"Be not deceived, Père Jerome, because saintliness of feeling is easy
here; you are the same priest who overslept this morning, and over-ate
yesterday, and will, in some way, easily go wrong to-morrow and the day
after."

He took it with him when--the _Veni Creator_ sung--he went into the
pulpit. Of the sermon he preached, tradition has preserved for us only a
few brief sayings, but they are strong and sweet.

"My friends," he said,--this was near the beginning,--"the angry words
of God's book are very merciful--they are meant to drive us home; but
the tender words, my friends, they are sometimes terrible! Notice these,
the tenderest words of the tenderest prayer that ever came from the lips
of a blessed martyr--the dying words of the holy Saint Stephen, 'Lord,
lay not this sin to their charge.' Is there nothing dreadful in that?
Read it thus: 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' Not to the
charge of them who stoned him? To whose charge then? Go ask the holy
Saint Paul. Three years afterward, praying in the temple at Jerusalem,
he answered that question: 'I stood by and consented.' He answered for
himself only; but the Day must come when all that wicked council that
sent Saint Stephen away to be stoned, and all that city of Jerusalem,
must hold up the hand and say: 'We, also, Lord--we stood by.' Ah!
friends, under the simpler meaning of that dying saint's prayer for the
pardon of his murderers is hidden the terrible truth that we all have a
share in one another's sins."

Thus Père Jerome touched his key-note. All that time has spared us
beside may be given in a few sentences.