The story of St. John Baptist de la Salle : founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian schools

Front matter

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Introduction

THIS well-told story of St. John Baptist de la SaUe is refreshing, intellectually and spiritually, coming, as it does, at a time when education is drifting steadily far away from its highest and holiest purpose, namely, the knowledge and love of God. Through the existing maze of false principle and unsound method in pedagogy, it should prove helpful to read and study the life of a Teacher Saint like that of the canonized Founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

Today, popular education, put by the State within the reach of all, is hailed as an accepted standard of modem progress and a pledge of civic liberty and of social welfare. If this be so, then our Saint was far in advance of his day and should be heralded a benefactor of the plain people, because of the entire consecration of himself to the training, religious and secular, of their children.

St. John Baptist de la Salle did for the common school system among the people what St. Vincent de Paul wrought for the social betterment of the masses. The God-given birthright of the children of men, that is, the right and privilege of heavenly citizenship rather than the urge of social democracy, inspired these Saints of God to labor with zeal and success extraordinary among the wage-earners of their day,

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Our Saint made it possible for the sons of the toiler on farm and in shop to enjoy the opportunities of elementary, higher and technical schools — a blessing reserved generally to the children of the well-todo. The course of study embraced the common branches of secular education together with a solid training in religious knowledge and piety. The complete thoroughness and soundness of the method turned out youth that was reverent towards God, dutiful to parents, and fitted for a useful life in the community.

This was a revolutionary change in the school world in favor of the working classes. It will be the better understood, if we remember that our ideals and practices of democracy did not then obtain; in fact, they were not known to the people. Rigid social and class distinction was the recognized custom, if not the law of the land. St. John Baptist de la Salle was of the aristocracy. Though close to the royal court, he knew that the^SUte of France was not necessarily the Slite of Christ. He knew also that the peasant and artisan, in the humble walks of life, could never move in the circle of royalty. Nor did he lament this privation. For he knew further that there was a king — Christ the Lord, and a queen — Mary Immaculate, and princes — the Angels and the Saints, to whom the children of the plough and of the hammer should be suffered to come that they might enter the banquet hall of the Eucharistic Lord and move in the courts of the God of Infinite love. To accomplish this was the mission of the Saint.

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The extraordinary success our Saint achieved before his death has been carried on by the Religious Institute he founded, whose members are committed to the teaching of youth the world over, with a consecration that is as rai^e as it is inspiring, because of the spirit of faith and humility, of prayer and study that animates their own lives while they are moulding the character of others.

This little volume is most readable and instructive. The author's keen ilisight into the times of St. John Baptist de la Salle and the clear style that brightens nearly every page with quaint and modem phrase or with homely parable, should make the reading attractive to teachers and pupils, and to educators generally, who would know wherein is hidden the secret of true education.

* Patrick J. Hayes, Archbishop of New York.

Contents

CHAPTEB PAGE

I. A King and a Saint 1

II. A Picture of the Age 9

CHAPTER 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 diflFerent 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—

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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

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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. Par 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 rivalling 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.

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Even before his death the alleged greatness of King 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 to-day 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. f^ 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 not realize it until he lay on his death-bed.

Chapter II A Picture Of The Age

IF we are to understand rightly the life of a great man, we must know something of the age in which he lived. To evaluate the military genius of Hannibal we must have some conception of the geographical relations of Spain, Northern Africa and the Italian peninsula, and some realization of the daring and originality displayed by the great Carthaginian general in crossing the Alps with his cumbersome army and attacking Rome from the north. We could not well appreciate the achievements of Columbus if we were ignorant of social and religious conditions in Italy, Portugal and Spain at the time in which he carried on his explorations. We should get a wrong idea of Washington if we neglected to learn how the colonies broke away from England, how the Continental Army was organized and equipped and how France came to the aid of the struggling Revolutionists. We might well make this a principle to guide us in the study of biography: // we do not know the times, we do not know the man. Now a saint, like every other great man, must be studied against the background of the time in which he lives. The saints in every age are much alike, because every saint loves God and his fellowman and is devoted to the Church and labors for the

salvation of souls; but the saints in every age are different, too, because social conditions are different, and different times in the world's history have different tendencies and different needs. Once there was a time in Europe when holy men used to go around collecting money to ransom captives; that is, to buy back men who had been taken away from their homes and made slaves. If those holy men were living in our country to-day they certainly would not be interested in ransoming captives, for there are no captives to ransom; but they might devote themselves to building hospitals and asylums or conducting clubs for workingmen or giving lectures to non-Catholics. The interior life of the saint is pretty much the same in every age, for it is a life of holiness and prayer; but the external life of the saint must differ according to the requirements of the age and the country in which he lives.

And so, before we take up the life of St. John Baptist de la Salle and see in what ways he grew in holiness and what things he did for God and the Church, we must glance at the seventeenth century in France, the age and the country in which he labored at the work of God; we must try to find out how the people lived and thought and in what ways they were different from the people of our day. This chapter must be like a moving picture which shows us another country and another time; and, if we use our imaginations as we read, we shall be able to see what France was like, in city and in country, in the days when King Louis XIV held court at Versailles and St. John Baptist de la Salle conducted schools at Reims.

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The first thing that we notice is that the social system was very different from ours. At all times and in every place there are, of course, several classes of people, such as the rich, the fairly rich, and the poor; the learned, the moderately learned, and the ignorant; those who work with their brains, those who work with their hands, and those who do not work at all. Such classes of people were in France in the days of St. de la Salle, just as they are in the United States in our own time. But there was then a class distinction which is not found among us, the distinction between the nobles and the common people, the aristocrats and the artisans or workmen.

What was that distinction.^ Well, some men were born of noble families — their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been called viscounts or marquises, or dukes — and so they were for that reason aristocrats; and they were thought, and they thought themselves, better and more important persons just on that account. The aristocrats might study or write or command a regiment in the king's army; but it was considered unworthy and imdignified for them to do any manual work or engage in business; and they always wore a certain kind of dress to distinguish them from the common people. And the common people were common people just because their ancestors were butchers or bakers or candlestick makers. Their duty was to honor the aristocrats and work for them and pay their bills; it was considered most improper for them to want to wear the silk stockings of the nobility or to be dissatisfied with their own station in life. When we understand all this we are able to see that St. John Baptist de la Salle, who came of a noble family, did a brave and heroic thing when he devoted his life to the education of the children of the common people.

In two places only the nobles and the commoners met on relatively equal terms — in the church and in the street. The streets of the larger cities such as Paris or Reims or Rouen were winding and narrow, dusty in summer and muddy in winter, paved with irregular cobble-stones and lined by houses which often hung far out into the air. Modern ideas of supplying clean water and of disposing of dirty water were not known, and the visitor who insisted on walking about had need to be on his guard against cascades of soapsuds and showers of refuse from upper windows. The nearest approach to a sewer was an open trench dug along the middle of the street, in which dogs frisked and into which children slipped. Traffic policemen were not a seventeenth century institution, so the streets presented a confusing and exciting spectacle with rearing horses, gilded coaches, squabbling servants, fruit venders shouting their wares and monks in their somber habits picking their way through the throng. At night the streets were dark, and respectable people never ventured forth. A law provided for a candle in every window, but nobody paid any attention to it; and though King Louis did something in Paris to widen, clean and light the streets, in other French cities the night was, in more ways than one, dedicated to the powers of darkness.

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But in the daytime, along the streets and in the shops on either side, the city dwellers who were not of the nobility went about their daily tasks. And what did they do? And could any man who wished to, be a tailor or a baker or a locksmith? Not at all. The tradesmen were banded together into guilds which were something like our modern labor unions, one difference being that in the guilds there were only a limited number of members, and applicants had to wait until vacancies occurred. If a young man wished to become a carpenter, for instance, he must first be accepted as an apprentice and work for several years without pay. Then, were a vacancy available, he would become a journeyman, and after several years more, again if there happened to be a vacancy — and usually there was not — he was elevated to the rank of master carpenter. But there were not many master tradesmen; and as they controlled the market, they were not anxious to have their numbers increased. The consequence of it all was that many a man who would have been glad to learn a trade was obliged to remain an unskilled laborer; and as there were thousands of unskilled laborers and very little for them to do, the cities were infested with beggars and pickpockets and sneak thieves, and the roads leading into the country were never free from prowling robbers. We know of two occasions when robbers set upon St. de la Salle, even though they knew him to be a priest.

Of course many poor men, no matter how much they needed food and money, had too much respect for God and His law to do anything wrong, but earned a few trifling coins by running errands or holding horses or carrying parcels. The families of such men were miserable in the extreme. Often they dwelt huddled together in one small and ill ventilated room; sometimes they could get no shelter but the arch of a bridge or the uncovered roof of a seven-story house. We know for a fact that a little before the death of Louis XIV, in Rouen, a city with a population of seven hundred thousand, some six hundred and fifty thousand people had only straw bundles for beds.

The common people in the country fared no better. The farmer did not own the ground he tilled. The farm was the property of the landed aristocrat who did no work but took a goodly share of the products. The king's officers taxed the peasantry again and again, for money was needed for the state, and the king and his nobles must be amused at Versailles. The privilege of collecting the taxes in country districts was sold at auction to the highest bidders. The newly made officials paid the money out of their own pockets, and then, with a license from the king to collect in the royal name, proceeded to make themselves rich at the expense of the country folks. Should the poor people have no money to give, the king's bailiffs seized the live stock and imprisoned the peasants. Then the women and children had to do the farm work; and even country priests were seen dragging the plow to keep their parishioners from starving. The peasants rarely tasted meat; and in famine years many of them subsisted on a bread made from ferns. To make

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matters worse, the king's soldiers sometimes overran the country districts, commandeering whatever was worth the taking.

Meanwhile life was gay and luxurious in the royal palace at Versailles. Ladies in ample gowns of silk and embroidery, and nobles in bright-colored clothes with lace at sleeve and knee, danced and feasted and sang the praises of the Great King. Thither artists came to show their skill, and philosophers to unfold their wisdom. The king was the state, he was the absolute ruler of his land; and so it was his policy to draw the nobles to Versailles, keep them amused, and prevent them from taking undue interest in the aflFairs of their hereditary estates. His police had the power to arrest any man, common or noble, on mere suspicion, to keep him in confinement as long as they wished, and to prevent him from having any communication with his family and friends. Under such circumstances he was a brave man indeed who defied the will of the sovereign and his favorites.

And yet, that seventeenth century in which King Louis XIV reigned goes down in history as the Golden Age of France. Rarely, if ever, in the history of the world have so many great men lived at the same time. Lending radiance to the name of the Great King were military commanders like Conde, Turenne, and Vendome; architects like Mansard, Blondel and Perrault; painters like Poussin and Le Brun; dramatists like Corneille, Racine and Moliere; poets like Boileau; navigators like Duquesne and Trouville, Immortal names are these, names that France and the world will never willingly forget; and even before the Great King's death they were recognized as immortal. The court of King Louis XIV was the one glittering point about which all Europe of the seventeenth century revolved, the center of refinement and elegance, of wit and wisdom, of fashion and art.

And — save for some Protestants in the south of France, the Huguenots — France, both in town and in country, at court and in the provinces, was a Catholic land. Every noble family prided itself on having a son a priest, and every peasant mother cherished the hope that her boy might some day dedicate himself to God. The Church received every outward mark of honor and esteem. Splendid religious processions, fragrant with incense, bright with tapers, and melodic with sacred chants, trailed their glittering length along the crooked streets of the cities, and from the tiny village churches in the provinces the priest went solemnly forth to bless the harvest fields. Few men and women, even in high places, sought exemption from the fast of Lent, and to miss Mass was not only a sin but a disgrace.

Nevertheless, both in town and country, many of the people were ignorant of the truths of salvation. Some of them went to church and said the public prayers without any very clear idea of what it all meant — just as an American boy might enjoy a holiday on the Fourth of July without much knowledge of the meaning of our national independence. The nobles in large numbers heard Mass, not on Sundays only, but every day, and in that they did

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