we, too, we priests, we religious, I, the Bishop, we
whose great mission it is to present in our lives, yet more than in our
speech, the Gospel of Christ, have we earned the right to speak to our
people the word spoken by the Apostle to the nations, "Be ye followers
of me, as I also am of Christ"?

We labor indeed, we pray indeed, but it is all too little. We should be,
by the very duty of our state, the public expiators for the sins of the
world. But which was the thing dominant in our lives--expiation or our
comfort and well-being as citizens? Alas! we have all had times in which
we, too, fell under God's reproach to His people after the escape from
Egypt: "The beloved grew fat and kicked; they have provoked me with that
which was no god, and I will provoke them with that which is no people."
Nevertheless, He will save us, for He wills not that our adversaries
should boast that they, and not the Eternal, did these things. "See ye
that I alone am, and there is no other God beside me. I will kill and I
will make to live. I will strike and I will heal."

God will save Belgium, my brethren; you cannot doubt it.

Nay, rather, He is saving her.

Across the smoke of conflagration, across the stream of blood, have you
not glimpses, do you not perceive signs of His love for us? Is there a
patriot among us who does not know that Belgium has grown great? Nay,
which of us would have the heart to cancel this last page of our
national history? Which of us does not exult in the brightness of the
glory of this shattered nation? When in her throes she brings forth
heroes, our mother country gives her own energy to the blood of those
sons of hers. Let us acknowledge that we needed a lesson in patriotism.
There were Belgians, and many such, who wasted their time and their
talents in futile quarrels of class with class, of race with race, of
passion with personal passion.

Yet when, on Aug. 2, a mighty foreign power, confident in its own
strength and defiant of the faith of treaties, dared to threaten us in
our independence, then did all Belgians, without difference of party, or
of condition, or of origin, rise up as one man, close ranged about their
own King and their own Government, and cry to the invader: "Thou shalt
not go through!"

At once, instantly, we were conscious of our own patriotism. For down
within us all is something deeper than personal interests, than personal
kinships, than party feeling, and this is the need and