AN

CHAPTER VI.

IMPERFECTION.

ND now I am going to utter my complaint. I must express my heart's grief. Why was this noble creature, this chef-d'œuvre de Dieu, as he was. well called by one of his best friends, to be so soon spent? Scarce come to maturity, not having yet attained the full command of his powers, and he was gone!

It is of Henri himself that I complain. I mourn that he is lost to us through his own fault. He sought death as much through a want of discipline as through impetuous courage, like a soldier who is killed when going beyond his post. In spite of all one's advice and entreaties, he fully illustrated that cruel dictum of science, "Men do not die, they kill themselves." 1

I know Henri Perreyve's whole life, I know the entire history of his mind, body, and soul; and I affirm that he died a victim to that great evil which I can only call priestly isolation. Alone through the daily course of his life (as Père Lacordaire wrote to him

1 "L'homme ne meurt pas, il se tue."

regretfully, "Alone, dear child, in your own room" 1), encountering alone the crowd which consumed him, he did not know how to resist the forcible entrainement of success, or the ceaseless interruptions of all those who sought to sun themselves in his light, or draw upon the stores of his zeal. Every day brought him the work of ten priests. "Refuse all these applications, and keep to your own work," I used to urge. "I am perpetually refusing," he would answer. In fact he refused some six or seven out of every ten applications, but even then there remained more than he could accomplish. Besides his Professorship of Moral Theology at the Sorbonne, which in itself is enough to engross whoever fills it; besides his numerous writings, which would have been a sufficient task, there was no end to his sermons, personal work in every direction, endless correspondence, hearing confessions, direction, réunions of young men, incessant visits, social intercourse without pause or limit! And all this ate into his very life and fairly consumed him.

About five years before his death Henri regained a measure of strength, which, if wisely husbanded, would have lasted for twenty years, but he poured it forth in reckless waste! I cannot describe my dismay when the day came on which I first perceived 1 "Seul, mon enfant, dans un appartement à vous!"

that he had evidently lost his powers of self-control, that he was carried away. He had taken to evening work, then to night work, to the sacrifice of his mornings, to finding meditation an impossibility; to the doing away with all recollection. Even before things came to this point, I used to write such notes as the following to him :—

"MON ENFANT,-I cannot be silent. I feel it to be my duty to warn you, to save your life, it may be. We agreed some eight months ago, in accordance with your physician's advice, that you were to take entire rest for several years. You know that it is Père Lacordaire's imperative opinion; you know how urgently he spoke about it to me lately; I am sure he was not less urgent with you yourself. If you go on as you are doing, in spite of all your friends, it will become a really blameable infatuation. Be sure that a relapse is not far off-it will probably come within a few weeks! Now forgive me; it is my deep affection which makes me speak. If you become unfit for anything, or if we lose you before your time through your own imprudence, it will be a sore wound to us all." This note was signed by two Oratorians.

"This sort of thing cannot go on," Père Lacordaire said to me; "he ought to have three years' rest, not only for his body's sake, but for mind and soul too. If he goes on with this active, broadcast

life he will break down, and moreover he will never gain the strength, depth, and greatness which God means him to have. Let him come to me at Sorèze for three years!"

Sorèze indeed! Why forsooth did Lacordaire give up his own life to the endless distractions of a school, letting himself be ground to dust like corn in a mill? Recollection does not depend upon a man's geographical distance from Paris; it depends upon the unity of his work, and the degree of his own interior life. It depends upon solitude with God, clauso ostio!

“Oh,

Anyhow, all the efforts made by Henri's friends were vain; he was carried away and crushed. what a profound horror I have in the depth of my heart of his imprudence!" one of those who sorrows piteously for his death writes to me; and I say the same. It stirs my wrath to see the laws of life thus neglected and trodden under foot, even by the best of men. This is no question of braving death in the cause of duty. When in 1864, Henri consented to preach at Sainte Barbe to those young men whose hearts his voice could reach better than any other, I raised no opposition, although he was then well nigh spent; and I could not but approve when he said, “I refuse all work this year, but as to the Conferences at Sainte Barbe, if I knew that I should die the day after

they are over, I should only undertake them the more resolutely. It is but what every subaltern does, when a dangerous post is allotted to him." But the "Station de Sorbonne," which followed, was an unpardonable mistake and did really cost him his life, not many months later. By his own fault he deprived us of all that his mature life, his old age might have been. We have so few old or wise men! and that chiefly because we are all more and more deficient in depth and recollection. The world moves on with ever increasing rapidity. Movement becomes multiplied and intensified in every shape, moral, intellectual, and physical. And beneath this surface movement, I fear, one discovers that there is a slackening of central impetus. We whirl about more, but we advance less.

I would fain dwell a few moments upon the evil which cost our dear young brother his life. I would warn others and myself against it, by analyzing it.

It is a universal blot; every living thing finds the difficulty of self-recollection, of gathering itself together, and abiding stedfast at the heart's core. It is an evil incident alike to the flowers by the wayside, to all living bodies, to all hearts and minds. It is the degenerare tamen of Virgil, which, passing on from the grain of wheat, he applies to all nature. It is that which S. Bernard, with his deep insight, has called "evisceratio mentis," "the disembowelling