No one ever more completely obeyed the counsels of
Christ: "If you will be perfect, leave your father and mother, your
wife, forsake your possessions, renounce yourself, take up your cross
and follow Me."
[Sidenote: Humanity has never shown such moral grandeur.]
Those among these brave men who have faith, are conscious of such
supernatural life and their letters--admirable collections have been
published--reflect a light of authentic saintliness. The others, too,
without knowing it, walk in the footsteps of Christ; at the moment of
supreme sacrifice He will enlighten them with the brightness of His
grace and will admit them, like their believing brothers, into the
heaven promised to those who suffer for righteousness. Humanity which
has never known horrors like those it is enduring now, has also never
shown such moral grandeur, and it is not astonishing that in face of
such great crimes and such great virtues, our soul should pause,
breathless, incapable of expressing the excess of its emotion.
[Sidenote: The devoted war of the American public for the wounded.]
I cannot speak to the great American public about our wounded, without
saying how much we appreciate the fact that it has followed them, with
admirable solicitude, all the length of their hard Calvary. Its
stretcher-bearers have helped us rescue them at the front, its
ambulances have carried them to our hospitals, where they have found its
doctors, its nurses to tend their wounds, its offerings of all kinds to
assure their material well-being and their moral comfort.
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