The world shall be judged by children. The spirit of childhood shall judge the world.
Of course the Saint of Lisieux never wrote anything of the kind. Maybe she never had any precise idea of the wondrous spring of which she was the herald. She can hardly have expected, I mean, that one day it would stretch over the earth, and that sweet-smelling tides and snow-white foam would cover towns of steel and reinforced concrete, innocent fields in their terror of mechanical monsters, and even the black-soaked soil of death. “I shall bring forth a shower of roses,” she said, twenty years before 1914.
But she didn’t know what roses they would be.
…
You know, sometimes I imagine what any decent agnostic of average intelligence might say, if by some impossible chance one of those intolerable praters were to let him stand awhile in the pulpit, in his pulpit, in his stead, on the day consecrated to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, for instance:
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he would begin, “I don’t share your beliefs, but I probably know more about the history of the Church than you do, because I happen to have read it, and not many parishioners can say that. (If I’m wrong, let those who have signify in the usual manner.)
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is well and good to praise the saints as you do, and I am grateful to the priest for allowing me to join in your praising. The saints belong more to you than to me, because you worship the same Master. There’s nothing strange about your congratulating yourselves for the glory they’ve won by their extraordinary lives, but—pardon the observation—I find it hard to believe that they would have endured such struggle and strife only so that you could have such celebrations; celebrations, moreover, that exclude the thousands of poor devils who have never heard of these heroes, and who will never hear of them except for you alone.
“True, every year the Postal Service circulates calendars with the saints’ names inscribed alongside the phases of the moon. Indeed, these sublime squanderers have given up everything, even their names, which that other vigilant administration, namely the civil state, has put at the disposal of all comers, believer and unbeliever alike, to serve in the registry for newborn citizens. As for the rest of us, we don’t know the saints—and it seems as though you don’t know them much more than we do. Who among you is capable of writing twenty lines about his or her patron saint? There was a time when such ignorance puzzled me; now, it seems as normal to me as it does to you.
“Well now, I know you’re not inclined to worry much about what people of my sort think. And the most pious among you are even very anxious to avoid all discussion with infidels, in case they were to ‘lose their faith,’ as they put it. All I can say is their ‘faith’ must be hanging by a thread. It makes you wonder what the faith of the lukewarm can be! We often call such…
