Heroes and Martyrs
Belloc, Hilaire
HEROES AND MARTYRS By HILAIRE BELLOC WORDS have a way of branching out like trees, so that a particular word which meant one thing comes to mean a dozen others: first, slightly different,...
...Now the true meaning of "a martyr to insomnia" would be a man who so adored sleeplessness as the end of man that he was willing to suffer anything rather than to go to sleep...
...I have been moved by them all my life, just as much when I knew them to be working on false premises as when I knew them to be working upon true...
...He seeks in that despair some kind of employment...
...He was forty-eight years of age...
...It depends upon his ability to triumph...
...It is part, I believe, of the Irony of God (I use the phrase reverently—I mean, rather, the contrast between the majesty of God's purpose and our own insignificance) that heroism passes unknown...
...he confirms his f ellowmen...
...Seeing the man's sufferings, he ordered him to be unloosened when the fire had already begun to do its work...
...I take it from fiction because, of a myriad real examples of heroism in defense of the Faith, it is the one which for the moment comes home to me most poignantly...
...I will go back into the fire...
...This poor tailor could not see how the Blessed Sacrament could be what the Faith affirmed it to be...
...He had heard the mutterings and protests against the insufficiency and avarice of the clergy...
...While a martyr to science ought to mean a man who successfully suffered the utmost tortures rather than admit that a proved scientific truth (such as the inferior oxydisability of gold to copper) was false...
...He loses his place...
...Then, recovering his will, this obscure fellow from the populace said, "No...
...I choose them because all three show very finely that power in man of setting an example in unflinching will to his fellowmen...
...In te Domine confido, non confundar in aeternum...
...It means one thing...
...He was condemned to be burned (after being brought up to London...
...Another man exercising some small talent in sport is similarly acclaimed...
...his wife persecutes him...
...he sinks into small, precarious, sordid lodgings...
...I am not sure that this sort is not the greatest heroism of all: that which has behind it the adamantine phrase, "Quia tu es Deus meus...
...They put him back to the agony and he was consumed...
...They bound him to the stake in Smithfield Market Place...
...I choose them deliberately from cases only one of which accords with the rightfulness of the issue, while the other two were wrongheaded...
...The young Prince of Wales, who was later to be Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, was present...
...It has remained single...
...The hero in the popular sense is popularly acclaimed...
...Then it came to mean someone who had suffered and died, or even only died, for the Faith...
...People talk of an old gentleman as being "a martyr to insomnia" which he has brought upon himself by debauch, or they talk of a person who gets cancer from fiddling about with chemicals as "a martyr to science...
...Some vulgar politician or other, ignorant of foreign languages, blunders unwittingly into insulting a foreign government, and becomes for five minutes a popular hero—as though he had won a battle...
...he is brought up against despair...
...Lately even that word has become a little degraded, and is used in two wrong senses...
...And it concerns no wrongheaded ideal, but a right one...
...Probably he was never sufficiently instructed in such a diseased time...
...The word "martyr" originally meant no more than a witness...
...The end of the story shows him failing to find it, utterly alone within and without, unsupported, but undeterred...
...It is in a book by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, and deals with the conversion of a humble curate married to a vixenish wife, dependent for his livelihood and hers upon a small stipend, earnestly and humbly adhering to the communion of his baptism, the Anglican...
...But three hundred years ago it was very real...
...The question makes us smile today...
...It is remarkable that while the word "hero" has branched out like this, the word "heroism" has not suffered the same misfortune...
...It was at the end of that lifetime after the Black Death, in the end of the Great Schism in the Papacy, in the time when men were at sixes and sevens about religion, and the bad turmoil which led to the explosion of the Reformation had already started, and the Church was corrupt...
...And all the time it has also meant a person who suffered out of all measure (and successfully 1) for a point of honor or of morals...
...All civilization was sick, and he had caught a special disease...
...But to go back to heroism...
...Next it has come to mean the subject of a romance...
...But those who go down into the depths and suffer the extreme of ill for conscience's sake, most of them, are never heard of...
...I will give three examples...
...My last example shall be from fiction...
...If he can just pass the line of extreme endurance, he is like the victor in a race breasting the tape...
...For the quality of heroism does not depend upon the opportunities of the hero— by instruction, experience or intelligence—of distinguishing the just cause...
...HEROES AND MARTYRS By HILAIRE BELLOC WORDS have a way of branching out like trees, so that a particular word which meant one thing comes to mean a dozen others: first, slightly different, then so different as to have no connection in the mind between one use of it and the other...
...It means the capacity of acting in the last sense: enduring great agony in defense of a point of honor or morals, and coming out triumphant...
...The first I take is that of a certain tailor, who came from Evesham about five hundred years ago and a little more...
...so do the words "policy," "police" and "polite"—each of which three originally meant "belonging to a city...
...Herein it is closely attached to that other word "martyr...
...The book portrays this man passing through the internal doubt, discussion and decision of the convert...
...It was the clergy who consecrated the Host—he denied their power...
...The very day before he was to die his detestable brother-inlaw, who was partner to his death, sent to promise him life if he would abandon episcopacy in the Anglican Church and advise King Charles, over whom he had such great power, to assent to the abolition of bishops of that establishment...
...Here is another example, also in a wrong cause, yet equally sincere and equally an example for every man, of tenacity...
...when, in general, evil was abroad...
...Heroism is a standing proof that we are the children of God...
...Both these kinds of martyrs are rare...
...That was heroism...
...He had taken his sentence nobly, and had said to those in the House of Lords, his fellow-peers who had the baseness to condemn him: "Te Deum laudamus...
...But he is much more...
...Now so it is with the word "hero," for it has come to mean three things...
...First an outstanding, rather theatrical applauded thing, a figure acclaimed as a representative of his nation or times, a leader, a doer of great deeds...
...He recanted...
...Those who practise heroism, even in a mistaken cause, are indeed the champions of our fallen race...
...Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford, had been condemned to death for supporting the English monarchy against a group of rich men who were in rebellion against it...
...For instance, the word chivalry, the word "cavalier," the word "cavalry," all have the same origin, and they mean three quite different things...
...But there is One who knows...
...He asked whether the victim would recant...
...Wentworth preferred to die, and next day he died...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 13
