ro66 OCCASIONAL SERMONS

fatherhood as it is conceived by a modern and, on the whole, anill-regulated age. The modern father despairs of exercising au-.thority because he is unable to inspire respect. Such an examplewould quickly breed relaxation in a religious community; torebuke faults, to refuse unreasonable requests, is part of asuperior's duty. And Abbot Matthews did not need to alterhis nature when he became an abbot instead of a schoolmaster'he retained something of his awe-inspiring quality. A shy man:he did not shrink from the duty of correction; a kindly man, hedid not yield readily to the suggestion of the first-comer. Hesaw the danger that increasing preoccupation with the school,and the dissipation of forces which school organization de-manded, might have a weakening effect on community life andcommunity discipline; perhaps we shall never know how muchwe owe it to him that Ampleforth remains, in the true sense, ahome of monks. Did any of his brethren feel that, here andhere, the yoke of discipline bore too hard on him? The voice ofself-pity was silenced, when he reflected that there was onemember of the community to whom no indulgence was evergranted, for whom no allowance was ever made, for whom nolabours were too exacting-and that was the Abbot himself.He was a great abbot because he was a good monk. Into that

inmost fastness of all we may not penetrate. "You are dead", theEaster-day epistle reminds us, "and your life is hidden withChrist in God." 3 I do not think Abbot Matthews ever forgot, inthe most worldly surroundings, that he had renounced theworld. You heard him making an after-dinner speech; it wouldbegin on the note set for him by others, but in aminute or two,without any airs of pietism, without any effect of embarrass-ment, he would be talking in dead earnest of the things thatwere near his heart. You were in conversation with him; his facewas lit up with that smile of his that was like a sunny day inwinter; then for a moment you were detained in conversationwith somebody else; and you looked back to find the same facedrawn and tense, the eyes looking into distance, its commonexpression when in repose. And you saw, in that play of lightand shadow, that this was a man whose thoughts were never faraway from God. We shall not see it again; he has passed beyondour world of light and shadow; may the face of Jesus Christ

3 Colossians 3:3.

IV. PANEGYRICS 1067

show gay and gentle to him. You must turn, with heavy hearts,to elect another in his place. Reverend fathers, God send you afather like him.So we leave him in his Creator's hands, of whom all paternity

in heaven and earth is named, our father in God, our fathernow with God. His body wiil be with his brethren, in the placehe loved so weil and left so seldom; that is but fitting; so far asearthly gifts were concerned, he received from Ampleforth allhe had, gave to Ampleforth all he had; we would not separatehis name from hers. Those heavenly graces which he receivedfrom God, as surely he gave back to God; the soul knows largerhorizons. Yet, where he rests with God, if any thoughts of hisstill turn towards earth, surely they will turn towards this placeand dweil like a benediction over this place; haec requies mea insaeculum saeculi; hic habitabo, quoniam elegi eam. May the prayers ofour blessed Lady and St Edmund and the saints of his order winhim, now and hereafter, refreshment, light and peace.

4HILAIRE BELLOC

Up, then, gird thee like a man, and speak out all the message I give thee.Meet them undaunted, and they shall have no power to daunt thee. StrongI mean to make thee this day as fortified city, or pillar of iron, or wall ofbronze, to meet king, prince, priest ofJuda and common folk all the countrythrough.-Jerernias 1:17-18.

THE other day, in a curiously moving country church atWest Grinstead, we laid to rest, not without the tears of

memory, an old and tired man. It was a funeral of circumstance;the Mass was Pontifical, the habits of many religious ordersgraced the sanctuary, and schoolboys' voices lent an intolerablebeauty to the Dies Irae. But in essence it was a country affair;some of Hilaire Beiloc's friends had met to see his body loweredinto the grave-there, in Sussex earth; there, beside the wife hehad so long mourned; there, with the house he had lived in forforty years, till it became "like a bear's fur" to him, only a fewThis panegyric was preached at the Requiem Mass for Hilaire Belloc at

Westnlinster Cathedral on 5 August 1953·

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miles away. Today, as if humouring that other side of him,which loved stateliness and the just proportion of well-orderedthings, we gather with muffied footfalls among the echoingvaults of a great cathedral-we, lesser men, who have lived solong under the shadow of his championship, to remind our-selves what it is we have lost, and to do him honour.We ask foolisWy what such a man would have wished to hear

said in his praise if he were alive; perhaps still more foolishly,what he is wishing to hear, if the dead know so much, care somuch, about transitory things. It was a question that exercisedhirn greatly, especially at the end of his life; the appetite forfame was, he said, at once the most irrational and the strongestof all appetites; of farne itself he told us, "It is but a savour andan air". For his friend Chesterton he prophesied enduring fameonly on condition that the cause for which they both did battleshould ultimately triumph, and England should return to a hap-pier way of living. Whether that was right, may be a matter ofdispute; but I think it gives us a clue to Belloc's own feelingabout such matters. What he cared for was not the good wordof posterity taken in the gross, but the praise of Christendom.Only such praise concerns US, here before his catafalque. Let

others remember him-have no fear, he will be remembered-as a great master of English prose, that virile, nervous Englishprose which he shares with men like Sterne and Cobbett; or asa satirist to be mentioned in the same breath as Swift andMeliere: or as a historian who had the rare quality of makingthe past live. For us, these are but the trappings of his greatness.Here was a man that interpreted divine things for us, underhomely images and in our common speech. He was a prophet.When I say that, I do not mean to suggest that he had any

special skill in forecasting future events; he made mistakes there,like the rest of uso I mean he was such a man as saw what hetook to be the evils of our time in a clear light, and with asteady hatred; that he found, or thought he had found, a corn-mon root in them, and traced them back, with what light Godgave him, to their origins in history. In this, he resembled agreat man whom he was proud to claim as his master, FatherVincent McNabb, of the Order of Preachers. Father Vincent,who has left us so Iittle record of his splendid gifts, was aninspiration to all that brilliant circle of Catholics among whom

IV. PANEGYRICS 1069

Belloc moved; men like John Phillimore, the professor of hu-manities at Glasgow, and Maurice Baring, whose novels weshall read again. But only two accepted from him the mantleof prophecy, Belloc and Chesterton. And of these, Bellochad the double portion; he was a prophet by destiny and bytemperament.A prophet, by derivation, is one who speaks out. He must

not wrap up his meaning; he must not expect success. "Tobrazen-faced folk and hard-hearted thy errand is, and still fromrhe Lord God a message thou must deliver, hear they, or denythee a hearing; rebels all, at least they shall know that they havehad a prophet in their midst." There is the double tragedy of theprophet; he must speak out, so that he makes men dislike him,and he must be content to believe that he is making no impres-sion whatever. Such is the complaint of Jeremias: "An ill daywhen thou, my mother, didst bring me into the world! A worldwhere all for me is strife, all is hostility; neither creditor I nordebtor to any man, yet they curse my name." He would be rid,if he could, of the prophet's burden; and there were moods, atleast, in which Belloc would indulge in the same complaint.Even when he wrote The Path to Rome, he was conscious of thestrain; "We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the worldalmost begins to talk astrange language. . . . And this is hardwhen a man has loved common views, and is happy only withhis fellows." And in his tribute to Chesterton, one of his lastworks, you will find him exclaiming, half in envy, half in repro-bation, at the man who took part in so much controversy, yetnever made an enemy; "without wounding and killing", he said,"there is no battle". With Chesterton, as with Johnson's friendwho jr ied to be a philosopher, "cheerfulness was always break-ing in"; Belloc's destiny was conflict, and he did not love it. Hewas "a prophet lost in the hills":

I challenged, and I kept the faith;The bleeding path alone I trod.

Why must he always be different, not thinking the thoughts ofcommon men?A sad life? You would not venture to assert it; as a young

man, he would sing in chorus, and ride, and sail the seas; nor

I07° OCCASIONAL SERMONS

did he lose, to the end, the pleasures of old memory and oftried friendship. But he was melancholy by temperament; theundercurrents of his mind were sad, and his face never lookedhappy in repose. And because this melancholy was fed, at alltimes, by a sense of intellectualloneliness, he stood, mentally, aconfessor to the faith that was in hirn. Many, who shared tharfaith, would not go all the way with hirn in following out itsimplications: Was the story of the Reformation really so simpleas he made it out to be? Were financial interests so powerful,were modern politics so corrupt, in real life as in EmmanuelBurden ? But his vision was prophetie, and therefore integral. Ifyou could not trace every link in the chain of historical causa-.tion, still you could not doubt the logical sequence of events; itwas no mere accident that the world which accepted the Refor-mation drifted, after a few centuries, into being the world weknow. If we had lost good fellowship and good craftsmanshipand a hundred other things which the natural side of hirn re-gretted, it was, it must be, a nemesis traceable to the loss ofcertain other things, which the supernatural side of hirn regret-ted inconsolably.Does the prophet do good? No such promise is made hirn

when he sets out with his message. His task is to deliver thatmessage to the men of his time, whether they hear or refusehirn a hearing. It may be, the stark language he talks to them,the unconventional gestures by which he tries to thrust it horne,will produce areaction, and wed them all the more firmly totheir old ways of thought. There are one or two terrible pas-sages in the Old Testament which almost seem to imply that theprophet is sent out, not to inspire repentance, but to redoublethe guilt of his unbelieving audience. What is important, itseems, is that they should know they have had a prophet in theirmidst. Must that be the epitaph we pronounce today over a manso widely read, so greatly loved? That the violence of his protestdefeated itself, and left England less kindly disposed than ever toa propaganda so crude, so exaggerated?To be sure, he was prophet rather than apostle; he did not, as

we say, "rnake converts".Indeed, I can still remember the agitation of Maurice Baring

when Chesterton first showed signs of becoming a Catholic;"Don't tell Hilary", he said, "he'd ruin everything."

IV. PANEGYRICS

You do not often hear it said of Belloe, as you hear it said ofChesterton, "I owe my conversion to him", But the influenceof a prophet is not to be measured by its impact on a singlemind here and there; it exercises a kind of hydraulic pressure onthe thought of his age. And when the day of wrath comes, andthat book is brought out, written once for all, which containsall the material for a world's judgment, we shall perhaps seemore of what Belloc was and did; how even his most irrespon-sible satire acted as a solvent force, to pierce the hard rind ofself-satisfaction which, more than anything, kept Victorian En-gland away from the Church; how the very overtones of hisunostentatious piety brought back to us memories of the faith,and of the Mass, and of our blessed Lady, to which English earshad grown unaccustomed.Have 1 represented hirn as a figure of marble? No one who

knew hirn, no one who has read the more intimate of his writ-ings, can picture hirn otherwise than as a man essentially hu-man, twinkling with fun, rippling with vitality. Even as wecommit his soul into the hands of his Creator, with those se-verely impersonal prayers the Church dictates to us, we arehaunted by a thousand human memo ries of hirn, recall a hun-dred endearing characteristics of hirn-his undisguised admira-tion for lesser men than hirnself, the punctilious care withwhich he would bestow charity on a beggar, his rather stiffcourtesy to strangers, his fondness for company and good cheer.Human? God knows he was human. For human frailties, mayhe receive the pardon he always desired. For the wideness of hishuman sympathies, may he find reward.And yet, you who loved Hilaire Belloe, you who read hirn,

and found inspiration in the reading, do not imagine that hewould be satisfied if we wrote for hirn the epitaph, "This manendeared hirns elf to his fellows". He was a prophet; menthought hirn a fanatic, and he has written his own epitaph, 1think, in a poem of that name. A fanatic, he says, is one whokeeps his word-not merely this or that casual promise, but

That great word which every manGave God before his life began:It was a sacred word, he said,Which comforted the pathless dead,

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And made God smile when it was shownUnforfeited before the Throne.

He has given an undertaking (that, surely, is the sense) that hewill be true to hirnself, that he will carry out faithfully the mis.,sion God gave hirn to perform, that he will challenge the menof his age with his own characteristic protest. Unforfeited-nohuman flattery, no love of ease, no weariness of conflict, shallmake hirn retract the pledge he has given. "I have fought thegood fight, 1 have finished the race, 1 have redeemed mypledge"-that is what Hilaire Belloc would wish us to say ofhirn, and there are few of whom it could be said so truly.May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed,

through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

5FATHER PAUL NEVILL, O.S.B.

What, do we need letters oJ recommendation to you, orJrom you, as someothers do? Why, you yourselves are the letter we carry about with us, writtenin our hearts,Jor all to recognize and to read=e-z Corinthians 3:1-2.

INthe first age of the Church, when there was danger of half-instructed Christians confusing the minds of the faithful by

preaching another gospel than that which the apostles had re-ceived, a missionary travelling from one preaching centre toanother carried with hirn letters of recommendation, to provethat he was in good faith. And St Paul, defending hirns elf fromacharge of inconstancy which his friends at Corinth were halfprepared to believe, suddenly pulls hirnself up (as his wont is)and says, "What! Can it really be necessary for me to build upmy reputation like this, when 1 am writing to you? Must 1 courtyour good opinion like astranger, when you are my own chil-dren in Jesus Christ? Why, you yourselves are my letter of intro-duction; only, my message to you was not written with paperand ink; it was, or should be, engraved on your hearts," Bur atthis point St Paul, who always got his metaphors mixed, puts itThis panegyric was preached at the Requiem Mass for Father Paul Nevill at

the London Oratory on I February 1954.

IV. PANEGYRICS

the wrong way round, and says, "You are written on my heart",instead of "I am written on your hearts"-which was what hemeant. N ever mind, it all comes to the same thing. What itmeans is that St Paul, the author of all those epistles which havebeen read and studied and argued over for nineteen centuries,wasn't really proud of his performances with paper and ink.What he was proud of was a little group of souls at Corinth, onwhom the image of Christ had been stamped through his min-istry. They were his credentials, they were the sign-manual ofhis apostleship.When it was last my melancholy privilege to preach before a

friend's catafalque, trying to interpret something of his quality,and weigh the measure of our loss, it was a writer of his torywhose name is known throughout the civilized world; and thecongregation which filled the cathedral was, 1 suppose, a cross-section of London. Today, we are once again mourning a histo-rian, but one whose vocation, and perhaps his tastes, opened upto hirn a quite different way of externalizing the message thatwas in hirn. And that, not merely by teaching history, though hewas an exact and a stimulating teacher. For thirty years of unre-mitting devotion he laboured to stamp his Master's image oneach boy-not on all the boys, on each boy-who passedthrough Ampleforth. That was his epistle in life, that is histestament in death. 1 suppose 1 am talking to many who enjoyedthat privilege; thinking little of it at the time, because boys don'tthink much, but seeing more dearly, now in retrospect, what itmeant. Is it intrusive of me if 1 labour the moral of my text?You are his epistle; his influence is graven in your hearts; and donot doubt that, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, he carried you,andcarries you, in his.Not that the school, or the boys in the school-that was the

extraordinary thing-absorbed all his energies. We others, whoknew Ampleforth only as guests, knew Father Paul as a friendwho always had leisure for you, always welcomed you as if youwere the person he had looked forward to seeing. That welcomeof his, how we valued it! Curiously, in this respect 1 bracket hirnin my mind with another Benedictine of the English obediencewho died barely a week before hirn, Abbot Hicks of Downside.So often 1 have enjoyed the hospitality of our two great monas-teries; and neither, now, can be quite the same again. Only a few

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