I

a king and a saint

"My brethren, God alone is great"

Those were the opening words of one of the greatest funeral sermons ever preached. It was a great sermon, because the preacher was a famous orator. Father Massillon; and because the words were uttered over the mortal remains of one of earth's greatest kings. That king was Louis XIV, who had ruled for half a century over France, the king whom historians have called the Great King (le Grand Monarque) and whose power was recognized at home and abroad. It was a great sermon, too, because many of the great ones of the earth were there to listen to it—kings and queens and ambassadors, generals and admirals and statesmen—wearing costly mourning garments and flanked by numerous attendants. And the first words of that sermon, are its greatest words, because they contain the deepest and most impres­sive truth.

That was more than two hundred years ago, in September, 1715. And four years later another man died. He was not a king, and the greatest preacher in France did not speak at his funeral. He died, not in a gorgeous palace, but in a plain, ill-lighted room; and the great ones of the earth did not come to follow his body to the grave. His remains were borne on the shoulders of men wearing the black habit of the Christian Brother; and along the streets the people—the plain people, the common people, the poor people—gathered with tears in their eyes and on their lips the words: "The saint is dead! The saint is dead!" That man was St. John Baptist de la Salle, the priest who founded the Institute of the Christian Schools.

Those two men—the king and the saint—who died about the same time, at the beginning of the eighteenth century—were about as different in their lives and in their deaths as two men could well be. And in the eyes of the world—the world which looked only on the outside of things and was much impressed by pomp and glare—there could be no comparison between them. Louis XIV had feasted delicately and had gone about clad in magnificent attire and had waged mighty wars and had been surrounded by fawning courtiers and flatterers; St. de la Salle had eaten only the plainest food and had worn the humble priest’s soutane, he had fought no enemies but sin and ignorance, and had been attended, only by a few simple, holy men: the first Christian Brothers. To the eyes of the world Louis XIV was truly the Great King, and St. de la Salle was just a simple, zealous priest.

In the eyes of God those two men were very different, too; but the difference was all the other way. For Louis XIV, though he had been careful about enhancing the glory of his kingdom, had been careless about saving his own soul; he had not been a good king like his great and holy predecessor, St. Louis, King Louis IX. The Great King had been a very selfish man, and had used his high place in life as a means of securing his own pleasure at the expense of his subjects; the country had been heavily taxed in order that no whim of his might be denied, and many Frenchmen gave their lives in wars that served only to add to the glory of the king. But, on the other hand, St. de la Salle lived his life in the belief that the soul is the only part of a man that really matters, that not all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them are of any worth in comparison with one immortal soul. And so he had given away all that he possessed in order to labor for the salvation of souls, especially the souls of boys; and the army he organized and led into battle was not an army bent on conquest or on earthly fame, but an army of Christian teachers, destined to carry the flag of Christ and His Church throughout France and throughout all the world, bringing light to darkened minds and grace to sin-stained souls.

In our day, even the world, looking at those two men, must doubt if the Great King was really as great as his admirers supposed; must conclude, indeed, that the humble priest who sought to bring faith and liberty to the minds of the young was far the greater man. There is a famous saying that has often been attributed to Louis XIV: “I am the state”. What did it mean? It meant that the king's word was law, that the king could do no wrong, that the king was the entire government of the people. “It is God's will”, the Great King wrote in his mem­oirs, “that every one born a subject should obey the King without question”. And less than a hundred years after the Great King’s death came the terrible French Revolution, in which the people of the land rose up against the successors of Louis XIV and destroyed everything that the Great King had most esteemed. Where now were his military conquests and his fine garments and his lavish entertainments in the gardens at Versailles? The work of his hand had come to naught.

But it was otherwise with the work of St. de la Salle. That work, though little noticed in the time of Louis XIV, has grown and grown until it is recognized everywhere as one of the best and biggest things in all the world. In the very year when King Louis was questioning the right of Our Holy Father, the Pope, to decide on Church affairs in France, St. de la Salle was laying the foundations of his Institute of the Christian Schools, a body of teachers destined to spread loyalty to the Church and to the Pope in every Christian land.

Louis XIV was one of the richest of men and the richest of kings. Filled with vainglory and foolish ambition, he spent nearly two hundred million francs (forty millions of dollars in our money) trying to build an aqueduct from the River Eure to his palace at Versailles. He wished to leave behind him something to rival the famous aqueducts of ancient Rome. The Louvre in Paris was not palace enough for the Great King, so he con­structed at Versailles a dwelling place that cost some five hundred million francs—money that had to come from his oppressed subjects. In such ways the Great Monarch delighted to squander vast sums, while many of his people lacked enough food to keep them alive.

St. de la Salle was one of the poorest of men and the poorest of priests. He came of a noble and wealthy family, but he freely gave away his inheritance to the poor of his native city; and in time of famine—and there were several famines during the reign of the Great King—he tasted the bitter pangs of want. Far from seeking a stylish place to live in, he gave up his fine family residence and went to live with the poor men who were the first Brothers; and he always chose the smallest and darkest room in the house. He had no thought of rivaling the deeds of the ancient Romans or of anybody else; his great object, his sole object, was to become more and more like Our Blessed Lord, Who was born in a cold stable and who through all His life had not whereon to lay His head.

In the days when kings and queens ruled in the world and were much more plentiful than they are now, they often received credit for fine things and great things and good things with which they usually had little or nothing to do. Thus, Queen Elizabeth of England got almost all the glory of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, while in fact the victory was due to a storm which dispersed the Spanish ships. And so it was that Louis XIV won renown—and gave his name to a period in history—mainly because there arose during his reign famous captains and writers and statesmen and saints. The Great King did not have to build a kingdom or to establish a government; that work had been done in France before his time by great kings like Henry IV and great statesmen like Cardinal Richelieu.

But it was very different with the work under­taken by St. de la Salle. He had to begin at the beginning. He had to find schools and teachers; and he had to interest wealthy people in the work in order that the schools might continue and the teachers might not starve. He had to overcome the opposition that always arises in this world when a great man attempts to do something unusual, especially if it is something good. He had to teach the teachers—a most important part of his work and something that until then had been almost entirely neglected. He had to write textbooks and organize free libraries and superintend Sunday schools and establish technical institutes and boarding colleges. And the bulk of this work he had to do quite by himself; he had no capable and willing statesmen, as the Great King had, to do the work for him. And so St. de la Salle did the work, and did it all, and did it well; and he gave the glory of it to Almighty God.

Even before his death the alleged greatness of Xing Louis XIV had begun to crumble and crack; not without reason might he murmur: “After me, the Deluge!” In his declining years the Great King saw his once powerful army routed by the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim and Ramillies; and in the Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, he was obliged to cede to England many of France’s American possessions, including Acadia, the land of Long­fellow’s “Evangeline”. Before his death he expressed regret for his pride and ambition which had brought affliction and misery to so many of his subjects, and with contrition he confessed his more personal sins. Let us hope that God, who is infinitely merciful, granted His plenteous forgiveness to that repentant old man of seventy-seven—the Great King trembling in the presence of Death, a greater king than he.

But King Death had no terrors for St. de la Salle. To die meant for him but to go into the presence of his God whom he had loved so much and served so faithfully through sixty-eight years of life. His last days were cheered by the progress of the schools he had founded throughout France, by the growth in numbers and in holiness of the Brothers he had gathered together to teach the neglected boys and young men of town and country. He could leave this world eagerly, happily, as the saints always do, knowing that God had blessed his work and would preserve it and make it grow. His favorite motto was not, “I am the state”; it was the little prayer that to this day the pupils of the Brothers use when responding to roll call, “God be blessed!” And his last words were these: “I adore in all things the will of God in my regard”.

And so, of those two men who died in France two hundred years ago and more, it would seem that today the humble saint, and not the worldly king, is the greater hero and the greater man. Anyway, to be a saint is better than to be a king; for we could get along quite well without any kings at all, but we cannot get along without saints. There are always saints in the world, though often they are not thought to be saints; indeed, perhaps the greatest saints of all are the hidden saints whose holiness is known only to God.

Now, this little book will help us to understand what a saint really is by telling us a few things about one. Already we are able to see that the Great King was not a saint and that the founder of the Brothers was a saint. And what was the essential difference between them? It was just this: That St. John Baptist de la Salle realized every day and every hour the truth of Father Massillon’s words, “God alone is great”, while Louis XIV did no realize it until he lay on his death-bed.