SONS OF THE PEOPLE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIII, Issue 8, 12 June 1885, Page 9

SONS OF THE PEOPLE.

(Correspondence of the Pilot.) In advocating the maintenance of the miserable sum of 900 francs a year to each of the French clergy, which the Chamber aims at withdrawing from them, M. Grandlieu says in Figaro that these priests are in an immense majority the sons of poor farmers ; they come from the farm and the plough ; they have raised themselves by their own merit, and, in exchange for the life of sacrifice and devotion which they lead in the depths of the rural districts, the State, which scatters money abroad on so many useless functions, grudges them 900 francs a year. They have been exiled, guillotined, shot, and they have never cursed their executioners. The first act of the successor of Mgr. Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, was to adopt, as a father, the orphans of the Commune 1 Au unpublished letter of Father Lacordaire says of the country priest .- •• If Plato and Socrates had seen this spectacle of a learned, serious man shutting himself up in a village to cultivate the intelligence and the conscience of poor peasants, to console and assist them by religion, they would have been ravished with admiration ; they would have kissed the ground on which these priests trod. . . . Their appearance is sometimes rude and coarse, but under this rudeness there is more force and devotioa than in the fine aristocracy. It is the blood of the barbarians which regenerated the Roman Empire. It is again this blood of the people which is the organ of all great deeds, and, in particular, of priestly devotedness. One day Napoleon was surprised by a storm and forced to take shelter in a cottage. As he stood upon the threshold he saw ao old priest passing by hurriedly. He asked the priest where he was goicg Buch weather. ' Sir,' said the priest, ' I am going to bring the last consolations of religion to a dying person.' Napoleon, touched, looked to his suite, saying . 1 What manly stuff are our French priests made of.' " If you ask what are the best known names amongst the clergy of to-day, in the Press and in the pulpit, those that have a universal reputation — Father Monsabre, Father Ollivier, Father Didon, Father Felix, you find that they are children of the people, and that they bear in their person and in their speech the strong imprint of their origin, taking from this origin an indescribable strength and power which gives a special action to their eloquence. And these are they whom the Governmeat, the champions of progress, cast out, disperse, proscribe ! Go still higher, these colonial bishops who are missionaries of the French language and French civilisation, these archbishops and cardinals, against whose grants — eaten up by chancy before being received — the deputies cry out, whence do they come but from the ranks of the people? There is Cardinal Gousset, who at the age of 17 did not know how to read, and who dug the e round ; Cardinal Regnier, seventh son of an Anjou peasant ; Cardinals Mathieu, Morlot, Pic,-one coming from an obscure office desk, another from a carpenter's shop, and the third from a cobbler's stall. There is the most glorioug of all, Algr. Dupanloup humbly repeating the sacred words : " Lifting up tne poor out of the dunghill— De xtercore erigens pauperem." It is not a fruitful and generous democracy, this wh.ch aims at crushing the moral and religious life of the nation, and of rendering life impossible to the powerful advocates of civilisation.