FATHER BURKE ON CARDINAL CULLEN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 233, 19 October 1877, Page 17

FATHER BURKE ON CARDINAL CULLEN.

Twenty-Five years ago he took up his burden of this great diocese, and that burden he has borne almost unaided for a quarter of a century. How has he borne it ? A new spirit has gone out through the land, a new spirit of a higher description has infused itself into the clergy, a Sacramental Pentecost has been (shed forth. Churches, colleges, hospitals, schools, asylums sprang up all around him as if he held in his hand the wand of a magician — as if he had a creating power for the greatness of his zeal for God. His' faith has been the pillar of Ireland's faith and its representative for five and twenty years. This man, strong in his knowledge and his faith has not only proclaimed and reared up that faith at home, but his voice has rung out, speaking the testimony of Ireland's great and ancient Church, in the walls of St. Peter's, in the great (Ecumenical Council, and all the bishops of the Church of God have given glory to Ireland, when they heard the words of her great Primate and Cardinal Archbishop. His life, a life of prayer, a life of profound union with God, as all who know him can testify, a life characterised with attributes not only of personal sanctity, but of prescient, far-seeing wisdom, and with that attribute of mercy which is the chief ornament of every servant of God, a life revealing itself to us, not only in the grandeur of his action, in the strength of his zeal, in the greatness of his knowledge, but a life manifested to us in all the sweetness of the simplicity and the humility of a little child, joined with the intellectual strength of a giant, and crowned with the highest honour it is in the hand of the Church of God to bestow. Before the Church's bishops to-day stands this glorious man, as he stood before Ireland's people for the last twenty-five years. And oh, long that he may stand there, is the prayer that goes forth from my inmost heart ; it is the prayer that, I am sure, reflects all your minds. Long may he remain to us, long may his crown be denied to him, may God add mercy to mercy and power to power, that his glory in the Church triumphant, when he is caught up into glory, may be coequal with his glory before the Church militant on earth ; that his glory may make him in heaven the prince of Ireland's episcopacy even as he was here ; that it may make him great amongst the saints as he is amongst the prelates of his Church. But before that glory comes may many a head amongst us have turned white with age ; may he remain to us for many a long year, and we have the assurance that he will, and that God will spare him to us, in the strength and the piety of the man whom he has called to his side to-day."