State Universities, II.. Ernest Sutherland Bates Father William Doyle, S.J.

...Still less are we conscious that the conditions of continuous advance in grace may be very hard, and that November u, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL scarce a step toward perfection may be taken without attendant perils rising round the elect soul that has chosen to scale the peaks...

...For, as Professor O'Rahilly well remarks—"The severest criticism of these lovers of Christ who lose their heads comes, not from the worldly-wise and indifferent, but from those who are wise in Christ, His sane, wellbalance, uninspired and uninspiring believers...

...That it shall be content to remain the past...

...he retorts...

...His request to go on the Congo mission did not meet with the approval of his superiors, but in November, 1915, he became chaplain to the 16th (Irish) Division and the brief remainder of his life was spent in the death-in-life and "enlizement" of the Flanders front-—during action always with the advance, and crawling from one shell-hole to another with absolution and comfort for his charges—during periods of comparative peace buried in a filthy dug-out that swarmed with rats and reeked with the odors of mortality...

...The true nature of sin and of sainthood being, perhaps mercifully, hidden from us, we remain unaware how the conditions of salvation change after each lapse...

...Yet a little imagination should tell us that the spirit of evil sits in the high places as well as in the low—that a time must come, in the course of such an ascent as William Doyle's where man and all the help man can give fall behind and below, where the landmarks are overpassed and the summit still out of reach...

...He had given them his own Sacred Body to eat, and they were going out now to face death, as only Irish Catholic lads can dQi" It is small wonder that he was worshipped by his men, that the mere sight of him could hold up a wavering line, that the hoarse whisper—"God bless you, Father, we're ready now...

...Pere Paul Ginhac, whose life he translated from the French, is "not a bad sort of old chap, even though he looks so desperately in need of a square meal...

...In the present edition, which is enlarged and revised, due heed is paid, * Father William Doyle, S.J., by Professor Alfred O'Rakilly...

...and once, to ease the pains of love, I tried with a penknife to cut the sweet name of Jesus on my breast...

...For the gallant saint was his school-fellow morei years ago than it is altogether pleasant to recall...

...Julien to the Roulers railway south of Frezenberg was held by Irishmen waiting for the word to advance...

...He was a very humble man, who carried the treasure of his exceptional vocation in fear and trembling...

...I undressed and walked up and down until my whole body was one big blister . ? . Words could never describe the sweet but horrible agony from that moment till far into the next day . . . More than once I knelt by the bed and offered Him my life, as I felt I could not live . . . Several times I have undressed and rolled in furze bushes...

...It cannot but tremble a little then for the validity of its own facile covenant...

...The scourge laid upon shoulders in some mediaeval cell— rather picturesque in a futile fashion...

...One fancies that a certain chill passes over it at this evidence that there is, despite all its soothsayers and prophets can tell it, despite the skill of camel drivers in getting their mounts through needleeyes, no really easy way of being good, far less holy, and that the old precept to crucify the flesh holds all its cogency...

...Reading it over afresh, one cannot but be struck by the wisdom of the dead priest's superiors who refused to attenuate, in the slightest, any of the "divine follies" which disturbed the prim worldly mind against whose infiltrations into the religious province his life was a mute protest...

...He was born on March 3, 1873, at Dalkey, outside Dublin, the son of an official at the Law Courts, and educated at Ratcliffe College, Leicestershire...

...The confession seems to be torn from the sufferer word by word by the same thirst for humiliation that has made sinners cry their sins aloud on the public highway...

...On August 17, outside Ypres, a German shell put an end to the legend of his charmed life...

...Willy Doyle" remains in his memory as a rallying cry at football scrimmages and critical moments of inter-divisional cricket matches...

...It was uan Irish shambles . . . their brigadiers called it murder...

...As he reads 12 THE COMMONWEAL November n, 1925 and as he writes, the regret that invests all memories of school-days and sharpens the tragic sense of the passing of life, is present, poignant and actual as a physical pain...

...I tried on Saturday night (or Sunday morning) to scourge myself as I felt Jesus wanted...

...We Ratcliffians had our alma mater in a picturesque neo-Gothic building that is one of the masterpieces of the elder Pugin...

...I often press my throbbing heart to the door of the Tabernacle to let Him hear its beats of love...

...Every insignificant rise in the undulating Flemish farmlands in front of them was crowned by a German post...

...The outward facts of Father Doyle's life, if we except the tragic accident which brought it to all men's attention, were meagre and conventional...

...Perhaps it was his keen sense of being, neither above nor below, but quite outside the wisdom of the world, that gives to his letters and diaries such an unexpected note of what might be called saintly frivolity...

...But the loneliness of this modern mystic and flagellant, conscious that he stood apart, not only from the world's common sense, but even from the mistrust of extravagance of every sort which is the keynote of modern religion, must have been extreme...

...He who at the very height of his mystical communion with God trembled for his own salvation is confident that the rough lads over whose tousled heads he makes the sign of the Cross in the firing line go straight to Heaven...

...Fate, and perhaps the precocity just mentioned, willed that he should kneel at the predestined lad's side when the Bread of Life, which his companion was to consecrate and carry next his heart through three years' inferno of war, first entered the breasts of both...

...Most of us muddle through life in a succession of rises and falls that never take us beyond the reach of human landmarks...

...During the winter I have done a penance which I shrink from and dread in a way I cannot describe . . . I set my alarum for three o'clock when it is freezing, slip out of the house in my night-shirt and stand up to my neck in the pond, praying for sinners . . . Crossing a lonely field late that evening [in 1911 ] I came across a forest of old nettles...

...a pack of devils...

...New York'- Longmans, Green and Company...

...This, I fancy, is the real secret of the irritation caused by the publication of Father Doyle's intimate journal, which has broken out in such unexpected comment as that "no sane person would put this book into the hands of a non-Catholic:" or "we think that certain passages might have been omitted," or which leads certain critics to regard its publication as "a breach of confidence difficult to justify...

...I know all the good girls in town by this, and a few of the queer ones too," is his remark during a mission in Dublin...

...The man who, when a young novice, confessed he would have "followed Napoleon anywhere" had a soldier's heart and took a frank and unshamed pride in the good showing made by his countrymen...

...The pain of that was nothing to the humiliation of making this known...

...A couple of times I fell on the altar-steps moaning—for Jesus's love...

...At Clongowes and Belvedere William Doyle pursued the arduous course of Jesuit noviceship and philosophy, and was ordained in 1907...

...It is hard to think of anything, even in the lives of the great canonized anchorets, more moving than this record of a soul whose fault was love...

...It is rather fond of having the Fioretri and the Apologia on its bookshelves and drawing-room tables...

...Surely God did receive with open arms the brave boy who laid down his life for Him...

...5.00...

...The pain of the thousand little pricks is intense for days afterwards...

...He recommends a blaspheming sergeant for the Military Medal, owing that "his language alone deserved it...

...was often the Gaelic warrior's prelude to a wild forward charge...

...He Still recalls a retaliation that lacked nothing in energy what time, a precocious and cheeky "new boy" with a premature gift for sarcasm, he permitted himself some flippant comment upon a suit of homespun, the product, no doubt, of some Irish peasant loom, whose blues and purples and reds, he still insists, were unique...

...We forgive the past," says Hugo, pompously as was his wont, "on one condition...

...Once when a girl declared that she liked Father Doyle "because he is holy," he tells us that "the words cut me like a knife...

...For over two weeks the twin Irish divisions that were to make the assault on the seventeenth had been under incessant artillery fire, crouching in wet ditches and shell-holes...

...His letters from the front bubble over with high spirits...

...The criticism is not unfrequently heard that Father Doyle's heroic and spectacular end threw a false glamor over his early life, and that without it his spiritual experiences would have taken their proper perspective as the aberrations of a saintly but unbalanced mind...

...But when an accident, such as the death of William Doyle lets it into the secret that austerity, alive and breathing, has been holding familiar converse with it day by day, using its telephones and typewriters and safety-razors, making light of the exorcisms uttered by its science and answering its maxims with a preoccupied smile, the case is different...

...The 16th Division are "those brave boys of mine...

...By HENRY LONGAN STUART THE dawn of Thursday, August, 16, 1917, the front line from St...

...the road of pain is mine...

...While merely remarking, in passing, that such comment falls strangely outside the category of true Catholic mystic thought, it is impossible not to see in it a certain questioning and mistrust of God's ways with the individual soul that is part of the blight cast upon religious thought by the miasmas of our time...

...They were not the obvious temptations of world, flesh and devil that assail ordinary men and women...

...That Father Doyle was conscious of a very special and personal call to suffer is evident in every line of his diary...

...The condition—the "string," in colloquial language—is that asceticism shall not issue too far from its ancestral environment nor obtrude its grisly face too far into the present...

...But it attaches, if you will notice, one condition to its reverence...

...The message which the world most urgently needs is the message that Father William Doyle's life and death can teach it...

...And I fancy that, with the passing of time, he will not only become a saint whom the faithful may venerate publicly, but a saint who will mean a very great deal to a world from which security and trust in prosaic formulas of virtue seem to be seeping away...

...And, of a shell that exploded two feet from his door—"Had I been five seconds later, I probably would have been converted into a beautiful specimen of a cabbage strainer, and at last made really hol(e)y...

...To the present writer, special circumstances are at hand which make any attempt to appraise Father Doyle's mystical life at once a difficulty and a fascination...

...UO my Jesus"—so ends the strange confession...

...The saints of earlier days could feel around them the moral support of a whole world whose belief in the efficacy of vicarious suffering was intact—a world, to be quite honest, which inflicted suffering pretty freely...

...The two phrases are those of Sir Philip Gibbs...

...Of one thing we may be sure...

...In Father Doyle's case we have the inestimable privilege of being able to read an intimate journal, penned almost day by day "for one on whom he greatly relied...

...Perhaps no man has ever laughed so gaily in the face of the King of Terrors, as this mad mystic from Ireland...

...He had made up his mind, if spared, to ask to be sent on a mission to one of the leper colonies...

...He retails with relish a story of an illiterate reader who told the brethren in the refectory that "Saint Jerome went off to Palestine carrying his missus (mss...

...It is by wounds that grace enters the unregenerate soul, and, till time shall be no more, the two wounds against which hardly any soul is armored are the wounds that the pathetic and the heroic inflict upon its coldness and indifference...

...God's "own Irish soldiers...

...But the secret of his humility might have remained hidden from men's eyes—a suspicion of spiritual pride might have invested and marred the lesson of his whole life had not God's providence at the end called him to a martyrdom that was shared with others and to an anonymous grave...

...But the disir cipline taken before the daily bath, and as much a matter of routine as your own physical exercises— how mad and wild a paradox 1 Like the princes of old Egypt who had the ancestral mummies wheeled into their banqueting halls to give a grim relish to the feast, the world has no great objection to seeing austerity, decently swathed, of course, in the cerements of the tomb, an occasional guest in its busy life...

...The world at large is ready enough with lip service to asceticism...

...The very tributes from men outside his communion which Professor O'Rahilly quotes are significant of what his appeal is likely to be...

...We search his letters in vain for that catastrophic view of the war which some very unsainted souls have taken...

...Of a rat in the trenches whose harem overran his bed night by night—"He seems, like King Solomon, to have a warm corner in his heart for the ladies...

...I, at least, always picture my old school-fellow, Willy Doyle, kneeling on the muddy firing-step in adoration before the Lord and Master whom he might now carry upon his inflamed breast, his face lit up by flares and starshells, at peace at last amid the upheaval and uproar of a world come to judgment—far more at peace than he had ever been in the prim and ordered world to which his sanctity was extravagance and his 100,000 aspirations lunacy...

...It came to him, I think, from the inevitable consciousness that he was, after all, a man of his own time...

...The remains of the slain party were never recovered or identified...

...In the course of his biography, Professor O'Rahilly pauses more than once to surmise what fate would have overtaken the memory of William Doyle, if a death of spectral splendor had not crowned it and if his holy life had remained, to its close, a record of interior sanctity and mortification of which God alone had the secret and of which even his superiors could only guess the intensity...

...Not only was the stage set for slaughter but slaughter had been going on during days...

...Not that sweetness comes out of the strong, but that out of sweetness strength can issue at need...

...In the following year he became minister at Belvedere, and his priestly life passed in discharging the duties of this office, in missions in England and Ireland, with two pilgrimages to shrines of his devotion on the continent...

...the wild Irish...

...Perhaps this appeal is to the unbeliever and the "hard case" rather than to those for whom religion is a familiar thing...

...His interior life, as revealed by his diaries and notes, is the record of an unceasing spiritual combat, and of an intoxication with love for God that almost passes human comprehension...

...In our hearts, perhaps, we are not dissatisfied with the dispensation that defers the due reparation to another world, where temptation, at least, shall be no more...

...The hair shirt worn beneath the hauberk of chain-mail— well and good...

...They had made their peace with God...

...Oh...

...But the hair-shirt beneath the dinnerjacket or khaki tunic—folly and alienation...

...It is at this point in progress that a sort of vertigo overtakes the predestined soul, that the body becomes a burden, that austerities and mortifications suggest themselves as the sole remedies that can steady nerves and brain, literally drunken with love, for the daily task...

...blithe breeze and rushing seas, Tho' ne'er, that earliest season past, On your broad main they meet again, Together bring them home at last...

...Once or twice I have forced my way through a thorn hedge, which tore and wounded me frightfully—for Jesus's love...

...in footnotes and elsewhere, to the occasional strictures, and not all of them outside of the Catholic fold, which were passed on Professor Alfred O'Rahilly's pious tribute when it first appeared...

...He has seen the eyes that gaze out upon us in the fine portraits of Professor O'Rahilly's biography—mirthful, yet somehow mournful, as of one foredoomed—sparkle with adventure, and flash with temper...

...Other souls may travel by other roads," he once wrote...

...The issue of a third edition of his life* within three years is proof that the appeal of the heroic has not lost its hold on men's imaginations...

...When a French officer at Wytschaete Ridge remarks that the 16th Division seem to fear "neither man nor devil"—"Why should they...

...Indeed, that which, to my mind at least, lends this intimate journal of Father Doyle its unique quality, and sets it aside from all other records of austerity written for our edification, is just this sense of a deep personal humiliation in his self-imposed calvary...

...there Were several strong 'pill-boxes' (concrete blockhouses) and in the middle of the line of attack, a spur (Hill 35) dominated every approach...

...It was on the next day, at what was perhaps the crisis of the war's agony, that a German shell, bursting at the mouth of a captured blockhouse whose very location is doubtful, put an end to one of the most saintly lives that has ever been lived on earth...

...Who the unseen enemies were against whom he strove remains a secret...

...But its discipline was Draconian and its interior economy (things have changed very much since) Spartan, I am led to wonder whether the constant importance attached throughout the memoir to mortification in such simple matters as butter or sugar did not have its rise in the importance such alleviations to monastic fare assumed in our youthful eyes...

...There will never be any mortal relics of Father William Doyle, Jesuit, chaplain and brother in devotion of the 16th Division of the British army...