave in the vilest of all posi-

tions, in the vilest of all epochs, in the vilest of all

cities.” * The Roman historian Tacitus describes

him in a sentence, “Antonius Felix exercised the

power of a king with the spirit of a slave, cruel and

lustful.” Though ugly to the point of repulsiveness

in personal appearance, Felix possessed some cur-

• ious fascination which only women can understand

(and perhaps only a certain brand of woman). He

had enticed his consort Drusilla, a Jewess, sister of

Herod Agrippa, away from her husband. And there

they sat enthroned when St. Paul was ushered in to

be tried. Here in itself is drama, a prince of saints,

the high-minded, pure-souled, incorrupt champion

of all that is good and holy, standing to be judged

by a loathsome reptile of a man, with a runaway

adulteress at his side. Unafraid, St. Paul preached

to them of “righteousness and chastity and of

the judgment to come.” Felix was frightened, but

like a good many other sinners he “bluffed it out” as

men say, temporized, procrastinated. “I will hear

thee again on this matter, but for this time go thy

way.” If the pagan was moved, what of the Jewess?

Pilate’s wife sent warning to her husband when

Jesus was up for judgment, “Have thou nothing to

do with that just man.” But Drusilla had no warn-

ing to give. No dream had come to her, no vision.

She was too far gone. “The mills of God grind

slowly,” says the adage. But they grind fast enough.

* Farrar Life and Work of St. Paul, II, p. 689,



56 SAINTS VS. KINGS

In a couple of years, Felix was demoted, disgraced.

He barely escaped execution.

He was succeeded by Festus, a befter type. The

new governor being installed, the Sanhedrin re-

doubled its efforts to get possession of St. Paul.

When Festus went first to Jerusalem, the Pharisees

stirred up the mob in the court of the Praetorium as

they had in Pilate’s day to cry for the blood of a

victim. But Festus was no such blunderer and no

such coward as Pontius Pilate. He stood his ground.

He would throw no sop to bloodhounds. As a Roman

—of the race of conquerors—^he despised these bick-
ering, quarreling, screeching, gesticulating fanatics.

But he knew not what to do with Paul. Lysias

had passed him along to Felix, and Felix had be-

queathed him to Festus. The Governor dared not kill

him for Paul had claimed, and proved, his Roman

citizenship. So what to do? He had summoned Paul

once and again and again, in the hope of discovering

either a crime for which he could be put out of the

way, or wanting that, a solution of the problem. But

all to no avail.

Festus was no more weary of the impasse than

Paul. There was the saint in a dungeon vile, its

walls bespattered with the blood of hundreds of

Herod’s victims. From that filthy prison he had

been brought forth whenever the mood was on the

procurator to interrogate him, and back he went

again when the interpellation was finished. Back to

the blood, the vermin, the dark, in chains with blas-

phemous bawdy soldiers to watch him and mur-

derers to keep him company.

So the next time Festus had him up from his

black hole to ask him “Wilt thou go up to Jeru-

salem?”, Paul issued his ultimatum: “I stand at



ST. PAUL AND AGRIPPA 67

Caesar’s judgment seat, where I ought to be judged.

To the Jews I have done no injury, as thou very well

knowest. For if I have injured them, or have com-

mitted,any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to

die. But if there be none of these things whereof

they accuse me, no man may deliver me to them : I

appeal to Caesar.” Then Festus having conferred

with the council, answered : “Hast thou appealed to

Caesar? To Caesar shalt thou go.”

Still there remained one more chance for Festus

to wash his hands of the unpleasant business with-

out bothering the emperor in far-away Rome. No

subordinate official likes to admit to his chief that

he cannot manage affairs in his own bailiwick. Now

it happened that King Agrippa, with his queen Ber-

nice, was come to pay a visit to the Governor. Paul’s

name came up in the conference, “I should like to see

him and hear him,” said Agrippa. “You shall, to-

morrow” said Festus.

They made a gala occasion of it. Festus, a new

man anxious to make an impression, staged the

affair with all the ceremonial allowed him by Rome.

Agrippa and Bernice, not to play second fiddle to a

subaltern, came, says the Scripture “with great

pomp; and whfen they were entered into the hall of

audience, with the tribunes and the principal men

of the city, at Festus’ commandment Paul was

brought forth.” *

There, I suggest, is a scene for some artist accus-

tomed to a large and brilliant canvas, or for a mas-

ter dramatist with a flair for spectacle and a genius

for making character emerge even from the midst

of gorgeous trappings. I find what I think to be a

brilliant and yet restrained description of the scene

in Canon Farrar : “It was a show occasion designed



58 SAINTS VS. KINGS

for the amusement of these princely guests, and the

idle aristocracy of Caesarea, both Jewish and Gen-

tile. . . The Herods were fond of show, and Festus

gratified their humour by a grand processional dis-

play. He would doubtless appear in his scarlet palu-

dament, with his full attendance of lictors and body-

guard, who would stand at arms behind the gilded

chairs which were placed for himself and his dis-

tinguished visitors. We a,re expressly told that
Agrippa and Bernice went in state to the Praetor-

ium, she, doubtless, blazing with all her jewels, and

he in his purple robes, and both with the golden

circlets of royalty around their foreheads, and at-

tended by a suite of followers in the most gorgeous

apparel of Eastern pomp. . . Did Agrippa think of

his great-grandfather Herod, and the massacre of

the innocents? Of his great-uncle Antipas, and the

murder of John the Baptist? Of his father Agrippa

I, and the execution of James the Elder? Did he re-

call the fact that they had each died or been dis-

graced, soon after, or in direct consequence of, those

inflictions of martyrdom? Did he realize how close-

ly, but unwittingly, the faith in that ‘one Jesus’ had

been linked with the destinies of his house? Did the

pomp of today remind him of the pomjfsixteen years

earlier, when his much more powerful father had

stood in the theatre, with the sunlight blazing on the

tissued silver of his robe, and the people shouting

that he was a god? Did none of the dark memories

of the place overshadow him as he entered that

former palace of his race? It is very unlikely. Ex-

treme vanity, gratified self-importance, far more

probably absorbed the mind of this titular king, as,

in all the pomp of phantom sovereignty, he swept

along the large open hall, seated himself with his



ST. PAUL AND AGRIPPA 69

beautiful sister by the Procurator’s side, and

glanced with cold curiosity on the poor, worn,

shackled prisoner—pale with sickness and long im-
prisonment—^who was led in at his command.”

The prisoner was a small man, not prepossessing

in appearance. Two years in a dungeon had half

blinded him; insufficient food had emaciated him

and made him haggard; he was unkempt, his beard

scraggly, his clothing ragged and dirty. He blinked

as he came into the light like the martyrs as they

stepped from the black dungeons of the Coliseum

into the dazzling sunlight of the arena. He would

walk slowly, painfully, stumbling perhaps, and he

would seem for the moment bewildered with the

pageantry. In this day the phrase was already cur-

rent “butchered to make a Roman holiday.” Did

that idea leap to his mind ? Did he say to himself,

“If not butchered to make a holiday, exhibited to

make a spectacle”?

At any rate there he was, the poor insignificant

Cilician Jew face to face with all the pomp that the

Orient could muster, perhaps even more gorgeous

than that of Rome, with more ceremonial, etiquette,

more bowings and bendings, prostrations, more

kowtowing on the part of the menials and more

hauteur in the bearing of the potentates.

But the little man is not impressed. Still less is

he frightened. For it happens, despite those rags,

that shaggy head, and untrimmed beard, that coun-

tenance dead white with prison pallor, there on the

polished marble fioor inlaid with mosaics of gold,

standing barefoot, chained by his wrists and ankles,

was a splendid specimen of man, man at his noblest

and best, superlatively intelligent, courageous, fear-

ing not mobs or kings or emperors, no more in awe



60 SAINTS VS, KINGS

of Herod Agrippa than John the Baptist had been of

Agrippa’s grandfather. Men like John the Baptist

’and Paul have a way of being blind to ceremonial

frippery and seeing only what is behind and beneath

these disguises for impoverished souls, these substi-

tutes for natural dignity, these masks invented to

conceal the too obviously weak physiognomy of

lechers, sybarites, tyrants. The little boy in the

legend cried out “The king has no clothes on!” To

children, prophets, seers, saints, no king has any

clothes on. They see through cloth of gold, and silks

and ruffles to the skin and through the skin to the

soul.

So Paul stands before Herod Agrippa, pierces

through the grandiose vesture, reads him as the

Judge of the living and the dead will one day read us

all, and, so far from being afraid of him or over-

awed by him, pities him. Paul must have thought of

Herod what John the Divine later wrote to the

bishop of the Church of Laodicea, “Thou sayest: I

am rich, and made wealthy, and have need of noth-

ing : . . . knowest not that thou art wretched, and

miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked?” (Apoc.

3 :17 ).

In these talks I have been calling for a drama-

tist: at this point I think I shall have to call for an

actor, one possessed of supreme talent, who could

stand in rags on the marble floor of a king’s palace

and without so much as a word or a syllable convey

to an audience the thoughts that rushed through the

teeming mind of St. Paul as he stood for those first

few moments before Festus the Governor, Agrippa

the King, and Bernice the Queen. While Paul stands

there saying nothing, Herod commences to squirm

like Pontius Pilate on his throne when Jesus had



ST. PAUL AND AGEIPPA 61

just stood and looked at him. “It is permitted thee

to speak,” said the king.

The poor, starved, ragged, seemingly forlorn

prisoner, with gyves on his wrists and chains on his

ankles, opens his mouth
;
and what eloquence bursts

forth ! And yet it was a simple tale—true eloquence
is always simple: the story of his life, his short

career as a persecutor of Christians, his part in the

stoning of Stephen, his mad dash down the Damas-

cus road breathing threats and slaughter, the vision,

the brief supernatural dialogue that passed from

heaven to earth and back again, “Saul, Saul, why

persecutest thou Me?” “Who art Thou Lord.” “I am

Jesus Whom thou persecutest”
;
the blindness, and

the falling away of the scales from his eyes, the re-

treat into the wilderness, the return, the attack of

the Pharisees upon him, his answer, his trial, but

more than all these things, his faith in God, in Jesus,

in the Resurrection.

Festus the pagan, stirred to the depth of his soul,

leaps to his feet and cries, “Paul thou art beside

thyself ! Much learning doth make thee mad.” And

Paul’s sane calm response, “I am not mad, most ex-

cellent Festus: I speak words of truth and sober-

ness.” With unaffected eagerness, yet with perfect

self-possession the prisoner calls upon the King to

stand witness for him: “The king knoweth these

things of which I speak. None of these things are

hidden from him. Neither was any of these things

done in a corner.” With most disconcerting simplic-

ity he looks the king in the eye and puts him, as it

were, in the dock. “Believest thou the prophets, 0

King Agrippa?” A moment’s hesitation. “I know
that thou believest!” It is the king’s turn to rise



62 SAINTS VS. KINGS

from his golden chair: he exclaims, “A little more

and thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”

That is the climax. After that the drama, as in

the classics, falls away gradually to its close. The

king, the governor. Queen Bernice, and all the big-

wigs of Caesarea leave the hall less pompously than

they came in.

The poor little man from Tarsus has, with all

the innocence in the world, with no guile whatsoever

and no conscious histrionics, turned the tables on

them all. He had been brought in to be exhibited.

He leaves, master of the situation. Those that had

expected a few minutes of diversion in the investi-

gation of this strange person, who had thought, per-

haps, to laugh at him, and in the amusement forget

their ennui, their fears, their ever-present dread of

evil, go away silent, perhaps conscience stricken.

They didn’t know it when they took their seats and

the majordomo at a nod from Festus cried “Bring

in the prisoner,” that there was about to appear the

man who would turn the world upside down, destroy

Rome, the Caesars, the Empire, and all of them. But

when he was led out again between his guards, his

chains clanking on the stone floor, perhaps they felt

a presentiment that this man might even blast Jupi-

ter oif Mount Olympus. He had shown power of a

kind that is as disastrous to false gods as to puppet

kings.

They took him off to Rome. He rejoiced to see

the centre of the world. Two years he lived in

humble lodgings, awaiting an audience with Nero.

There is no evidence that he was ever summoned to

the imperial palace. If not, it was just as well for

Nero. The man who had discomforted Herod would



ST. PAUL AND AGRIPPA 63

not quail before Nero. He could have given that

monster a very uneasy half-hour.

The last scene in the Apostle’s exciting life is one

more procession from prison, this time from the

Mamertine (probably) to the gate of the Ostian

way, past the pyramid of Cestius, out three miles

upon the Campagna, to the scene of execution. Paul

is bidden to kneel on the road. He kneels. The

swordsman stands by. The lictor reads the sentence

of death. The reading concluded, the lictor stands

back, the executioner steps forth, the long sword

flashes in the sunlight, the head of the martyr rolls

in the dust, his blood, like that of Jesus, bespatter-

ing the soldiers.

When they picked up his poor body and buried it,

they put on his tombstone his own triumphant epi-

taph : “I have fought the good flght, I have flnished

my course. I have kept the Faith.” The active,

eventful, spectacular, even dramatic career of one of

the noblest of men was at an end.



64 SAINTS VS. KINGS

HEROD ANTIPAS AND JOHN THE
BAPTIST

Address delivered on December 19, 1937

In the preceding talk of this series I commenced

with what I dare say is a platitude: The essence of

drama is in conflict of persons, of forces, of both.

That was by way of introducing the story of the con-

flict between St. Paul and Herod Agrippa. Today,

coming to St. John the Baptist and Herod Antipas, I

feel obliged to repeat the statement that drama

comes from conflict. Fate, as the Greeks called it, or

Divine Providence, as we know it to be, often seems

to work with deliberate dramatic intent. It was de-

creed on high that John, the holiest of men, and

Antipas, one of the worst of men, should And them-

selves in the same generation in the same corner of

the world. A clash was inevitable.

But before we come to the scene of action let us

have the chief participants in the drama.

First, Herod Antipas, grandson of Antipater and

son of Herod the Great. We shall understand Herod
Antipas better if we take a look at his grandfather

and at his father, that monstrous ogre called by a

curious perversion of the meaning of words “the

Great.” This worst of the house of Herod, a blue-

beard more wicked than any that the fairy stories

have imagined, was an Edomite, of the Asmonean

family, half Arab, half Jew. His education was

Greco-Roman. By some strange process of natural

selection he seems to have escaped all the good quali-

ties of Arab, Jew, Greek, and Roman, and to have

combined in himself all the evil of the east and the

west, of Jew and Gentile. With his father Antipater



HEROD ANTIPAS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 66

(who, by the way, was not king but procurator)

Herod rose to prominence by the favor of Pompey

the Great. When Pompey was defeated by Julius

Caesar, the Herods, father and son, made a lightning

change of allegiance, saved their skin and their poli-

tical jobs. When in turn, Julius Caesar was stabbed

“at the foot of Pompey’s statua, which all the while

ran blood,” the two shifty Asmoneans turned their

coats again swiftly and so cleverly as to stand in

with Cassius, who with Brutus had murdered

Caesar. When Octavian, later called Augustus Caes-

ar, defeated every one in sight, including Antony

and Cleopatra, both friends of the Herods, once

again Antipater and his son were agile enough to

leap to the side of the victor in time.

But Herod the Great was not merely a chamel-

eon. He was a tiger, as cruel as he was shifty. He

inaugurated his reign with multiple murders. He

killed Mariamne his wife—one of his ten wives

—

her brother, her mother Alexandra, even her grand-

father; one of his own brothers, his sister Salome

(aunt of the dancing Salome), Hyrcanus whom he

had made high priest, forty-five members of the San-

hedrin at once, and two of his own sons. Hearing a

rumor that a third son, the eldest, planned to

poison him, he sought permission from the Emperor

to put him to death. The permission came when

Herod was on his death bed, and the last official act

of this incredible monster was one more assassina-

tion in his own family. Four days later he followed

them all to whatever place is reserved in the other

world for such a wicked brood. As if trying to prove

that “the evil that men do lives after them”, he pro-

vided in his will that when he should die all the lead-

ers of the Jewish nation should be corralled in the



66 SAINTS VS. KINGS

Hippodrome at Caesarea and butchered, because he

had a sentimental desire to have tears shed at his

funeral. His friend Octavian, Caesar Augustus,

uttered an epigram that might well have served as

an epitaph for his tomb: “It were better to be

Herod’s swine than Herod’s son.”

But even these bloody orgies were not the worst

feature in the life of the Herods. Behind the multi-

tudinous murders, and partly explaining them, was

the basest kind of lust, too gross for explicit descrip-

tion. Suffice it to say that all of Herod’s palaces

were typical Oriental seraglios in which adultery, in-

cest, amorous intrigue, and all manner of indecen-

cies, served as a background for cruelty. St. John

Chrysostom, in one of his famous sermons to the

people of Antioch, comments with horror upon the

fact that a gory hiuman head just severed from the

body should be served up at a banquet as if it were

something to eat. What part, he cries, can feasting

have with murder? But he seems to forget for the

moment that with the Herods no obscenity was im-

possible. To feast and to kill, to make love one mo-

ment and to murder the next, to eat and drink and

dance and on the same night to revel in blood, was as

characteristic of the Herod family as of the fabulous

Sultan in the Arabian Nights.

In such an atmosphere was reared Antipas, the

particular Herod immortalised in history as the

murderer of John the Baptist. He was a Herod

through and through, cruel, lustful, crafty, suspi-

cious, but with a little lingering superstitiousness

that did duty in place of conscience and religion.

Perhaps beyond all his other characteristics the one

that stood out was slyness. Jesus refers to him as

“that fox.”



HEROD ANTIPAS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 67

Like his father he was an adulterer, and as if

adultery were not sufficiently base for a Herod, in-

cestuous. On a visit to Augustus Caesar in Rome, to

repair his political fences, he had accepted hospi-

tality from his brother Philip, and with tjrpical

treachery had entered into an adulterous intrigue

with Philip’s wife Herodias, and promised to marry

her after divorcing his own wife. Why these lecher-

ous beasts should bother with such a formality as

divorce is a puzzle, just as today it is amazing, that

dukes and duchesses, adventurers and actresses, and

their imitators in what is called ironically “high”

society, should suffer the inconvenience of a six

weeks’ exile in Nevada, lie, cheat, and perjure them-

selves to get a diploma of divorce. Why bother? No-
body believes their lies; nobody, except perhaps that

ridiculous, preposterous, tyrannical, mythical per-

sonage called “the Law”; nobody attaches any im-

portance to their certificate except as evidence of

successful prevarication. Every one beyond the age

of ten knows that the sole motive that impels most

of them is sexual restlessness and that the ultimate

goal of some of them is nothing less than complete

promiscuity. So why do such people bother either

with divorce or even with marriage?

And now, John the Baptist, whose manner of

life, even if he had never so much as opened his

mouth, would be a thunderous condemnation of the

Herodian lechery and bloodshedding. In the Book of

Wisdom there is a passage that explains the inevit-

able persecution of the just by the unjust. No mat-

ter how deeply vicious men may become they retain,

as men, conscience enough to feel the rebuke implicit

in the life of a good man, and to be infuriated by the

sight of virtue

:



68 SAINTS VS. KINGS

“Let us therefore lie in wait for the just, because

he is not for our turn; he is contrary to our

doings, and upbraideth us with transgressions of the

law, and divulgeth against us the sins of our way of

life. . . He is become a censurer of our thoughts.

He is grievous unto us, even to behold: for his life

is not like other men’s, and his ways are very differ-

ent. We are esteemed by him as triflers, and he
abstaineth from our ways as from filthiness, and he

preferreth the latter end of the just, and glorieth

that he hath God for his father. Let us see then if

his words be true, and let us prove what shall

happen to him, and we shall know what his end shall

be. . . Let us examine him by outrages and tor-

tures, that we may know his meekness and try his

patience. Let us condemn him to a most shameful

death. . .”

And yet John the Baptist had not, as far as we

know, any direct purpose of stirring up opposition,

still less of instigating a revolution against the

Herods. He had in mind just one idea, to prepare his

own soul and that of his people for the Advent of the

Messias. He was a voice crying not in the streets of

the city, not in the squares of Caesarea or the pre-

cincts of the Temple at Jerusalem, where malcon-

tents could hear him and be stirred to revolt: he

was a voice in the wilderness; and he cried not

“Rise! To Arms!” but “Prepare ye the way of the

Lord.” He had no personal ambition. Quite the con-

trary. It was his vocation to gather disciples and

surrender them to Another, to do his unobtrusive

work and then obliterate himself. “There hath stood

one in the midst of you,” he said, “whom you know

not. The same is he that shall come after me
;
who is



HfiEOD ANTIPAS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 69

preferred before me : the latchet of whose shoe I am

not worthy to loose.”

Surely there was no danger in this man. He was

no rebel, no anarchist. Then why did Herod watch

him with increasing alarm? The answer of course

is that despots, dictators, tyrants watch everybody.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” we say.

Yes, and nervous is the hand that carries a sceptre.

H: 4:

Now it happened, as I have said, that in the Pro-

vidence of God, these two persons, antithetical in so

many respects, Herod Antipas and John the Baptist,

were brought close together.

John was baptizing in Perea on the far side of

the Jordan. But that was one of the four districts

that composed Herod’s tetrarchy. There at a town

called Machaera he had built one of his numerous

palaces. In that palace was to be held the ever

memorable banquet, that shares in history the noto-

riety of the feast of Belshazzar ini Babylon. Within

the castle wall was the prison of John the Baptist. I

find a good description of the castle in Cunningham

Geikie

:

“Surrounding a large space with walls and

towers, Herod built a city from which a path led up

to the citadel, on the top of the ridge. The citadel

itself was at one end of a narrow ridge, nearly a

mile in length from east to west, and formed a last

retreat in case of attack, but it was not enough for

his magnificent ideas. At the other end of the ridge,

he built a great wall, enclosing the summit of the

hill, with towers two hundred feet high at the cor-

ners, and in the space thus gained built a grand

palace, with rows of columns of a single stone

apiece, halls lined with many-coloured marbles, mag-



70 SAINTS VS. KINGS

nificent baths, and all the details of Roman luxury,

not omitting huge cisterns, barracks, and store-

houses, with everything needed for defence in case

of siege. The detached citadel was the scene of

John’s imprisonment; a stern and gloomy keep, with

underground dungeons, still visible, hewn down into

the living rock. The fortress-palace, at the other

end of the fortifications, at the time of the residence

of Antipas and his retainers, was merry with their

revelry, but the dungeon of John lay in midnight

darkness. From his windows Antipas had a mag-

nificent view of the Dead Sea, the whole course of

the Jordan, Jerusalem, Hebron, the frowning fort-

ress of Masada, the circle of Jordan, and the cliffs

of Engedi, on the west, and of the mountains of Gil-

ead, rising beyond the wild heights of Pisagh, on the

north; but his captive, the child of the boundless

wilderness, pined in perpetual night.”

Herod, as we have seen, was part Jew and there-

fore had at least some little religiosity if not religion

in his blood. It had been diluted and poisoned with

two kinds of paganism, Arabian and Roman. The

Arabian with his birth, the Roman by his educa-

tion. But enough of pure Judaism remained to make

him Uneasy in the presence of a holy man in whom

he could not but see some resemblance to the proph-

ets of old. Indeed John exercised a fascination over

Herod. The king in his palace sent again and again

to have the strange prisoner brought up from the

dungeon, and bade him talk. What the half-starved,

emaciated, gaunt and haggard Baptist told the bes-

tial monarch in those interviews is not recorded, but

there can be no doubt that it was “plenty.”

In a previous talk in this series we have recalled

the fact that such ferocious men as Sir John



HEROD ANTIPAS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 71

Hawkwood and Bernardo Visconti listened gladly

to St. Catharine of Siena. The fascination of a

saint is like the fascination of fire. It interests us,

^hypnotizes us even though we know it may in a

moment devour us. The Gospel says that the king

heard the prophet “willingly.” So, John might con-

ceivably have escaped death even though he threat-

ened the king with the wrath gf God. But John's

mistake—a magnificent mistake, the kind of mis-
take that a divinely ordained prophet always makes

—was that he incurred the hatred of the woman in
the case, the intriguing, adulterous, passionate

Herodias. For John had said to Herod, That woman,

there by your side : she is by right the wife of Philip

your brother
;
your relationship with her is not mar-

riage but adultery, and worse, incest ! “It is not law-

ful for thee to have her.”

There is the climax, and there, as far as John’s

chance to live was concerned, was the end.

Since I am not writing but merely suggesting the

drama that could be written around this tragic inci-

dent, I shall not immediately pursue the action to its

swift conclusion. I permit myself to pause for a

minute to remark that in all the history of human

courage, nothing is nobler than the way in which the

prophets stand up in the face of kings and tell the

truth. A thousand years before John, Nathan con-
fronted King David, told him the parable of the man

who had exceeding many sheep and oxen but

slaughtered the poor man’s one little ewe lamb;

caught the king off guard, and when David, the im-

petuous, fiery David, arose to his feet and cried,

“The man that hath done this is a child of Death.”,

Nathan said, “Thou art the man” Thou art the



72 SAINTS VS. KINGS

adulterer who stole the wife of Urias the Hethite

and had him killed because he complained.

And a few years after John, St. Paul would stand

before Felix and Drusilla, his adulterous consort,

and preach into their very faces Sin, Death, and the

Judgment to come.

Jesus Himself, Who might have lived and died in

peace among His native Galilean hills, imprudently

—as cowards and timorous persons say, imprudent-
ly—^went up to Jerusalem, bearded the Pharisees in
their den, and, with the common people listening,

excoriated the hypocrites, pouring out upon them

such a volcano of vituperation as has seldom come

from the mouth of man. We may imagine how the
Apostles and disciples, timid folk at first, protested

to the Master, “Dear Jesus, this is a terrible mistake.

You must not! These men have position and power.

Good Master, it is not prudent ! Talk to them as you

talked to us on the shores of the Sea of Genesareth,

gently, kindly. Dear good Lord, don’t thrust your

head into the lion’s jaws. Jesus, dear good Jesus, be

prudent
!”

But there was fire in the eyes of the Master. He

would indeed preach gentleness and kindness to

innocent peasants on the mount in Galilee, but to the

Pharisees He preached Death and Judgment and

Damnation

!

Now the prophets were like Jesus. True, they

all paid for their rashness with their life. But life

or death—does not matter to a prophet. A man or-
dained to the ministry of the Word is a traitor to

God if he dissembles before the great ones. Of all

misfits in the pulpit I think the most despicable

is the court preacher, the “pulpit orator” who

manages adroitly to keep in the good graces of



HEROD ANTIPAS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 73

kings and other potentates by polite conciliatory

sermons, while ostensibly preaching the Gospel. No

man can tell the Gospel truth to powerful people and

retain their favor. Jesus couldn’t do it. St. John the

Baptist couldn’t do it. St. Paul couldn’t do it. “If I

did yet please men,” says he, “I should not be the

servant of God.” St. John Chrysostom couldn’t do it,

as we have seen in his encounter with Theodosius

and Eudoxia. St. Thomas Becket couldn’t do it be-

fore Henry II. No truth-teller can escape condem-

nation in this world. To please the rich and the

powerful, the sinners in high places, the rulers of

the world of wickedness, one must be a sycophant;

and no sycophant can be a prophet of God.

To resume the action of the drama.

Herodias bided her time, and at length she saw

her chance. It came in the midst of a banquet—^a
drinking bout. The king, drunk, no doubt, but not

too drunk to be immune to sex-stimulation, inflamed

by the orgiastic gyrations of a dancing girl, rose un-

steadily to his feet and babbled as the drunken do,

something like this: “Salome, you are wonderful.

I swear on my word of honor you can have ansrthing

you want, even though it be half my kingdom!”

Salome dashes out of the banquet chamber and tells

her mother. Herodias, cold sober and in full posses-

sion of her wits, says “The time has come. I have

him. Tell the king you want the head of John the

Baptist brought into the banquet on a silver

charger.”

The king, startled but still maudlin enough to

think himself bound by an oath taken in his cups,

consents. The headsman goes down to the dungeon.

The murder is swiftly done, and the head of the

prophet, still warm and gory, is laid upon the table



74 SAINTS VS. KINGS

before the eyes of the king. I think the king is still

looking at that head in eternity.

With that ghastly tragedy we conclude this ex-

hortation to some playwright of genius to whip these

superbly dramatic stories into shape for the stage.

Next week, please God, we shall be concerned with

something very different, the sweet beautiful story

of Christmas.



CHRISTMAS 76

CHRISTMAS

Address delivered on December 26, 1937

The facts of the Gospel are not only facts but

symbols. Almost every event recorded by Matthew,

Mark, Luke, and John, as having taken place his-

torically in a certain spot, Bethlehem, Nazareth,

Jerusalem, at a certain moment in time, happens

again in various parts of the world from the

day of the birth of Jesus until the end of the

world. Christ was born in Bethlehem, in the year,

says St. Luke, when Caesar Augustus ordered a

census to be taken, that is to say in the year 749

from the founding of Rome. But Jesus is born again

mystically—not indeed physically but none the less
really—every day and everywhere since then. At
the age of 12 and again at 30 He walked the streets

of Jerusalem. He walks the streets of Jerusalem

and London and New York today, not of course vis-

ibly, but just as truly as when with feet of flesh and

blood He trod the pavements in the city of Solomon.

He opened the eyes of the blind, unstopped the ears

of the deaf, cleansed the lepers and raised the dead

1900 years ago in the Holy Land, and there is not

and has not been one hour or one moment in all these

ensuing centuries when those same miracles have

not been repeated. He walked on the waters of the

Lake of Genesareth in the days of Peter and James

and John; He walked upon the waters of the River

Thames in the days of Francis Thompson. He sat by

the well in the village of Sichar, chatted with the

Samaritan woman, disclosed to her the sad condition

of her own soul and received her confession. And

from that moment to the present. He has sat down



7C SAINTS VS. KINGS

unexpected, uninvited perhaps, by the side of men

and women in sin, and revealed themselves to them-

selves; He has stricken their hearts with compunc-

tion, listened to their confession and saved them.

When the storm arose on the Sea of Galilee, He

spoke a word “Be Still” and there came a great

calm; when the storm of temptation arises in the

heart of man again He calms the waves of passion,

more tumultuous than the waves of any sea. In the

Garden of Gethsemane when one of His own disci-

ples drew a sword to defend Him, He said “Put up

thy sword into the scabbard ;” and I know not how

many times in the intervening centuries the Name of

Jesus God of peace has stayed the hand of one who

would have slain a brother man. The Christ of the

Andes — to cite one instance — has produced
permanent peace between Chile and the Argentine.

We could wish that the Christ of the Pyrenees and
of the Guadarramas might have been equally suc-

cessful in staying the fratricidal strife in Spain, and

that the Christ of the Yangtsekiang could have made

His voice heard above the noise of exploding bombs

at least on Christmas day. Why it is that He, being
God, does not enforce Peace, we cannot know; it is

as much a mystery to us as the fact His will is not

done on earth as it is in heaven. But this we know

—

having made man’s will free He does not whip us

into obedience as a man might whip a disobedient

dog. He will have a voluntary sacrifice or none at

all. Jesus would work His will and His way, gently,

persuasively, not by violence, not by coercion, allur-

ing rather than commanding. He draws us with the

cords of Adam, that is to say with love, and He is

tugging at those cords incessantly. The world, in

spite of all its crime and cruelty, is softened by the



CHRISTMAS 77

sight of innocent babyhood, so Jesus comes to us

helpless on the straw in a stable.

In that cheerless cave in Bethlehem, He drew to

Himself angels and shepherds and kings. That the

angels should follow Him from heaven to earth,

from the realms of eternal glory to the humble

stable, is not amazing. They follow Him whitherso-

ever He goeth. That the shepherds should come to

adore Him is not strange either. They were poor,

but not unenlightened. They had heard the prophecy

read on many a Sabbath Day in the synagogue

“Thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art a little one among

the thousands of Juda: [but] out of thee shall

he come forth. . . that is to be the ruler of

Israel.” And they had heard the rabbis, reckon-

ing from the prophecy of Daniel, declare that the

fullness of time had come. So they were not alto-

gether astounded, though* they did indeed fear with

a great fear, when the “angel of the Lord stood by

them, and the brightness of God shone round about

them.” And they were gently reassured when “the

angel said to them: Fear not; for, behold, I bring

you good tidings of great joy, that shall be to all the

people. For this day is born to you a Saviour who is

Christ the Lord, in the city of David.” What they

had heard from the Holy Book in the synagogue, all

came back to them then. They realized thn.t these

strange events were the fulfillment of the prophe-

cies : the long expected Messias was come. So they

went into the city, with the hymn in their hearts and

on their lips.

“Angels we have heard on high

Sweetly singing o’er the plain.

And the mountains in reply

Echo back the joyous strain.”



78 SAINTS VS. KINGS

No, it was not strange that angels should sing or

that simple shepherds should hear, “Glory to God in

the highest and on earth peace to men of good will.”

It is to be expected that shepherds, simple folk, un-

tainted with skepticism, unbewildered by preten-

tious philosophies, should hear angelic voices and

believe. “Blessed are the eyes that see the things

that you see. For I say to you, that many prophets

and kings have desired to see the things that you see,

and have not seen them
;
and to hear the things that

you hear, and have not heard them,” says Jesus
;
and

He adds, O Father, . . . thou hast hidden these

things from the wise and the prudent and hast re-

vealed them to little ones.” But what is indeed amaz-

ing is that kings, wise men, scholars—we should call
them nowadays—should come from afar to seek the
new-born Babe and offer Him their gifts and their

adoration.

Now it is this particular phase of the phenomenal

events of that day in Bethlehem I would wish to

emphasize. Let us then for the moment forget the

angels and the shepherds and concentrate our atten-

tion on the wise men, and let us see especially if

what has been said about the historical facts of the

Gospel being forever repeated is not verified in this

matter also.

How many kings of learning, masters of science

and philosophy, sages, scholars of a class that is

usually wise in its own conceits, have laid aside their

intellectual pride and have come humbly to offer the

homage of mind and heart to the Infant on the

Straw, can never be known or estimated. To at-

tempt the enumeration would be to call the roll of

the master-minds of the last nineteen centuries.

It means little to the world at large, I suppose, if



CHRISTMAS 79

we orthodox Christians speak of The Fathers of the

Church and of theologians as among the great ones

who have worshipped Jesus. These, we are told,

would naturally pay tribute to Him. St. Paul, Jus-

tin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Origen, Clem-

ent of Rome and Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian,

Jerome and Athanasius and Augustine, Bernard,

Dante the poet supreme, Thomas Aquinas of the

comprehensive intellect, Copernicus, Francis Bacon,

Leibnitz, Descartes, Pascal, Agassiz, Faraday, Kep-

ler, Sir Isaac Newton—I say it would matter little or
nothing to a critical, skeptical world if we were to

name these great men who have laid their tribute of

faith and love at the feet of Jesus. For these were

Christians. But when the unorthodox, even to the

degree of unbelief, surrender their prejudices, for-

get to be skeptical and join with angels and shep-

herds and magi and saints in the chorus of praise of

Jesus—when scholars whose proud intellect ordinar-
ily inhibits their tongues from uttering any kind of

prayer, not to say a cry of jubilation, when these

men whose minds are all but permanently closed to

any Divine impulse, sing with the rest of us Gloria

in excelsis Deo! then I say it is a matter of interest

and importance to a world that is, as Jesus said,

“stiff-necked, hard of heart and slow to believe.”

Then is fulfilled the prophecy that Christ would

bring low every height that exalteth itself against

the knowledge of God and lead captive every under-

standing unto His obedience.

I find to my liking a few paragraphs in a Life of
Christ, published some fifty years ago, by Cunning-

ham Geike. He says: “We all know how lowly a

reverence is paid to Jesus in passage after

passage by Shakespeare, the greatest intellect



80 SAINTS VS. KINGS

known, in its wide, many-sided splendour. Men like

Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and Milton, set the

name of Jesus Christ above every other. Jean Paul

Richter speaks of Christ as the One who, being the

holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the

holy, with His pierced hands lifted empires off their

hinges, and turned the stream of centuries out of its

channel, and still governs the ages. Spinoza calls

Christ the symbol of divine wisdom; Kant and Ja-

cobi hold Him up as the symbol of ideal perfection,

and Schelling and Hegel as that of the union of the

divine and human. ‘I esteem the Gospels,’ says Go-

ethe, to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth

from them the reflected splendour of a sublimity,

proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ, of so di-

vine a kind as only the divine Could even have mani-

fested upon earth.’ J. J. Rousseau says, ‘How petty

are the books of the philosophers, with all their

pomp, compared with the Gospels ! Can it be

that writings at once so sublime and so simple are.

the work of men? Can He whose life they tell

be Himself no more than a mere man? Is there any-

thing in His character, of the enthusiast or the am-

bitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity in His

ways, what touching grace in His teachings ! What a

loftiness in His maxims, what profound wisdom in

His words! What presence of mind, what delicacy

and aptness in His replies! What an empire over

His passions ! What is the man, where is the sage,

who knows how to act, to suffer, and to die without

weakness and without display? Men do not invent

like this
;
and the facts respecting Socrates, which no

one doubts, are not so well attested as those about

Jesus Christ. . . If the death of Socrates be that of



CHRISTMAS 81

a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a

God.’

“Thomas Carlyle repeatedly expresses a similar

reverence. ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ says he, is ‘our divin-

est symbol! Higher has the human thought not

yet reached! A symbol of quite perennial, infinite
character, whose significance will ever demand to be

anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ says the exquisite genius. Herder, ‘is

in the noblest, and most perfect sense, the realized

ideal of humanity.’
”

To add some others not mentioned by Geike:

David Friedrich Strauss, who wrote a Life of Christ

but tried to show that a great deal of it was myth

(he lived in an age affected with mythophobia),

none the less was sufficiently subdued by the majesty

of his subject to say “Christ stands alone and un-

approached in the world’s history,” and he contin-

ues: “Jesus stands foremost among those who have

given a higher ideal to humanity
;
it is impossible to

refrain from admiring and loving Him. Never at

any time will it be possible to rise above Him, nor to

imagine any one who shall be even equal with Him.

He is the highest object we can possibly imagine in

respect of religion: the Being without whose pres-

ence in the mind perfect piety is impossible.”

Ernest Renan, the rationalist, sometimes a scof-

fer, indeed occasionally somewhat of a blasphemer,

concludes his Vie de Jesus with the remarkable out-

burst “Between Thee, 0 Jesus, and God there is no

longer any distinction: Thy beauty is eternal. Thy

Kingdom shall have no end. This Christ of the Gos-

pels,” he says, “is the most beautiful incarnation of

God in the most beautiful of forms.”

Immanual Kant was indignant when a critic



82 SAINTS VS. KINGS

compared his teaching with that of Jesus. “One of

those names,” he said, “before which the heavens

bow, is sacred
;
the other is only that of a poor schol-

ar, endeavouring to explain to the best of his abil-

ities the teachings of his Master.”

Goethe, the great philosophic poet, who ranks

with Homer and Shakespeare and Dante, calls Jesus

Christ “The Divine Man, the Holy One, and type

and model of men.”

Finally, not to make the catalogue too long, Mat-

thew Arnold says “Jesus comes forth from the True

God, the Eternal Who makes for righteousness ; His

spirit governs the course of humanity.”

Obviously it would be a labor of love to continue.

I have in mind at the moment books written in

praise of Christ by a converted atheist
;
by a writer

of historical novels, whose religion or irreligion I

cannot guess; by a famous journalist struggling

against agnosticism
;

by a social worker who

glorifies Jesus as a working man; by a very

great philosopher and historian; by a literary critic

—indeed these eulogies of Jesus by otherwise non-
religious authors pour out from the press in an un-

ending stream. Naturally, we Christians are proud

and happy to know that our Master has power to

subdue the rebellious minds of normally unbelieving

men. And indeed if it be strange that the wise men

of old came from afar to worship at the crib, it must

be accounted even more wonderful that the wise men

of modern times, who accept no prophecy as divine

and who see no miraculous star, should none the less

come from a far land, a very far land, the land of un-

belief, of skepticism, of irreligion, even in some in-

stances from the ultima thule of atheism, to lay

their tribute at the feet of Jesus. This is a



CHEISTMAS 83

greater conquest than that of the hearts of the

shepherds, a more astounding miracle than the

appearance of an unaccountable star in the heavens.

Perhaps it is the greatest of all the triumphs of that

innocent and apparently helpless little Baby that He

has subjected to Himself the minds of proud schol-

ars and won the hearts of those who but for Him

would have no heart.

Isaias had declared, and John the Baptist had re-

peated, “Every valley shall be exalted and every

mountain and hill shall be laid low.” At the crib of

Jesus the double prophecy is fulfilled. Humble folk

are exalted to stand side by side with angels and

kings
;
and the pride of philosophers is brought low,

so low that they are at the foot of a manger in a

stable.



. /



CARDINAL HAYES STATES PURPOSE

OF CATHOLIC HOUR

(Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the

studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New York
City, March 2, 1930.^

Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the

National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all
who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use

this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy

expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its

musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of

inquiries, must be met. . . .

This radio hour is for all the people of the United States.

To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to

express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For

this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly

will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am
sure, to- the voice of the ancient Church with its historic

background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and

with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora-

tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . .

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is

no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that

task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the
good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our -

countrymen. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country

who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material,

and a more spiritual standard among our people.

With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa-

thy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue.
So may it be fulfilled. This word of dedication voices, there-
fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known,
to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we

love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make
better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing
the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine

through Christ; pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating

our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only
justice but gladness and peace to our searching and que.'^-

tioning hearts.



92 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS
In 39 States, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii

Alabama Birmingham WBRC* 960 kc
Mobile WALA 1410 kc

Arizona Phoenix KTAR 620 kc
Tucson KVOA 1290 kc
Yuma KYUM 1240 kc

Arkansas Little Rock KARK* 920 kc

California Fresno KMJ 580 kc
Los Angeles KFI 640 kc
San Diego KFSD 600 kc
San Francisco KPO 680 kc

Colorado Denver KOA 850 kc

District of Columbia Washington WRC 980 kc
Florida Jacksonville WJAX 930 kc

Miami WIOD 610 kc
Pensacola WCOA 1370 kc
Tampa ....WFLA 970-620 kc

Georgia Atlanta WSB 750 kc
Savannah WSAV 1340 kc

Idaho Boise T. KIDO 1380 kc

Illinois Chicago ........WMAQ 670 kc

Indiana Fort Wayne WGL 1450 kc
Terre Haute WBOW 1230 kc

Kansas Wichita KANS 1240 kc

Kentucky Louisville WAVE* 970 kc

Louisiana New Orleans WSMB 1350 kc
Shreveport KTBS 1480 kc

Maine Augusta WRDO 1400 kc
Maryland Baltimore WBAL 1090 kc
Massachusetts Boston WBZ 1030 kc

Springfield WBZA 1030 kc
Michigan Detroit WWJ* 950 kc

Saginaw WSAM 1400 kc
Minnesota Duluth-Superior WEBC 1320 kc

Nibbing WMFG 1300 kc
Mankato ky<;m 1230 kc
Minneapolis-St. Paul KSTP 1500 kc
Rochester KROC 1340 kc
Virginia WHLB 1400 kc

Mississippi Jackson WJDX 1300 kc

Missouri Kansas City WDAF 610 kc
Springfield KGBX 1260 kc
Saint Louis KSD* 550 kc

Montano Billings KGHL 790 kc
Bozeman KRBM 1450 kc
Butte KGIR 1370 kc
Helena KPFA 1240 kc



92 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS
In 39 States, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii

Nebraska Omaha .....WOW 590 kc

New Mexico Albuquerque KOB 1030 kc

New York Buffalo WBEN 930 kc
New York WEAF 660 kc
Schenectady WGY 810 kc

North Carolina Charlotte WSOC 1240 kc
Raleigh WPTF 680 kc
Winston-Salem' WSJS 600 kc

North Dakota Bismarck KFYR 550 kc
Fargo WDAY 970 kc

Ohio Cincinnati WSAI* 1360 kc
Cleveland WTAM 1 100 kc
Lima WLOK 1240 kc

Oklahoma Tulsa KVOO 1170 kc
Oregon Medford KMED 1440 kc

Portland KGW* 620 kc

Pennsylvania Allentown WSAN 1470 kc
Altoona WFBG 1340 kc
Johnstown WJAC 1400 kc
Lewistown WMRF 1490 kc
Philadelphia KYW 1060 kc
Pittsburgh KDKA 1020 kc
•Reading WRAW 1340 kc
Wilkes-Barre WBRE 1340 kc

Rhode Island Providence WJAR 920 kc

South Carolina Charleston WTMA 1250 kc
Columbia WIS 560 kc
Greenville WFBC 1330 kc

South Dakota Sioux Falls KSOO-KELO 1140--1230 kc

Terwiessee Kingsport WKPT 1400 kc
Memphis WMC* 790 kc
Nashville WSM* 650 kc

Texas Amarillo KGNC 1440 kc
Dallas WFAA 820 kc
Fort Worth WBAP* 820 kc
Houston KPRC 950 kc
San Antonio WOAI 1200 kc
Weslaco KRGV 1290 kc

Utah Salt Lake City KDYL* 1320 kc

Virginio Norfolk WTAR* 790 kc
Richmond WMBG 1380 kc

Washington Seattle KOMO 950 Kc
Spokane KHQ 590 kc

Wisconsin Eau Claire WEAU 790 kc
LaCrosse WKBH 1410 kc

Hawaii Honolulu KGU 760 kc

* Delayed Broadcast

(Revi^^d gs of October^ 1944)



I •

r

_i V /

"
-

'; i'il

-



CATHOLIC HOUR RADIO ADDRESSES IN
PAMPHLET FORM

Prices Subject to chancre without notice.

OUR SUNDAY VISITOR is the authorized publisher of all CATHOLIC
HOUR addresses in pamphlet form. The addr^ses published to date, all of
which are available, are listed below. Others will be published as they are

delivered.

Quantity Prices Do Not Include Carriagre Charge

**The Divine Romance/’ by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 80 pages

and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid: 5 or more, 10c each. In Quantities,

$8.76 per 100.

”A Trilogy on Prayer,” by Rev. Thomas F. Burke, C.S.P., 32 pages
and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid: 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.60 per 100.

’’Christianity and the Modern Mind," by Rev. John A. McClorey, S.J.,

64 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid: 5 or more, 10c each. In

quantities, $6.60 per 100.

"The Moral Law,” by Rev. James M. Gillie, C.S.P., 88 pages and
cover. Single copy, 20c; 6 or more, 16c each. In quantities, $10.60 per 100.

’’Christ and His Church,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan, 88

pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid; 6 or more, 16c each. In
quantiti^, $10.60 per 100.

’’The Marks of the Church,” by Rev. Dr. John K. Cartwright, 48 pages
and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.60 p«r 100.

‘‘The Organization and Government of the Church,” by Rev. Dr. Fran-

cis J. Connell, C.SS.R., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5
•F more, 8e each. In quantities, $6.60 per 100.

’’Moral Factors in Economic Life,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis J. Haas
and Rt. Rev. Msgr. John A. Ryan, 82 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c
postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.60 per 100.

"Divine Helps for Man,” by Rev. Dr. inward J. Walsh, C.M., 104
pages and cover. Single copy, 26c postpaid; 6 or more, 20c each. In
quantities, $14.00 per 100.

"The Parables,” by Rev. John A. McClory, S.J., 128 pages and cover.
Single copy, 80c postpaid; 6 or more, 20c each. In quantities, $18.00 per

100.

"Christianity’s Contribution to Civilization,” by Rev. James M. Gillis,
C.S.P., 96 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid; 6 or more, 15c
each. In quantities, $11.00 per 100.

"Manifestations of Christ,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 123
pages and cover. Single copy, 30c postpaid; 6 or more, 26c each. In
quantities, $16.00 per 100.

"The Way of the Cross,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Pulton J. Sheen, 32 pages
and cover (prayer book size). Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 or more, 6c
each. In quantities, $3.60 per 100.

"Christ Today,” by Very Rev. Dr. Ignatius Smith, O.P., 48 pages and
eover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.50
per 100.

"The Christian Family,” by Rev. Dr. Edward Lodge Curran, 68 pageis
and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 10c each. In quan^ties,
$7.76 per 100.

"Rural Catholic Action,” by Rev. Dr. Edgar Schmdedeler, O.S.B., 24
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 or more, 5c each. In quan-
tities $4.00 per 100.

"Religion and Human Nature,” by Rev. Dr. Joseph A. Daly, 40 pages
and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities,
$6.60 per 100.

’"^e Church and Some Outstanding Problems of the Day,” by Rev.
Jones L Corrigan, S.J., 72 pages and cover. Single copy, 15e postpaid;
6 or more. 10c each. In quantities. $8.76 per 100.

"Conflicting Standards,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 80 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 6 or more, 10c each. In quantities.
$8.75 per 100.

"The Hymn of the Conquered,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen,
128 pages and cover. Single copy, 30c postpaid ; 5 or more, 25c each. In
quantities $15.00 per 100



“The Seven Last Words,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, (prayer

book size) 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 5 or more, 6«

each. In quantities, $3.50 per 100.

“The Church and the Child,” by Rev. Dr. Paul H. Furfey, 48 pages

and cover. Single copy, 15cr postpaid ; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.60 per 100.

“Love’s Veiled Victory and Love’s Laws,” by Rev. Dr. George F.

Strohaver, S.J., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 6 or more

8c each. In quantities, $6.60 per 100.

“Religion and Liturgy,” by Rev. Dr. Francis A. Walsh, O.S.B., 32 pages

and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$5.50 per 100.

“The Lord’s Prayer Today,” by Very Rev. Dr. Ignatius Smith, O.P.,

64 page and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 10c each. In

quantities $6.50 per 100.

“God, Man and Redemption,” by Rev. Dr. Ignatius W. Cox, S.J., 64
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In quan-

tities, $6.60 per 100.

“This Mysterious Human Nature,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P.,
48 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Eternal Galilean,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 160 pages

and cover. Single copy, 35c postpaid; 5 or more, 25c each. In quantities,

$17.00 per 100.

“The Queen of Seven Swords,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen
(prayerbook size), 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 or

more, 5c each. In quantities, $3.50 per 100.

“The Catholic Teaching on Our Industrial System,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr.
John A. Ryan, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 or more,

8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Happiness of Faith,” by Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S.J., 80 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 or more, 10c. In quantities, $8.76 per 100.

“The Salvation of Human Society,” by Rev. Peter J. Bergen, C.S.P., 48
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid, 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-

tities, $6.50 per 100.

“Catholic Education,” by Rev. Dr. George Johnson, 40 pages and

cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid: 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.50

per 100.

“The Church and Her Missions,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. William Quinn, 32
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 6 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Church and the Depression,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P.,
80 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 6 or more, 10c each. In
quantities, $8.76 per 100.

“The Church and Modern Thought,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P.,
80 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 6 or more, 10c each. In
quantities, $8.76 per 100.

“Misunderstood Truths,” by Most Rev. Duane G. Hunt, 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid ; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.60 per 100.

“The Judgment of God and The Sense of Duty,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr.
William J. Kerby, 16 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 ol
more, 5c each. In quantities, $4.00 per 100.

“Christian Education,” by Rev. Dr. James A. Reeves, 32 pages and
cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $4.00
per 100.

^

“What Civilization Owes to the Church,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. William
Quinn, 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 10 each.
In quantities, $6.60 per 100.

“If Not Christianity; What?” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 90
pages and cover. Single copy, 20cf postpaid; 6 ^ more, 16c each. Id
quantities. $11.00 per 100.

“The Prodigal World,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 140 pages
and cover. Single copy, 36c postpaid; 6 or more, 26c each. In quantities,
$17.00 per 100.

“The Coin of Our Tribute,” by Very Rev. Thomas F. Conjon, O.P.,
40 pages and cover. Single copy, ' 16c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $6.60 per 100.

“Pope Pius XI,” by His Eminence Patrick Cardinal Hayes. An address
in honor of the 79th birthday of His holiness, 16 pages and 4 color cover.
Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.00 per 100



**Misanderstandinir the Charch,” by Most Rev. Duane G. Hunt, 48

pag’es and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 or more, 8c each. In quan-

tities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Poetry of Duty,” by Rev. Alfred Duffy, C.P., 48 pages and cover.

Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“Characteristic Christian Ideals,” by Rev. Bonaventure McIntyre, O.

F. M., 82 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each.

In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Catholic Church and Youth,” by Rev. John F. O’Hara, C.S.C.

48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Spirit of the Missions,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Thomas J. McDonnell,

32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Life of the Soul,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 96 pages and

cover. Single copy 25c postpaid; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities, $12.00

per 100.

“The Banquet of Triumph,” by Very Rev. J. J. McLamey, O.P., 32^
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more. 8c each. In quan-

tities, $5.50 per 100.

“Society and the Social Encyclicals—^America’s Road Out,” by Rev.
R. A. McGowan, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 5 or more,
8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Our Wounded World,” by Rjt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 112 pages
and cover. Single <?opy, 25c postpaid; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities,

$14.00 per 100.

TTie first six addresses in this series published separately under

the title “Freedom and Democracy: a Study of Their Enemies,”

56 pag^ and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c each.
In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“Pius XI, Father and Teacher of the Nations,” (On His Eightieth
Birthday) by His Excellency, Most Rev. Amleto Giovanni Cicognani,

16 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 5c each. In
quantities, $3.50 per 100.

“The Eastern Catholic Church,” by Rev. John Kallok, 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.50

per 100.

“The ‘Lost* Radiance of the Religrion of Jesus,” by Rev. Thomas A.
Carney. 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each.

In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“Some Spiritual Problems of College Students,** by Rev. Dr. Maurice
S. Sheehy, 40 pag^ and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c
each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“God and Governments,** by Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.50

per 100.

“Justice and Charity,** by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen.
Part I

—
“The Social Problem and the Church,** 96 pages and cover.
Single copy, 25c postpaid; 5 or more, 20c each. In quan-

tities, $12.00 per 100.

Part n—^“The Individual Problem and the Cross,** 80 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c each.

In quantities, $8.75 per 100.

“Saints vs. Kings,** by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 96 pages and
cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid ; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities, $12.00

per 100.

“In Defense of Chastity,** by Rev. Felix M. Kirsch, O.M. Cap., 72 pages
and cover, including study aids and bibliography. Single copy, 15c postpaid

;

5 or more, 10c each. In quantities, $8.75 per 100.

“The Appeal To Reason,** by Most Rev. Duane G. Hunt, D.D., LL.D.,
72 pages and cover. Single Copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c each. In
quantities, $8.75 per 100.

“Practical Aspects of Catholic Education,” by Very Rev. Edward V.
Stanford, O.S.A., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more,

8c ea<^ In quantities, $6.50 per 100.
“The Mission of Youth in Contemporary Society,** by Rev. Dr. George

Johnson, 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c
each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Holy Eucharist,** by Most Rev. Joseph F. Rummel, S.T.D., LL.D.,
32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $5.50 per 100.



“The Rosary and the Rigrhts of Man," by Ven Rev. J. J. McrLamey,
O.P., 56 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each.

In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“Human Life," by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 96 pages and cover.
Single copy, 25c postpaid; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities^ $12 per 100.

“Freedom,** by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen.

Part II
—
“Personal Freedom,** 96 pages and cover. Single copy,

25c postpaid; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities, $12.00

per 100.

“The Holy Ghost," by Very Rev. J. J. McLarney, O.P., 56 pages and

cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities,

$6.50 per 100.

“Toward the Reconstruction of a Christian Social Order,** by Rev.
Dr. John P. Monoghan, 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid

;

5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“Marian Vignettes,** by Rev. J. R. Keane, O.S.M., 32 pages and cover.

Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Peace of Christ,** by Very Rev. Martin J. O’Malley, C.M., 32
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-
tities $5.50 per 100.

“God*s World of Tomorrow,** by Rev. Dr. John J. Russell, 40 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.50 per 100.

“What Catholics Do At Mass,** by Rev. Dr. William H. Russell, 72
pages and cover, including study club questions and suggestions, and brief
bibliography. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities,

$8.75 per 100.

“The Catholic Tradition in Literature,** by Brother Leo, F.S.C., 40
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-
tities, $6.50 per 100.

“Prophets and Kings: Great Scenes, Great Lines,** by Rev. James M.
Gillis, C.S.P., 96 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid ; 5 or more,

15c each. In quantities, $11.00 per 100.

“Peace, the Fruit of Justice,** by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 64

pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c each. In quan-
tities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Seven Last Words and The Seven Virtues,** by Rt. Rev. Msgr.
Fulton J. Sheen, 80 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more,
10c each. In quantities, $8.75 per 100.

“1930—Memories—1940**—^The addresses delivered in the Tenth Anni-
versary Broadcast of the Catholic Hour on March 3, 1940, together with
congratulatory messages and editorials. 80 pages and cover. Single copy,
25c postpaid; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities, $11.00 per 100.

“What Kind of a World Do You Want,** by Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J.,
40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Life and Personality of Christ,** by Rev. Herbert F. Gallagher,
O.F.M., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 or more, 8c each.

In quantities, $6.60 per 100.

“Law,** by Rev. Dr. Howard W. Smith, 40 pages and cover. Single
copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“In the Beginning,** by Rev. Arthur J. Sawkins, 40 pages and cover.
Single copy, 16c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“America and the Catholic Church,** by Rev. John J.' Walde, 48 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.60 per 100.

“The Social Crisis and Christian Patriotism,** by Rev. Dr. John F.
Cronin, S.S., 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 or more, 8c
each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“Missionary Responsibility,** by the Most Rev. Richard J. Cushing, D.D.,
LL.D., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid: 6 or more, 8c each.
In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Crucial Questions,** by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 64 pages and
cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.60
per 100.

“Favorite Texts From The Confessions of St. Augustine,** by Rev.
James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid; 6 or
more, 10c each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.



**The Purposes of Our Eucharistic Sacrifice,” by Rev. Gerald T. Bask-

field, S.T.D., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c

each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Case for Conscience,” by Rev. Thomas Smith Sullivan,

S.T.D., 82 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each.

In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Catholic Notion of Faith,” by Rev. Thomas N. O’Kane, 40 pages

and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.50 per 100.

“Freedom Defended,” by Rev. John F. Cronin, S.S., Ph.D., 32 pages

and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8<? each. In quantities,

$5.50 per 100.

“The Rights of the Oppressed,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Martin J. O’Connor,

40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Practical Aspects' of Patriotism,” by Rev. George Johnson, Ph.D.,

40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“What Is Wrong and How to Set It Right,” by Rev. James M. Gillis,
C.S.P., 80 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c, postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c

each. In quantities, $8.75 per 100.

“Peace,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. 160 pages and cover.
Single copy, 35c postpaid ; 5 or more, 25c each. In quantities, $17.00 per

100 .

“Christian Heroism,” by Rev. Robert J. Slavin, O.P., 64 pages and

cover. Single copy, 20c, postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c. In quantities, $7.50

per 100.

“A Report to Mothers and Fathers,” by Rev. William A. Maguire,
Chaplain, U. S. Army, and Rev. Christopher E. O’Hara, Chaplain, U. S.
Navy, 24 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c. In
quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Liturgy and the Laity,” by Rev. William J. Lallou, 32 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c. In quantities,

$6.50 per 100.

“The Catholic Interpretation of Culture,” by Rev. Vincent Lloyd-
Russell, 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15e postpaid; 5 or more, 10c.
In quantities, $8.00 per 100.

“Conquering With Christ,” by Rev. John J. Walde, 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c. In quantities, $8.50 per

100 .

“The Victory of the Just,” by Rev. John F. Cronin, S.S., 40 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c. In quantities, $8.00 per
100 .

“Thoughts for a Troubled Time,** by Rev. John Carter Smyth, C.S.P.
32 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c. In quan-
tities, $6.50 per 100.

“We Are the Children of God,” by Rev. Leonard Feeney, S.J., 32 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c. In quantities, $6.50
per 100.

“Justice,” by Rev. Ignatius Smith, O.P., 32 pages and cover. Single
copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 10c. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Crisis in Christendom,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. 112
pages and cover. Single copy, 30c postpaid; 5 or more, 25c each. In
quantities, $15.00 per 100.

“The Christian Family,” by Rev. Dr. Edgar Schmiedeler, O.S.B., 32
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In
quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“Social Regeneration,” by Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., 24 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities,

$6.00 per 100.

“Second Report to the Mothers and Fathers,” by Catholic Chaplains
of the Army and Navy. 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid

;

5 or more, 15q each. In quantities, $8.50 per 100.

“Sainthood, the Universal Vocation,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Ambrose J.
Burke. 24 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c
each. In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Path of Duty,” by Rev. John F. Cronin, S.S., 4q pages and cover.
Single copy, 15c postpaid

; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities, $8.00 per 100.



“The Church in Action/* by Rev. Alphonse Sehwitalla, S.J., Rev. Paul

Tanner, Rev. William A. O’Connor, Rt. Rev. James T. O’Dowd, Very Rev.

John J. McClafferty, Rev. Dr. Charles A. Hart, Very Rev. George J.

Collins, C.S.Sp., Rev. John La Farge, S.J., and Rev. Lawrence F. Schott.

64 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In

quantities, $7.50 per 100.

“The Pope’s Five Points for Permanent Peace,” by Rev. T. L. Bous-

caren, S.J. 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 15e postpaid; 5 or more,

10c each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“Human Plans are Not Enough,” by Rev. John Carter Smyth, C.S.P.
32 pages and cover. Single copy 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In
quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“One Lord; One World,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen. 100 pages
and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid ; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities,

$13.00 per 100.

“The Catholic Layman and Modern Problems,” by O’Neill, Woodlock,
Shuster, Matthews, Manion, and Agar. 68 pages and cover. Single copy
20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In quantities, $9.00 per 100.

'‘God,” by Rev. Richard Ginder. 36 pages and cover. Single copy,
15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities, $7.50 per 100.

“The Moral Law,” by Rev. T. L. Bouscaren, S.J. 32 pages and cover.
Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, lOcr each. In quantities, $6.50 per 100.

“The Sacramental System,” by Rt. Rev Msgr. Ambrose J. Burke.
40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each.
In quantities, $8.00 per 100.

“Concerning Prayer,” by Rev. John Carter Smyth, C.S.P. 36 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities,
$7.50 per 100.

(Complete list of 122 pamphlets to one address in U. S. $15.75 postpaid.
Price to Canada and Foreign Countries, $19.50.)

Address: OUR SUNDAY VISITOR. Huntinaton. Indiana.





r:

\
-

|-

'

'

;>f;