CARDINAL MANNING ON THE PRINCE IMPERIAL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 336, 26 September 1879, Page 7

CARDINAL MANNING ON THE PRINCE IMPERIAL.

In the course of a sermon preached by him at Chiselhurst on July 13th, and reported by the Daily Nen-s, His Eminence said :— • * TT doubtful if a P uf er sympathy, more generous, more disinterested, more free from every taint of this world, ever surrounded a tomb. It was doubtful if the nations of Europe ever united in a more generous feeling of love, sorrow, and sympathy for the mother in her solitude, of veneration for the son lying in the grave of honour and of glory. Wherever there was a generous heart on earth, it would be sorrowing ; wherever there was a Christian, there would be sorrow. Few things were more beautiful than the sorrow and the veneration of those hard strong English soldiers who bore him to the grave, or those rough, tender-hearted English seamen, who stood up high upon their masts with bare heads, venerating him as he was borne past them in his shrcud. This was a most noble sorrow, and it was an English sorrow. France sorrowed and England too. He was our guest ; more, he was our own. We had received him, made him our own by love and hospitality. He was numbered among our Princes, and the day before the Princes of England followed him to the grave, and England herself represented by her Queen, suppoited the weakness of that lonely mother in the solitude of her home. Ihere was not a mother in England who did not join in this sorrow, and there were many mothers in England who had given their sons in this wild and terrible warfare. The youth of England, those that had never seen him, were touched, and his bright example had spoken to them. His comrades in aims, men who bore arms like himself had wondered at the purity, the holiness, the dignity of that youth. a7T- a gieat jOy and consolation to be permitted on such a day to add his (his Eminence's) own sympathy, and he did so with peisonal recollections. He remembered— as long as he lived he should never -orget it— the first time and the last time that he saw the youthful Prince. The first time was when one of his venerable priests had the strange courage, he knew not how, to invite the Prince to the opening of a new school that had been built for the poor little children of London. With that humility which belongs to the highest dignity he came. In the midst of those poor little ones, himself then a youth, for it was years ago, with his bright smile and his kind voice, he gave them joy in the midst of that holy festival. He would never forget it ; it was a beautiful event to be for ever remembered. The last time, the Prince was standing in a large assembly. There were tnere the statesmen and warriors and the great administrators of the British Empire in war and in peace. There were the culture and the manhood of Englishmen, and he rose up, and with an intellectual power and a precision of language in our own mother tongue, and with an eloquence of speech, he so fascinated that multitude before him that they hung upon his lips, and he (the preacher) listened to that youth, and said to himself, " What may there not be before that youth ; there is the power which persuades humanity." The Prince had himself given us a revelation of that which we could never otherwise have known. After he had departed, the loving hands that tended him found a document in his own characters. How should it be described. Was it a prayer to his Heavenly Father, was it an oblation to his Divine Master, was it a sacrifice of himself ? It was full of self-sacrifice, full of devotion, full of humility. France was that great country created by her soldiers and her priests ; soldiers vested with sacerdotal character, because full of piety ; her priests possessing a martial courage and the spirit of the soldier, and the priest guided the hand that wrote that prayer. Besides the sorrow of many nations and the sorrow of England, her Queen, her Princes and her people, there was one sorrow left. This could hardly be spoken of. If ever a son was worthy of a mother's love it was he, if ever a mother loved her son it was his mother. What a desolation now for tbe solitary woman, all alone, yet not alone, for they who believe were never lonely. She looks upon her son in the grave with certain confidence in the glory of the resurrection, in the future recognition of the personal identity in the restoration of the bonds of mother and son in all the perfection of eternal life. The words that Jesus spoke were spoken again :— " A little while and ye shall see me." And what was the longest life but a little while passed here below ?