The spirit of such men as he, and of such nations as his beloved

Belgium, is well expressed in Henley's now famous "Invictus."



Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.



In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.



* * * * *



It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.



Amidst all the horrible deeds committed by the Germans in Belgium,

Cardinal Mercier has spoken the truth publicly and fearlessly. His

unconquerable soul seems to have protected his frail body. He is one of

the great heroes of brave, suffering Belgium--a hero who carries

neither sword nor gun; but his courage might be envied by every soldier

on the field of battle, and his judgment by every commander directing

them.



The Germans seemed to fear him from the first. General von Bissing, who

was the German Governor of invaded Belgium, wrote to Cardinal Mercier,

after the Cardinal's Easter letter to the oppressed Belgians appeared,

and called him to account, suggesting what might happen to him if he

did not cease his attacks upon the Germans and German methods.



The Cardinal replied that he would never surrender his liberty of

judgment and that, whenever the orders and laws of the Germans were in

conflict with the laws of God, he would follow the latter and advise

his people to do the same.



"We render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's," he wrote, "for we

pay you the silent dread of your strength, but we keep, sacred in our

hearts and free from your orders, our ideas of right and wrong.



"It was not without careful thought that we denounced to the world the

evils you have done to our brothers and sisters--frightful evils and

horrible crimes, the tragic horror of which cold reason refuses to

admit.



"But had we not done so, we should have felt ourselves unworthy of our

high office.



"As a Belgian, we have heard the cries of sorrow of our people; as a

patriot, we have sought to heal the wounds of our country; and as a

bishop, we have denounced the crimes against innocent priests."



They deprived him of his automobile, with which he used to hasten to

all parts of Belgium to assist and comfort sufferers from German

tyranny and torture. They ordered him to remain in his residence.



As a part of his church duty, he wished to go to Brussels to celebrate

high mass. He applied for a pass which would allow him to go by train

or trolley. An excuse was invented for refusing it. Then the Cardinal

sent word to the Commandant that he must go and that he would walk. Two

hours afterward he left his residence on foot, accompanied by two or

three priests, and started on his walk of fifteen or more miles to

Brussels.



Men, women, and children, and priests from every part of the city

crowded about him and followed him, till he reached the German

sentries, who stopped the crowd and demanded where they were going.



The Cardinal showed his Ausweiss, an identification card which every

Belgian must carry, and he was allowed to proceed with two priests for

companions. The other priests demanded the right to go on, and a heated

dispute arose between them and the sentries. One of the priests lost

his temper and forgot himself so far that he began to beat one of the

sentries with his umbrella. The other sentry called for help, and the

crowd was soon dispersed. The angry priest was put under arrest and led

off to the guardhouse.



The Cardinal had gone on but a short way when the uproar behind him

caused him to stop and look back at what was happening. When he saw the

priest led off by the soldiers, he and his companions turned back and

followed the soldiers to the little guardhouse. He walked directly in,

looking neither to the right nor the left, standing a head above the

rest of the crowd. He fixed his piercing black eyes upon the eyes of

the priest; then he beckoned him to come and turned and walked out,

followed by the priest.



The soldiers made no attempt to stop them. They seemed to recognize an

authority that they could not help obeying, even though they did not

want to. The Cardinal accompanied by the three priests went on down the

road and out of Malines towards Brussels. They walked about half way

to the city and then took the trolleys.



In speaking of the Germans, the Cardinal is reported to have said,

"They are so stupid, these Germans! Sometimes I feel that they are like

silly, cruel children, and that I should do something to help them."



He loves America and the Americans and is grateful for all that the

United States have done for his suffering people. He told one of his

fellow-workers who had become discouraged, "If you follow a great

Captain, as I do, you will never be discouraged."



In him martyred Belgium has found a voice heard round the world. He has

never ceased to denounce the atrocious crimes of the German masters of

his country and he has continually sought to comfort and cheer his

unhappy people. He sees far, and so he sees clearly the power outside

ourselves that finally brings to Right the victory over Might. His

Pastoral Letter, Christmas, 1914, will never be forgotten nor will the

words of cheer to his suffering people when he reminds them of the

greatest truth of life, that only through sacrifice and suffering come

the things best worth while. His statement in letters to the German

Commandant of the facts concerning the deportation of Belgians into

Germany, to work as virtual slaves, will forever form part of the

records of history's blackest deeds.



This Pastoral Letter of Christmas, 1914, is in part as follows:



It was in Rome itself that I received the tidings--stroke after

stroke--of the destruction of the church of Louvain, of the

burning of the Library and of the scientific laboratories of our

great University and of the devastation of the city, and next of

the wholesale shooting of citizens, and tortures inflicted upon

women and children, and upon unarmed and undefended men. And

while I was still under the shock of these calamities, the

telegraph brought us news of the bombardment of our beautiful

metropolitan church, of the church of Notre Dame, of the

episcopal palace, and of a great part of our dear city of

Malines.



Afar, without means of communication with you, I was compelled

to lock my grief within my own afflicted heart, and to carry it,

with the thought of you, which never left me, to my God.



I needed courage and light, and sought them in such thoughts as

these. A disaster has come upon the world, and our beloved

little Belgium, a nation so faithful in the great mass of her

population to God, so upright in her patriotism, so noble in her

King and Government, is the first sufferer. She bleeds; her sons

are stricken down, within her fortresses, and upon her fields,

in defense of her rights and of her territory. Soon there will

not be one Belgian family not in mourning. Why all this sorrow,

my God? Lord, Lord, hast Thou forsaken us?



The truth is that no disaster on earth is as terrible as that

which our sins provoke.



I summon you to face what has befallen us, and to speak to you

simply and directly of what is your duty, and of what may be

your hope. That duty I shall express in two words: Patriotism

and Endurance.





PATRIOTISM



When, on my return from Rome, I went to Havre to greet our

Belgian, French, and English wounded; when, later at Malines, at

Louvain, at Antwerp, it was given to me to take the hands of

those brave men who carried a bullet in their flesh, a wound on

their forehead, because they had marched to the attack of the

enemy, or borne the shock of his onslaught, it was a word of

gratitude to them that rose to my lips. "O brave friends," I

said, "it was for us, it was for each one of us, it was for me,

that you risked your lives and are now in pain. I am moved to

tell you of my respect, of my thankfulness, to assure you that

the whole nation knows how much she is in debt to you."



For in truth our soldiers are our saviors.



A first time, at Liége, they saved France; a second time, in

Flanders, they halted the advance of the enemy upon Calais.

France and England know it; and Belgium stands before them both,

and before the entire world, as a nation of heroes. Never before

in my whole life did I feel so proud to be a Belgian as when, on

the platforms of French stations, and halting a while in Paris,

and visiting London, I was witness of the enthusiastic

admiration our allies feel for the heroism of our army. Our King

is, in the esteem of all, at the very summit of the moral scale;

he is doubtless the only man who does not recognize that fact,

as, simple as the simplest of his soldiers, he stands in the

trenches and puts new courage, by the calmness of his face, into

the hearts of those of whom he requires that they shall not

doubt of their country. The foremost duty of every Belgian

citizen at this hour is gratitude to the army.



If any man had rescued you from shipwreck or from a fire, you

would hold yourselves bound to him by a debt of everlasting

thankfulness. But it is not one man, it is two hundred and fifty

thousand men who fought, who suffered, who fell for you so that

you might be free, so that Belgium might keep her independence,

so that after battle, she might rise nobler, purer, more erect,

and more glorious than before.



Pray daily, my Brethren, for these two hundred and fifty

thousand, and for their leaders to victory; pray for our

brothers in arms; pray for the fallen; pray for those who are

still engaged; pray for the recruits who are making ready for

the fight to come.



Better than any other man, perhaps, do I know what our unhappy

country has undergone. Nor will any Belgian, I trust, doubt of

what I suffer in my soul, as a citizen and as a Bishop, in

sympathy with all this sorrow. These last four months have

seemed to me age-long. By thousands have our brave ones been

mown down; wives, mothers are weeping for those they shall not

see again; hearths are desolate; dire poverty spreads, anguish

increases. At Malines, at Antwerp, the people of two great

cities have been given over, the one for six hours, the other

for thirty-four hours of a continuous bombardment, to the throes

of death. I have passed through the greater part of the most

terribly devastated districts and the ruins I beheld, and the

ashes, were more dreadful than I, prepared by the saddest of

forebodings, could have imagined. Other parts which I have not

yet had time to visit have in like manner been laid waste.

Churches, schools, asylums, hospitals, convents in great

numbers, are in ruins. Entire villages have all but disappeared.

At Werchter-Wackerzeel, for instance, out of three hundred and

eighty homes, a hundred and thirty remain; at Tremeloo two

thirds of the village are overthrown; at Bueken out of a hundred

houses, twenty are standing; at Schaffen one hundred and

eighty-nine houses out of two hundred are destroyed--eleven

still stand. At Louvain the third part of the buildings are

down; one thousand and seventy-four dwellings have disappeared;

on the town land and in the suburbs, one thousand eight hundred

and twenty-three houses have been burnt.



In this dear city of Louvain, perpetually in my thoughts, the

magnificent church of St. Peter will never recover its former

splendor. The ancient college of St. Ives, the art-schools, the

consular and commercial schools of the University, the old

markets, our rich library with its collections, its unique and

unpublished manuscripts, its archives, its gallery of great

portraits of illustrious rectors, chancellors, professors,

dating from the time of its foundation, which preserved for

masters and students alike a noble tradition and were an

incitement in their studies--all this accumulation of

intellectual, of historic, and of artistic riches, the fruit of

the labors of five centuries--all is reduced to dust.



Thousands of Belgian citizens have in like manner been deported

to the prisons of Germany, to Münsterlagen, to Celle, to

Magdeburg. At Münsterlagen alone three thousand one hundred

civil prisoners were numbered. History will tell of the physical

and moral torments of their long martyrdom. Hundreds of innocent

men were shot. I possess no complete list, but I know that there

were ninety-one shot at Aerschot, and that there, under pain of

death, their fellow citizens were compelled to dig their graves.

In the Louvain group of communes one hundred and seventy-six

persons, men and women, old men and babies, rich and poor, in

health and sickness, were shot or burnt.



In my diocese alone I know that thirteen priests were put to

death. One of these, the parish priest of Gelrode, suffered, I

believe, a veritable martyrdom.



We can neither number our dead nor compute the measure of our

ruins. And what would it be if we turned our sad steps towards

Liége, Namur, Andenne, Dinant, Tamines, Charleroi, and

elsewhere?



And where lives were not taken, and where buildings were not

thrown down, what anguish unrevealed! Families, hitherto living

at ease, now in bitter want; all commerce at an end, all careers

ruined; industry at a standstill; thousands upon thousands of

workingmen without employment; working-women, shop-girls, humble

servant-girls without the means of earning their bread; and poor

souls forlorn on the bed of sickness and fever, crying, "O Lord,

how long, how long?"



How long, O Lord, they wondered, how long wilt Thou suffer the

pride of this iniquity? Or wilt Thou finally justify the impious

opinion that Thou carest no more for the work of Thy hands? A

shock from a thunderbolt, and behold all human foresight is set

at naught. Europe trembles upon the brink of destruction.



The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.



Many are the thoughts that throng the breast of man to-day, and

the chief of them all is this: God reveals Himself as the

Master. The nations that made the attack, and the nations that

are warring in self-defense, alike confess themselves to be in

the hand of Him without whom nothing is made, nothing is done.

Men long unaccustomed to prayer are turning again to God. Within

the army, within the civil world, in public, and within the

individual conscience, there is prayer. Nor is that prayer

to-day a word learnt by rote, uttered lightly by the lip; it

surges from the troubled heart, it takes the form, at the feet

of God, of the very sacrifice of life.



God will save Belgium, my Brethren, you cannot doubt it.



Nay, rather, He is saving her.



Across the smoke of conflagration, across the stream of blood,

have you not glimpses, do you not perceive signs, of His love

for us? Is there a patriot among us who does not know that

Belgium has grown great? Nay, which of us would have the heart

to cancel this last page of our national history? Which of us

does not exult in the brightness of the glory of this shattered

nation? Let us acknowledge that we needed a lesson in

patriotism. There were Belgians, and many such, who wasted their

time and their talents in futile quarrels of class with class,

of race with race, of passion with personal passion.



Yet when, on the second of August, a mighty foreign power,

confident in its own strength and defiant of the faith of

treaties, dared to threaten us in our independence, then did all

Belgians, without difference of party, or of condition, or of

origin, rise up as one man, [close-ranged] about their own king

and their own government, and cry to the invader: "Thou shalt

not pass!"



At once, instantly, we were conscious of our own patriotism. For

down within us all is something deeper than personal interests,

than personal kinships, than party feeling, and this is the need

and the will to devote ourselves to that more general interest

which Rome called the public thing, Res publica. And this

profound will within us is Patriotism.



Our country is not a mere gathering of persons or of families

dwelling on the same soil, having amongst themselves relations,

more or less intimate, of business, of neighborhood, of a

community of memories, happy or unhappy. Not so; it is an

association of living souls to be defended and safeguarded at

all costs, even the cost of blood, under the leadership of those

presiding over its fortunes. And it is because of this general

spirit that the people of a country live a common life in the

present, through the past, through the aspirations, the hopes,

the confidence in a life to come, which they share together.

Patriotism, an internal principle of order and of unity, an

organic bond of the members of a nation, was placed by the

finest thinkers of Greece and Rome at the head of the natural

virtues.





ENDURANCE



We may now say, my Brethren, without unworthy pride, that our

little Belgium has taken a foremost place in the esteem of

nations. I am aware that certain onlookers, notably in Italy and

in Holland, have asked how it could be necessary to expose this

country to so immense a loss of wealth and of life, and whether

a verbal manifesto against hostile aggression, or a single

cannon-shot on the frontier, would not have served the purpose

of protest. But assuredly all men of good feeling will be with

us in our rejection of these paltry counsels.



On the 19th of April, 1839, a treaty was signed in London, by

King Leopold, in the name of Belgium on the one part, and by the

Emperor of Austria, the King of France, the Queen of England,

the King of Prussia, and the Emperor of Russia on the other; and

its seventh article decreed that Belgium should form a separate

and perpetually neutral State, and should be held to the

observance of this neutrality in regard to all other States. The

signers promised, for themselves and their successors, upon

their oaths, to fulfill and to observe that treaty in every

point and every article. Belgium was thus bound in honor to

defend her own independence. She kept her oath. The other Powers

were bound to respect and to protect her neutrality. Germany

violated her oath; England kept hers.



These are the facts.



The laws of conscience are sovereign laws. We should have acted

unworthily had we evaded our obligation by a mere feint of

resistance. And now we would not change our first resolution; we

exult in it. Being called upon to write a most solemn page in

the history of our country, we resolved that it should be also a

sincere, also a glorious page. And as long as we are required to

give proof of endurance, so long we shall endure.



All classes of our citizens have devoted their sons to the

cause of their country; but the poorer part of the population

have set the noblest example, for they have suffered also

privation, cold, and famine. If I may judge of the general

feeling from what I have witnessed in the humbler quarters of

Malines, and in the most cruelly afflicted districts of my

diocese, the people are energetic in their endurance. They look

to be righted; they will not hear of surrender.



The sole lawful authority in Belgium is that of our King, of the

elected representatives of the nation. This authority alone has

a right to our affection, our submission.



Occupied provinces are not conquered provinces. Belgium is no

more a German province than Galicia is a Russian province.

Nevertheless the occupied portion of our country is in a

position it is compelled to endure. The greater part of our

towns, having surrendered to the enemy on conditions, are bound

to observe those conditions. From the outset of military

operations, the civil authorities of the country urged upon all

private persons the necessity of avoiding hostile acts against

the enemy's army. That instruction remains in force. It is our

army, and our army solely, in league with the brave troops of

our Allies, that has the honor and the duty of national defense.

Let us intrust the army with our final deliverance.



Towards the persons of those who are holding dominion among us

by military force, and who cannot but know of the energy with

which we have defended, and are still defending, our

independence, let us conduct ourselves with all needful

forbearance. Let us observe the rules they have laid upon us so

long as those rules do not violate our personal liberty, nor our

consciences, nor our duty to our country. Let us not take

bravado for courage, nor tumult for bravery.



Our distress has moved the other nations. England, Ireland, and

Scotland; France, Holland, the United States, Canada, have vied

with each other in generosity for our relief. It is a spectacle

at once most mournful and most noble. Here again is a revelation

of the Providential Wisdom which draws good from evil. In your

name, my Brethren, and in my own, I offer to the governments and

the nations that have succored us the assurance of our

admiration and our gratitude.





OZYMANDIAS



I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.