LEO XIII, THE GREAT LEADER

By Rev. A. P. Doyle, C.S.P.

Written in August 1903,
in The Catholic World, a monthly magazine,
on the occasion of the death of Pope Leo XIII.

 My course I've run of ninety lengthening years.
    From Thee the gift. Crown them with endless bliss.
 O hearken to Thy Leo's prayers and tears,
    Lest useless they should prove, O grant him this.

Leo XIII.'s Message to the Twentieth Century:

The greatest misfortune is never to have known Jesus Christ. Christ is the fountain-head of all good. Mankind can no more be saved without His power than it can be redeemed without His mercy.

When Jesus Christ is absent human reason fails, being bereft of its chief protection and light: and the very end is lost sight of for which, under God's providence, human society has been built up.

To reject Dogma is simply to deny Christianity. It is evident that they whose intellects reject the yoke of Christ are obstinately striving against God. Having shaken off God's authority, they are by no means freer, for they will fall beneath some human sway.

God alone is life. All other beings partake of life, but they are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is "the Truth," because He is God of God. If any one abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth (John xv. 6).

Once remove all impediments and allow the spirit of Christ to revive and grow in a nation, and that nation shall be healed.

The world has heard enough of the so-called "rights of man." Let it hear something of the rights of God.

The common welfare urgently demands a return to Him from whom we should never have gone astray: to Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life,--and this on the part not only of individuals but of society as a whole.

LEO XIII., THE GREAT LEADER.

BY REV. A. P. DOYLE.

THE aged Pontiff breathed his last at 4 P. M. on July 20. Because he had lived for over ninety years, and not for any other immediate reason, the end came. Though there was an apparent dissolution of his body under the devastating hand of time, still the mind is as keen and the heart as full of zeal, and the spirit as eager for work, as though the years of his glorious pontificate were before him.

During the last fortnight the gaze of all the world has been eagerly fixed on the death-bed of the expiring Pope, and under the white light of the public gaze he has loomed up, the great man he is, in all his gigantic proportions. The world saw the corporal feebleness of age and the ravaging hand of disease, but it saw also the conquering and unconquered spirit of the greatest man of his age—the noblest Roman of them all.

It is not time as yet to write his eulogy. We are too near the massive proportions of a great life to give a proper estimate of its greatness. It will be necessary to stand off from it at some distance in order to get the proper perspective. Still there are, however, some things that have impressed the world, and from these we cannot get away.

During these days of his mortal sickness, when the struggle with the grim monster became the keenest, Leo never is anything but the Christian gentleman. Men of dominating minds and inflexible wills, especially if they have been accustomed to rule, are