"Dies Irae”

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 1, 5 January 1922, Page 33

" Dies Irae ”

NOTED FRENCH WRITER TOUCHED.

n 1,1 a receilt number of a literary review a celebrated f rencli writer thus gives expression to his feelings on hearing the solemn strains of the “Dies Irae” sung in one of the cathedrals of Paris: & "Suddenly the ‘ Dies Irae’ has burst forth on the air thick with incense, and those stanzas, composed in some unsnaded garden by a gentle disciple of St. Francis. have rolled over our heads like threats mingled with hopes Ido not know if yon have thus been touched even to tears, as I have been by that poetry bearing he impress of the austere love which overflowed from he soul of the first Franciscans. But I can tell you that I have never heard the thirteenth strophe without feeling myself shaken by a religious tremor That strophe says :

Thou the sinful woman savest ; Thou' the dying thief forgavest And to me a hope vouchsafes!.

. he singer who launches forth these Latin words in file vessel of the church is her© in the voice of the entire assembly. At present, those pure, great, exalted persons must inwardly repeat :

Thou the sinful woman savest; Thou the dying thief forgavest ; And to me a hope vouchsafes!:.

"That, is what the Church desires, the Church which lias condemned theft and made marriage into a Sacrament It humiliates, in its wisdom, the virtues of those happy people who are called the just, and it reminds the best among them that, far from being able to erect, themselves into judges, they -ought themselves to crave for pardon. This Christian morality seems to me minutely sweet and infinitely wise. It will never completely prevail against the violences of the spirit and the pride of the flesh : but it will sometimes spread its divine peace over our tired hearts, and it will teach us m pardon, with all other offences, the treasons committed against us by those whom we have loved too well.”

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