The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
His occupation of inspector ceased in 1860; and being fully conversant
with the circumstances which led to his quitting a post of honor and
trust, which was then producing to him an income of eight hundred pounds
a year, we must express our strong feeling that it was a great error of
judgment on his part which led him so to act that it was possible to
deprive him of this office. He was thus thrown back into all those
difficulties of maintenance which he had so bravely encountered fifteen
years before. It is true that Mr. Marshall was in fibre an author; the
elementary character of the education he had to control, and the
constant iteration of its petty details, besides the exclusion from his
range of inspection of all those religious instructions in which he
would naturally have taken a great interest—these things galled him. He
fled for refuge to the more interesting subject of “Christian Missions,”
on which he composed the well-known work published by him at Brussels in
1862, but which, in spite of the vast number of volumes which it
required him to look over for his facts, he managed to compose before he
quitted the inspectorship. If he could have had the place of a professor
in some great Catholic institution, which would have afforded him a
moderate income and a fitting subject on which he could have thrown the
powers of his most active and apprehensive mind, that would have been to
him an earthly elysium. But elysiums are not of the earth, at least not
of nineteenth-century earth to Catholics in England. He gave up eight
hundred pounds a year to be for the rest of his life a vigorous, witty,
sarcastic, and trenchant Catholic champion and a wanderer on the face of
the earth. From henceforth he was of those who have “no abiding city.”
If he began this second stadium of his life with an act of imprudence
which religion did not call for, which, in our individual judgment, we
think it did not even justify, he traversed those seventeen years of
bitter trial with the spirit of a confessor, and he ended them with the
death of an humble, contrite, earnest Christian. He on whose words,
defending Catholic doctrines, illustrating Catholic truths, excited
multitudes in great cities have hung, who could make them thrill through
with the emotions which he felt himself, died in a small room over a
shop in an obscure outskirt of London, tended by an unwearied,
uncomplaining affection which had been proof against every sorrow and
every trial, and was the only earthly consolation left to him. In the
eyes of the world it was a sad end of an agitated life. But we make bold
to say that he is not sorry now for his choice; and that what he
accepted rashly he transformed by endurance into matter for lasting
reward, for the praise which does not pass away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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